During the same year, an experimental line run westward from Steep Rock and Beaver Creek by Anthony Bledsoe showed that upon the extension of the boundary line, these settlers would fall within the bounds of North Carolina.

Although thus informally warned of the situation, the settlers made no move to vacate the lands.

But in the following year, after the running of Donelson's line, Alexander Cameron, Stuart's deputy, required "all persons who had made settlements beyond the said line to relinquish them." Thus officially warned, Brown and his companions removed to Watauga.

Cameron's order did not apply, however, to the settlement, to the settlement north of the Holston River, south and east of Long Island; and the settlement in Carter's Valley, although lying without the Virginia boundary, strangely enough remained unmolested.

The order was directed at the Watauga settlers, who were seated south of the Holston River in the Watauga Valley.
The plight in which the Watauga settlers now found themselves was truly desperate; and the way in which they surmounted this apparently insuperable difficulty is one of the most striking and characteristic events in the pre-Revolutionary history of the Old Southwest.