* Tennessee. The name, Ten-as-se, appears on Adair's map as one
of the old Cherokee towns. Apparently neither the meaning nor the
reason why the colonists called both state and river by this name
has been handed down to us.
Though Fort Loudon had fallen tragically during the war, and
though Waddell's fort had been abandoned, neither was without
influence in the colonization of Tennessee, for some of the men
who built these forts drifted back a year or two later and setup
the first cabins on the Holston. These earliest settlements, thin
and scattered, did not survive; but in 1768 the same settlers or
others of their kind--discharged militiamen from Back Country
regiments--once more made homes on the Holston. They were joined
by a few families from near the present Raleigh, North Carolina,
who had despaired of seeing justice done to the tenants on the
mismanaged estates of Lord Granville. About the same time there
was erected the first cabin on the Watauga River, as is generally
believed, by a man of the name of William Bean (or Been), hunter
and frontier soldier from Pittsylvania County, Virginia. This
man, who had hunted on the Watauga with Daniel Boone in 1760,
chose as the site of his dwelling the place of the old hunting
camp near the mouth of Boone's Creek.
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