Their wives and children provided with temporary shelter, the immigrants looked about for locations for more permanent dwellings, Virginia offered to every actual settler who should erect a log cabin and cultivate a small patch of ground four hundred acres so located as to include his improvements, together with the right to buy a thousand acres adjoining, at a price scarcely more than enough to cover the cost of surveying. The immigrants knew they were near the North Carolina boundary, but they supposed they were north of the line which starts "at a white stake on the Atlantic Ocean, at north 39° 20', and runs thence west to the South Seas," and thus were within the limits of Virginia and entitled to avail themselves of its cheap munificence,--cheap, because the whole territory had been bought by King George from the Six Nations for a few trinkets the total value of which did not exceed the cost of the wedding-outfit of a modern lady of fashion. This line, "west to the South Seas," had not then been run farther west than the "Steep Rock," near the White-Top Mountain. When it was subsequently extended, the settlers found themselves within the limits of North Carolina and not entitled to the benefit of the Virginia law. But of this more hereafter. Now they were unconscious of encroaching on any rights of white man or red, and went on with their improvements, confident that they were acquiring an indefeasible title to their new possessions. 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.