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. This young man was destined to become one of the most unique characters in American history. I know of no other of whom it can be said that he was loved by both his friends and his enemies. Indian mothers were wont to hush their children to sleep with the terror of his name, but Indian chieftains were known to plead when in distress, "Send us John Sevier. He is a good man, and he will do us right." In the times that "tried men's souls" to the uttermost he was to stand firm when most men faltered. He was to be "the rear-guard of the Revolution," and in its darkest days was to throw his sword into the trembling scale and turn it to final victory at King's Mountain.