In this battle of the Island Flats[36] the whites were slightly superior[37] in number to their foes; and they won without difficulty, inflicting a far heavier loss than they received.  In this respect it differs markedly from most other Indian fights of the same time; and many of its particulars render it noteworthy.  Moreover, it had a very good effect, cheering the frontiersmen greatly, and enabling them to make head against the discouraged Indians.

On the same day the Watauga fort[38] was attacked by a large force at sunrise.  It was crowded with women and children,[39] but contained only forty or fifty men.  The latter, however, were not only resolute and well-armed, but were also on the alert to guard against surprise; the Indians were discovered as they advanced in the gray light, and were at once beaten back with loss from the loopholed stockade.  Robertson commanded in the fort, Sevier acting as his lieutenant.  Of course, the only hope of assistance was from Virginia, North Carolina being separated from the Watauga people by great mountain chains; and Sevier had already notified the officers of Fincastle that the Indians were advancing.  His letter was of laconic brevity, and contained no demand for help; it was merely a warning that the Indians were undoubtedly about to start, and that “they intended to drive the country up to New River before they returned”—­so that it behooved the Fincastle men to look to their own hearthsides.  Sevier was a very fearless, self-reliant man, and doubtless felt confident that the settlers themselves could beat back their assailants.  His forecast proved correct; for the Indians, after maintaining an irregular siege of the fort for some three weeks, retired, almost at the moment that parties of frontiersmen came to the rescue from some of the neighboring forts.[40]

While the foe was still lurking about the fort the people within were forced to subsist solely on parched corn; and from time to time some of them became so irritated by the irksome monotony of their confinement, that they ventured out heedless of the danger.  Three or four of them were killed by the Indians, and one boy was carried off to one of their towns, where he was burnt at the stake; while a woman who was also captured at this time was only saved from a like fate by the exertions of the same Cherokee squaw already mentioned as warning the settlers.  Tradition relates that Sevier, now a young widower, fell in love with the woman he soon afterwards married during the siege.  Her name was Kate Sherrill.  She was a tall girl, brown-haired, comely, lithe and supple “as a hickory sapling.”  One day while without the fort she was almost surprised by some Indians.  Running like a deer, she reached the stockade, sprang up so as to catch the top with her hands, and drawing herself over, was caught in Sevier’s arms on the other side; through a loop-hole he had already shot the headmost of her pursuers.

Soon after the baffled Otari retreated from Robertson’s fort the other war parties likewise left the settlements.  The Watauga men together with the immediately adjoining Virginian frontiersmen had beaten back their foes unaided, save for some powder and lead they had received from the older settlements; and moreover had inflicted more loss than they suffered.[41] They had made an exceedingly vigorous and successful fight.