They were the banditti and, in 1776, the Tories of the western hills; they pillaged the homes of the men who were fighting for the democratic ideal.
It was not the Regulation Movement which turned westward the makers of the Old Southwest, but the free and enterprising spirit of the age.

It was emphatically an age of doers; and if men who felt the constructive urge in them might not lay hold on conditions where they were and reshape them, then they must go forward seeking that environment which would give their genius its opportunity.
Of such adventurous spirits was James Robertson, a Virginian born of Ulster Scot parentage, and a resident of (the present) Wake County, North Carolina, since his boyhood.

Robertson was twenty-eight years old when, in 1770, he rode over the hills to Watauga.

We can imagine him as he was then, for the portrait taken much later in life shows the type of face that does not change.

It is a high type combining the best qualities of his race.