adition that has clung to the family after its historical setting has been forgotten. Nathaniel Gist was a soldier in the French and Indian war; for his services he received a tract of several thousand acres of land in Bourbon County, Kentucky, on which he built the famous old homestead called Canewood, long remembered for the hospitality it dispensed.8 Probably in Braddock’s campaign, but certainly in that of General Forbes, he was closely associated with the Cherokees; and after the fall of Fort Duquesne in 1758, he spent much of his time in their nation up to the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
In the year 1753 George Washington was dispatched by Governor Dinwiddie on an important mission to the French on the Ohio. He was then only twenty-one years old—an age at
6Manuscript letters of John Mason Brown, January 17, 18, 22, and February 4, 1889, in archives of the Bureau of American Ethnology, cited in Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee, p. 109.
which fast friendships are readily formed. At Will’s Creek he met with Christopher Gist, father of Nathaniel Gist, and engaged him as guide in his expedition. Christopher Gist was one of the earliest and most intelligent explorers of the country west of the Alleghanies. Three years before, he had been employed by the Ohio Company to explore their immense grant lying between the Monongahela and Kentucky Rivers. Originally from Maryland, he was at that time living on a farm near the home of Daniel Boone on the Yadkin River. On his return from his first expedition it was his fortune to stand on a mountain and view the magnificent country of Kentucky, long before it was beheld by his neighbor Boone.9 The tradition that Gist saved Washington’s life while crossing the Alleghany River may not be literally true,10 but they suffered terrible hardships and dangers together, and a warm friendship grew up between them. When hostilities broke out Gist, who had formed a settlement near Fort Necessity, attached himself to Washington, and continued with him until operations in the West terminated with the evacuation of Fort DeQuesne by the French in 1758.
In the campaign against Fort DuQuesne great effort was made to engage the Cherokees in the British interest; Washington thought their presence indispensably necessary. Many of them were engaged. Among others, a chief whom Washington calls Antasity,11 undoubtedly meant for Outacite (the mankiller), of Tomotley, known on the border as Judge Friend. At the close of the Cherokee war in 1762 Outacite went to England with Henry Timberlake, where he created a great furore, was visited by thousands of people, had an audience with the king, and received many presents; among others one from Oliver Goldsmith, which, either from its appropriateness or the manner of its giving, so excited his gratitude that he embraced the great poet, and incidentally smeared his face with oil and red ochre.12 Another chief with Washington was the great warrior, Scollacutta (Hanging Maw), afterwards head chief or the nation and a man of peace.13 Ranking both of these was Attakullakulla (Little Carpenter), of Tuskegee, who was then in the zenith of his power.14
On Washington’s recommendation, Captain Christopher Gist was put in charge of the Indian affairs of the army. Nathaniel Gist, who had been elevated to the rank of lieutenant, entered the department of service of which his father had charge, and commanded a detachment of Indian auxiliaries. This was the beginning of the long and intimate friendship that subsisted between him and the Cherokee Indians.
After the fall of Fort DuQuesne, Nathaniel Gist returned to his old haunts and friends on the Yadkin River; and there is little reason to doubt that he found an early opportunity to visit his new friends on the Little Tennessee. Indeed it seems certain that he had visited the Long Island of Holston before 1760. There are few places in Tennessee around which cluster so much of early romance as is wreathed about the Long Island of Holston. It was opposite this Island that Colonel William Byrd erected Fort Robinson in 1758, 