Nearly all the settlers whom Robertson found at Watauga were from Fairfax County, Virginia, and they had been attracted to the country by the report given of it by Dr. Thomas Walker, who with other gentlemen had made a hunting and exploring-tour through it as early as 1748.  They were mostly from the farming population, somewhat uncouth in manner, and not much acquainted with books, but not illiterate, for in a document subscribed soon afterward by upward of a hundred of them only two names are signed with a cross.  They had but little wealth; but they had what in a new community is far better,—­frugal and industrious habits, enterprise, firm self-reliance, and the cool intrepidity which is fostered by frequent exposure to danger.  No better material could have been selected to subdue the wilderness to the purposes of agriculture.

Among them, however, were some who had received the best education then afforded by the colonies.  Prominent among these were the Seviers,—­a father and four sons, who some time before had emigrated from Shenandoah County, Virginia, and settled about thirty miles farther north, near what is now Bristol, in Tennessee.  There they were neighbors to the Shelbys, —­another father and four sons,—­who also have left an heroic record in the history of the Revolution.

Some of the younger Seviers, coming upon this valley on a hunting-expedition, had induced their father to remove to it; and here, “higher up the river, on its north side, and near the closing in of a ridge,” he had built a roomy log mansion, a portion of which was still standing in 1844.  The sons had erected dwellings lower down the river, and nearer the “Watauga Old Fields.”

The Seviers were of French descent.  The family name in France was Xavier, and they originally came from Xavier, a town at the foot of the Pyrenees, in Navarre, which was the birthplace of the famous ecclesiastic and missionary St. Francis Xavier.  After the death of the saint the family became Huguenots, and on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 the direct ancestor of the Seviers of whom I am writing fled from France and settled in London, where he is said to have engaged in trade and prospered.  The grandson of this man, Valentine Sevier, emigrated to Shenandoah County, Virginia, shortly prior to 1740; and this is the gentleman who, with his four sons, had now settled in the valley of the Watauga.

Each of these young men displayed qualities in after-life that would have rendered him worthy of notice in the annals of any community; but the oldest, John, born in 1744, is the one whose life and exploits will demand much the larger space in the following pages.  Though so young, he had already acquired some distinction in his native State, for he had been appointed a captain in the “Virginia line” by the Earl of Dunmore, the last royalist governor of Virginia.  In that capacity he had come in contact with Washington, who was a colonel in the same service; and it was doubtless owing to their early association that twenty years afterward, when Sevier was under the ban of outlawry by North Carolina, Washington appointed him to the military command of East Tennessee.