When Colonel John Donelson ran the line in the latter part of 1771, The Little Carpenter, who with other Indian chiefs accompanied the surveying party, urged that the line agreed upon at Lochaber should break off at the head of the Louisa River, and should run thence to the mouth thereof, and thence up the Ohio to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. For this increase in the territory of Virginia they of course expected additional payment. As a representative of Virginia, Donelson agreed to the proposed alteration in the boundary line; and accordingly promised to send the Cherokees, in the following spring, a sum alleged by them to have been fixed at five hundred pounds, in compensation for the additional area. This informal agreement, it is believed, was never ratified by Virginia; nor was the promised compensation ever paid the Cherokees. [127] Under the belief that the land belonged to Virginia, Jacob Brown with one or two families from North Carolina settled in 1771 upon a tract of land on the northern bank of the Nonachunheh (corruption, Nolichucky) River. During the same year, an experimental line run westward from Steep Rock and Beaver Creek by Anthony Bledsoe showed that upon the extension of the boundary line, these settlers would fall within the bounds of North Carolina. Although thus informally warned of the situation, the settlers made no move to vacate the lands. But in the following year, after the running of Donelson's line, Alexander Cameron, Stuart's deputy, required "all persons who had made settlements beyond the said line to relinquish them." Thus officially warned, Brown and his companions removed to Watauga. [128] Cameron's order did not apply, however, to the settlement north of the Holston River, south and east of Long Island; and the settlement in Carter's Valley, north of the Holston and west of the Long Island, although lying without the Virginia boundary, strangely enough remained unmolested. The order was directed at the Watauga settlers, who were seated south of the Holston River in the Watauga Valley. The plight in which the Watauga settlers now found themselves was truly desperate; and the way in which they surmounted this apparently insuperable difficulty is one of the most striking and characteristic events in the pre-Revolutionary history of the Old Southwest. It exhibits the indomitable will and fertile resource of the American character at the margin of desperation. The momentous influence of the Watauga settlers, inadequately reckoned hitherto by historians, was soon to make itself powerfully felt in the first epochal movement of westward expansion. CHAPTER XIII. Opening the Gateway--Dunmore's War Virginia, we conceive, can claim this Country [Kentucky] with the greatest justice and propriety, its within the Limits of their Charter. They Fought and bled for it. And had it not been for the memorable Battle, at the Great Kanaway those vast regions had yet continued inaccessable.