Their route lay down through the Clinch and Holston valleys to the settlement at the base of the mountains.

Sevier and his Wataugans had gone by Gillespie's Gap, over the pathway that hung like a narrow ribbon about the breast of Roan Mountain, lifting its crest in dignified isolation sixty-three hundred feet above the levels.
The "Unakas" was the name the Cherokees had given to those white men who first invaded their hills; and the Unakas is the name that white men at last gave to the mountain.
Great companies of men were to come over the mountain paths on their way to the Mississippi country and beyond; and with them, as we know, were to go many of these mountain men, to pass away with their customs in the transformations that come with progress.

But there were others who clung to these hills.

They were of several stocks--English, Scotch, Highlanders, Ulstermen, who mingled by marriage and sometimes took their mates from among the handsome maids of the Cherokees.

They spread from the Unakas of Tennessee into the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky; and they have remained to this day what they were then, a primitive folk of strong and fiery men and brave women living as their forefathers of Watauga and Holston lived.