After perfecting arrangements with Clark for securing "cabin rights" should the land prove to lie in Virginia, Robertson returned to Watauga to take command of the migration.
Toward the end of the year two parties set out, one by land, the other by water, for the wonderful new country on the Cumberland of which Boone and Scaggs and Mansker had brought back such glowing descriptions.

During the autumn Judge Henderson and other commissioners from North Carolina, in conjunction with commissioners from Virginia, had been running out the boundary line between the two states.

On the very day--Christmas, 1779--that Judge Henderson reached the site of the Transylvania Fort, now called Boonesborough, the swarm of colonists from the parent hive at Watauga, under Robertson's leadership, reached the French Lick and on New Year's Day, 1780, crossed the river on the ice to the present site of Nashville.
The journal of the other party, which, as has been aptly said, reads like a chapter from one of Captain Mayne Reid's fascinating novels of adventure, was written by Colonel John Donelson, the father-in-law of Andrew Jackson.

Setting out from Fort Patrick Henry on Holston River, December 22, 1779, with a flotilla consisting of about thirty flatboats, dugouts, and canoes, they encountered few difficulties until they began to run the gauntlet of the Chickamauga towns on the Tennessee.

Here they were furiously attacked by the Indians, terrible in their red and black war-paint; and a well-filled boat lagging in the rear, with smallpox on board, was driven to shore by the Indians.