Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 209 



fathers he inherited a gay, pleasure-loving tempera- 

 ment, that made him the most charming of com- 

 panions. His manners were polished and easy, and 

 he had great natural dignity. Over the backwoods- 

 men he exercised an almost unbounded influence, 

 due as much to his ready tact, invariable courtesy, 

 and lavish, generous hospitality, as to the skill and 

 dashing prowess which made him the most re- 

 nowned Indian fighter of the Southwest. He had 

 an eager, impetuous nature, and was very ambitious, 

 being almost as fond of popularity as of Indian- 

 fighting. 22 He was already married, and the father 

 of two children, when he came to the Watauga, 

 and, like Robertson, was seeking a new and better 

 home for his family in the West. So far, his life 

 had been as uneventful as that of any other spir- 

 ited young borderer; his business had been that of 

 a frontier Indian trader ; he had taken part in one or 

 two unimportant Indian skirmishes. 23 Later he 



22 See, in the collection of the Tenn. Hist. Soc., at Nash- 

 ville, the MS. notes containing an account of Sevier, given 

 by one of the old settlers named Hillsman. Hillsman espe- 

 cially dwells on the skill with which Sevier could persuade 

 the backwoodsmen to come round to his own way of think- 

 ing, while at the same time making them believe that they 

 were acting on their own ideas, and adds "whatever he had 

 was at the service of his friends and for the promotion of 

 the Sevier party, which sometimes embraced nearly all the 

 population." 



23 Mr. James Gilmore (Edmund Kirke), in his "John 

 Sevier," makes some assertions, totally unbacked by proof, 

 about his hero's alleged feats when only a boy, in the wars 

 between the Virginians and the Indians. He gives no dates 

 but can only refer to Pontiac's war. Sevier was then eigh- 



