So it was that as early as 1757, before the great Cherokee war, a company of Virginians under Andrew Lewis had, on an invitation from the Indians, erected Fort Loudon near Great Telliko, the Cherokees' principal town, and that, after the treaty of peace in 1761, Waddell and his rangers of North Carolina had erected a fort on the Holston.
* 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.