Many left the country, and most of the remainder, when midsummer was past, began to urge that they should all go back in a body to the old settlements.

The panic became very great.

One by one the stockades were deserted, until finally all the settlers who remained were gathered in Nashborough and Freelands.

[Footnote: By some accounts there were also a few settlers left in Eaton's Station; and Mansker's was rarely entirely deserted for any length of time.] The Cumberland country would have been abandoned to the Indians, had Robertson not shown himself to be exactly the man for whom the crisis called.
Robertson was not a dashing, brilliant Indian fighter and popular frontier leader, like Sevier.

He had rather the qualities of Boon, with the difference that he was less a wandering hunter and explorer, and better fitted to be head of a settled community.