His skill and daring, together with his unfailing courtesy, ready tact, and hospitality, gained him unbounded influence with the frontiersmen, among whom he was universally known as "Nolichucky Jack." [Footnote: MSS.

"Notes of Conversations with Old Pioneers," by Ramsey, in Tenn.Hist.Soc.Campbell MSS.] The Virginian settlements on the Holston, adjoining those of North Carolina, were in 1777 likewise made into a county of Washington.

The people were exactly the same in character as those across the line; and for some years the fates of all these districts were bound up together.
Their inhabitants were still of the usual backwoods type, living by tilling their clearings and hunting; the elk and buffalo had become very scarce, but there were plenty of deer and bear, and in winter countless wild swans settled down on the small lakes and ponds.

The boys followed these eagerly; one of them, when an old man, used to relate how his mother gave him a pint of cream for every swan he shot, with the result that he got the pint almost every day.

[Footnote: "Sketch of Mrs.
Elizabeth Russell," by her grandson, Thomas L.Preston, Nashville, 1888, p.29.An interesting pamphlet.] The leading family among these Holston Virginians was that of the Campbells, who lived near Abingdon.