For fourteen days he lived almost wholly on nuts and wild berries, and was on the point of death from starvation, when he met two hunters on horseback, who fed him and let him ride their horses by turns, and brought him safely to his home.
Such hardships were little more than matter-of-course incidents in a life like his; and he at once prepared to set out with his family for the new land.

His accounts greatly excited his neighbors, and sixteen families made ready to accompany him.

The little caravan started, under Robertson's guidance, as soon as the ground had dried after the winter rains in the spring of 1771.[20] They travelled in the usual style of backwoods emigrants: the men on foot, rifle on shoulder, the elder children driving the lean cows, while the women, the young children, and the few household goods, and implements of husbandry, were carried on the backs of the pack-horses; for in settling the backwoods during the last century, the pack-horse played the same part that in the present century was taken by the canvas-covered emigrant wagon, the white-topped "prairie schooner." Once arrived at the Watauga, the Carolina new-comers mixed readily with the few Virginians already on the ground; and Robertson speedily became one of the leading men in the little settlement.

On an island in the river he built a house of logs with the bark still on them on the outside, though hewed smooth within; tradition says that it was the largest in the settlement.

Certainly it belonged to the better class of backwoods cabins, with a loft and several rooms, a roof of split saplings, held down by weighty poles, a log veranda in front, and a huge fire-place, of sticks or stones laid in clay, wherein the pile of blazing logs roared loudly in cool weather.