In the spring of 1770, with the express intention of discovering suitable locations for homes for himself and a number of others, who wished to escape the accumulating evils of the times, James Robertson of Orange County, North Carolina, made an arduous journey to the pleasing valley of the Watauga. Robertson, who was born in Brunswick County, Virginia, June 28, 1742, of excellent Scotch-Irish ancestry, was a noteworthy figure of a certain type--quiet, reflective, conservative, wise, a firm believer in the basic principles of civil liberty and the right of local self-government. Robertson spent some time with a man named Honeycut in the Watauga region, raised a crop of corn, and chose for himself and his friends suitable locations for settlement. Lost upon his return in seeking the mountain defiles traversed by him on the outward journey, Robertson probably escaped death from starvation only through the chance passing of two hunters who succored him and set him upon the right path. On arriving in Orange he found political and social conditions there much worse than before, many of the colonists declining to take the obligatory oath of allegiance to the British Crown after the Battle of Alamance, preferring to carve out for themselves new homes along the western waters. Some sixteen families of this stamp, indignant at the injustices and oppressions of British rule, and stirred by Robertson's description of the richness and beauty of the western country, accompanied him to Watauga shortly after the battle. This vanguard of the army of westward advance, independent Americans in spirit with a negligible sprinkling of Loyalists, now swept in a great tide into the northeastern section of Tennessee. The men of Sandy Creek, actuated by independent principles but out of sympathy with the anarchic side of the Regulation, left the colony almost to a man. "After the defeat of the Regulators," says the historian of the Sandy Creek Association, "thousands of the oppressed, seeing no hope of redress for their grievances, moved into and settled east Tennessee. A large proportion of these were of the Baptist population. Sandy Creek Church which some time previous to 1771, numbered 606, was afterward reduced to fourteen members!" [123] This movement exerted powerful influence in stimulating westward expansion. Indeed, it was from men of Regulating principles--Boone, Robertson, and the Searcys--who vehemently condemned the anarchy and incendiarism of 1770, that Judge Henderson received powerful coöperation in the opening up of Kentucky and Tennessee. [124]