History and Government In the Summer of 1540 the Indian villages in the valley of the Tennessee River were ransacked by a strong mounted company of Spaniards from Florida. Before entering Tennessee, they had followed Hernando De Soto through what is now Georgia and the Carolinas, believing that somewhere in the vast reaches of the wilderness there would be treasure cities to plunder. From the Tennessee valley the Spaniards moved westward for almost a year. Many of them - including grim, iron-willed De Soto - had looted with Cortez in Mexico or Pizarro in Peru and, as a matter of course, they massacred the Indians and burned their villages when they failed to find gold. They followed bison trails and Indian trade-paths, wandering south at times into Alabama and Mississippi. In April 1541 the remnants of the party planted the flag of Spain on the bluffs of the Mississippi River and made camp near the present site of Memphis. After raiding Chickasaw villages nearby for food and mussel pearls, they crossed the river to continue searching for the will-o'-the-wisp gold they were never to find. More than a century passed before there is record of another white man entering the territory. In 1673 a woods ranger named James Needham was commissioned by Abraham Wood, Virginia trader, to scout the possibility of trade with the Overhill Cherokee whose towns lay along the Little Tennessee and Tellico Rivers. Accompanied by Gabriel Arthur, an indentured servant, and several Indians from the Cherokee Lower Towns, Needham twice crossed the mountains into Tennessee. On the second trip he was killed by the Indians. In the year that Needham and Arthur were in the valley of the Tennessee, Joliet and Marquette with five companions beached their canoes under the Lower Bluffs and were hospitably received in the Chickasaw villages north of the present Memphis. Other white men, French and English, may have found their way into Tennessee, but the next recorded visit was that of La Salle in 1682, when Fort Prudhomme was thrown up near the mouth of the Hatchie River on the First Chickasaw Bluff. A crude arrangement of earthworks and palisades occupied for only a short time, the fort soon fell into ruin. A deserter from La Salle's expedition, Martin Chartier, who wandered into Middle Tennessee and joined a band of Shawnee in the lower Cumberland Valley, left the valley with the tribe in 1692. Soon afterward a second Frenchman, Charles Charleville, set up a trading post in an old Shawnee stockade at French Lick, half a mile from the bluff upon which the little frontier town of Nashville was to be built nearly a century later. During the period of conflicting claims that followed, Spain included Tennessee with the Province of Florida on the strength of De Soto's journey. The French based their claim to the entire Mississippi Valley on La Salle's explorations and the activities of traders from Louisiana and Canada. The English claim was derived from the Virginia and Carolina grants which had indefinite limits westward. After Needham's trips among the Cherokee, the English lost no time in spreading their influence west to the Mississippi. Although French traders continued to visit Tennessee, their importance waned rapidly as more English traders came over the mountains and settled among the Cherokee, usually marrying into the tribe. This persistent penetration by the English robbed the Spanish and French claims of real force. When Virginia was partitioned in 1663, Tennessee became a western part of Carolina; thirty years later a further division left Tennessee within the jurisdiction of North Carolina. Ideas about the region remained vague well into the middle of the eighteenth century. The Upper Tennessee Valley, which Virginians thought was within their boundaries, was not explored until 1748, when Dr. Thomas Walker, sent out by the Loyal Land Company of Virginia, penetrated the territory to the present Kingsport. Two years later Walker with a party of Long Hunters (probably already familiar with the region) came down the upper Holston Valley, followed well-beaten bison trails westward, and crossed the Clinch River. From this point Walker and his wilderness scouts pushed north into Kentucky through the great mountain pass which he later named Cumberland Gap in honor of the Duke of Cumberland. When the French and Indian War broke out, the Overhill Cherokee petitioned the colonial governments of Virginia and South Carolina to build and strongly garrison a fort in their country. Virginia acted first Major Andrew Lewis led a party into the Overhill country and built a fort near Chota, the Cherokee capital. The South Carolinians, refusing to cooperate with the Virginians, set about building a fort