American pioneer, born in Brunswick co., VA, on the 28th of June 1742, and brought up on his father’s farm. In 1759 he accompanied Daniel Boone on his third expedition across the Alleghenies and discovered the Watauga Valley. Next spring he led a band of settlers there and arranged with the Cherokees a treaty on terms of which the whites and natives lived at peace till 1776. Troubles then broke out, but Robertson succeeded in subjugating the Indians, and, at the instance of the governor of North Carolina, took up his residence at their capital in order to keep them in check. In 1779 he removed, with a number of the Watauga settlers to the region of the Cumberland, where on Christmas of that year they founded Nashville, and organized themselves into a civil and military body with Robertson at their head. Their conflicts with the savages who swarmed around them were almost incessant. In 1781 the fort of Nashville was besieged by 1,000 Indians and Robertson’s life was saved by his wife. Notwithstanding severe losses by the tomahawk and desertion, Robertson maintained the settlement. During the Revolutionary War he supported the patriot cause, and on being later urged by the Spaniards, with the promise of many advantages, to establish an independent government west of the Alleghenies, he refused their offer. In 1790 he was made by Washington a brigadier-general and, as such, commanded the Tennessee militia. During his later years he was U.S. agent to the Chickasaw Indians, and died at the Chickasaw Agency, TN, on the 1st of September 1814. See A. W. Putnam’s Life and Times of Robertson (1859), and J. R. Gilmore’s Advance-Guard of Western Civilization (1888).
