creek, west from the present Franklin, and crossed the Nantahala mountains at Waya gap--where a fight took place--to Nantahala river, probably at the town of the same name, about the present Jarretts station. From here the march was west across the mountain into the present Cherokee county and down Valley river to its junction with the Hiwassee, at the present Murphy. Authorities: Moore narrative and Wilson letter in North Carolina University Magazine, February, 1888; Ramsey, Tennessee, p. 164; Roosevelt, Winning of the West, I, pp. 300-302; Royce, Cherokee map; personal information from Colonel William H. Thomas, Major James Bryson, whose grandfather was with Rutherford, and Cherokee informants. (18) Colonel William Christian (p. 50): Colonel William Christian, sometimes incorrectly called Christy, was born in Berkeley county, Virginia, in 1732. Accustomed to frontier warfare almost from boyhood, he served in the French and Indian war with the rank of captain, and was afterward in command of the Tennessee and North Carolina forces which participated in the great battle of Point Pleasant in 1774, although he himself arrived too late for the fight. He organized a regiment at the opening of the Revolutionary war, and in 1776 led an expedition from Virginia against the Upper Cherokee and compelled them to sue for peace. In 1782, while upon an expedition against the Ohio tribes, he was captured and burned at the stake. (19) The great Indian war path (p. 50): This noted Indian thoroughfare from Virginia through Kentucky and Tennessee to the Creek country in Alabama and Georgia is frequently mentioned in the early narrative of that section, and is indicated on the maps accompanying Ramsey's Annals of Tennessee and Royce's Cherokee Nation, in the Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. Royce's map shows it in more correct detail. It was the great trading and war path between the northern and southern tribes, and along the same path Christian, Sevier, and others of the old Indian fighters led their men to the destruction of the towns on Little Tennessee, Hiwassee, and southward.