The first English fort built in Eastern Tennessee was that of Loudon, in 1757, so called for the Earl of Loudon, at the time Governor of Virginia. It stood at the junction of the Tellico and Little Tennessee rivers, now in Monroe County, and 35 miles southwest of Knoxville. Its garrison of from two to three hundred men was, with three exceptions, massacred by the Indians in 1760, and with it a number of women and children. The first permanent settlement of Anglo-Americans in the region was made on the Watauga River, not far from the present northwestern border of North Carolina. As early as 1748, explorers, traders and hunters from Virginia had visited that part of the land. Thirteen years afterwards, nineteen men were attracted to it from the same State by the abundance of its game and were employed as sportsmen on Clinch and Powell’s rivers for eighteen months. Another company went towards it from North Carolina, but with the exception of the famous Indian hunter and fighter Daniel Boone, they halted at the spot where now is Abingdon, Virginia. Probably he had before been on the waters of the Watauga, for a beech tree, that stands on Boone’s creek, a tributary of that river, not far from Jonesboro, still bears this inscription, “_D. Boon cilled a Bar on tree in the year 1760._” These visits were followed by others from companies of hunting pioneers. In 1764 Boone returned to the same region from his home on the Yadkin River, North Carolina. Another pioneer gave him a glowing description of the country which is now Kentucky, and in 1771 he endeavored with a party of eighty persons--forty of whom were hunters--to pass into it through Cumberland Gap. They were waylaid and fiercely assailed by Indians and were forced to abandon the enterprise. Some four years later it was successfully renewed, and Boone, passing over the Clinch and Cumberland mountains from East Tennessee, led in the establishment beyond them of a great Commonwealth. An eminent historian of the United States, after relating the wrongs to which the people of North Carolina were subjected in 1770-71, under the provincial Governor, Tryon, proceeds to tell how and where they fled from oppression.