those selected by themselves; where full liberty of conscience, of speech, and of action prevailed.  Yet, almost in the first year of their settlement, they formed a written code of regulations by which they agreed to be governed; each man signing his name thereto.  The pioneer settlements of the Holston and Watanga, formed by parties of emigrants from neighboring provinces, traveling together through the wilderness, were not, in their constitution, unlike those of New Haven and Hartford; but among them was no godly Hooker, no learned and heavenly-minded Haynes.  As from the first, however, they were exposed to the continual depredations and assaults of their savage neighbors, who looked with jealous eyes upon the approach of the white men, and waged a war of extermination against them, it was perhaps well that there were among them few men of letters.  The rifle and the axe, their only weapons of civilization, suited better the perils they encountered from the fierce and marauding Shawnees, Chickamangas, Creeks, and Cherokees, than would the brotherly address of William Penn, or the pious discourses of Roger Williams.

During the first year, not more than fifty families had crossed the mountains; but others came with each revolving season to reinforce the little settlement, until its population swelled to hundreds; increasing to thousands within ten or fifteen years, notwithstanding the frequent and terrible inroads upon their numbers of the Indian rifle and tomahawk.  The dwelling-houses were forts, picketed, and flanked by block-houses, and the inhabitants, for mutual aid and protection, took up their residence in groups around different stations, within a short distance of one another.

Not long after the Bledsoes established themselves upon the banks of the Holston, Colonel Anthony Bledsoe, who was an excellent surveyor, was appointed clerk to the commissioners who ran the line dividing Virginia and North Carolina.  Bledsoe had, before this, ascertained that Sullivan County was comprised within the boundaries of the latter province.  In June, 1776, he was chosen by the inhabitants of the county to the command of the militia.  The office imposed on him the dangerous duty of repelling the savages and defending the frontier.  He had often to call out the militia and lead them to meet their Indian assailants, whom they would pursue to their villages through the recesses of the forest.  The battle of Long Island, fought a few miles below his station, near the Island Flats, was one of the earliest and hardest fought battles known in the traditionary history of Tennessee.  In June, 1776, more than seven hundred Indian warriors advanced upon the settlements on the Holston, with the avowed object of exterminating the white race through all their borders.  Colonel Bledsoe, at the head of the militia, marched to meet them, and in the conflict which ensued was completely victorious; the Indians being routed, and leaving forty dead upon the field.  This disastrous defeat for a time held them in check:  but the spirit of savage hostility was invincible, and in the years following there was a constant succession of Indian troubles, in which Colonel Bledsoe was conspicuous for his bravery and services.