of their own. The work was pushed to completion in 1757 by British regulars and militia from South Carolina, under the command of Captain Paul Demore. Named Fort Loudoun in honor of the Earl of Loudoun, commander of the British forces in America at the time, this was the first Anglo-American fort garrisoned west of the Alleghenies. The Virginia fort at Chota was never occupied. No sooner had the garrison taken possession than traders, artisans, blacksmiths, and small farmers began settling in the region protected by the fort. Many of them brought their wives, and "undoubtedly the first child born in the West to parents of the Anglo-Saxon race saw the light of day in the little community." Fort Loudoun remained the westernmost English outpost for three years. Abandoned at the outbreak of the Cherokee War, it was reoccupied by the North Carolinians after the British victory of 1761. Trade with the Cherokee was resumed and white men could again travel unmolested through the Overhill region. Even during the height of the war a few wilderness scouts had been hunting in Tennessee and Kentucky. The most noted of these was Daniel Boone, whom the Indians both feared and admired. When Richard Henderson of North Carolina, one of the first great American land speculators, became interested in East Tennessee and Kentucky lands, he sent Boone in 1760 to find desirable sites for settlement. A year later another landhunter, Elisha Walden, explored the Clinch and Powell Valleys. Increasing numbers of Long Hunters, seeking lands for Henderson and other speculators, came into Tennessee. In 1765 and again in 1770 Henry Scaggs passed through the Cumberland Gap and explored the bluffs where Nashville now stands. In the next four years parties led by James Smith, Kasper Mansker, and Isaac Bledsoe extensively explored this region. One of the parties found Timothe DeMonbreun, an Illinois Frenchman, operating a trading post in a cave on the Cumberland River. When early Nashville grew up almost at his front door, DeMonbreun became one of its leading citizens. Meanwhile actual settlement of Tennessee began in 1769, when William Bean built his cabin on Boone's Creek near the Watauga River and several families from North Carolina joined him. Bean's settlement and those in Carter's River Valley (1771) and on the Nolichucky River (1772) were known as the Watauga Settlements. Isolated in a mountain wilderness and almost entirely ignored by North Carolina, the people of the Watauga Settlements soon felt the lack of organized government. In 1772 they formed the Watauga Association and elected five magistrates to make and administer law. The records of the Association are lost and little is known about it. It is certain, however, that the Watauga constitution was the first to be written and adopted by independent white Americans. The Wataugans had no legal title to the lands they occupied. Until March 17,1775, the region was part of the Cherokee country, but on that date Richard Henderson's newly created Transylvania Land Company purchased an immense tract of nearly 20,000,000 acres from the Indians. Immediately the Transylvania Company resold the Watauga territory to its settlers. Title was taken by Charles Robertson as trustee for the community. At the outset of the Revolutionary War the Wataugans organized themselves into a military district which they named for George Washington. They requested annexation to North Carolina and in 1777 the petition was granted. Washington District was incorporated as Washington County, including the whole of the present State, and in 1779 Jonesboro was platted as the county seat. In the same year Colonel Evan Shelby marched from Watauga against the Chickamauga, a hostile branch of the Cherokee, and defeated them near the present Chattanooga. In 1780 news came across the mountains that Major Patrick Ferguson and a British force of about twelve hundred men, most of them loyalists, were raiding westward. The Over-Mountain men of Watauga rallied at Sycamore Shoals under John Sevier and, as they trailed eastward, were reinforced by Shelby's Indian fighters and a force of Virginians led by Colonel William Campbell. On October 7 they attacked the British entrenchments on King's Mountain. The frontiersmen used the Indian tactics they knew so well, creeping from tree to tree, sniping at the British. Ferguson and about six hundred of his men were killed while the Americans lost only twenty-eight men. This, the only battle in which the Tennessee settlers took part, marked the turn of the tide in the South. While war was going on in the East, the migration of settlers into Middle Tennessee began. (continued on next page!)

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