The kindness of a descendant of one of those noble patriots who, after having won distinction in the struggle for Independence, sought new homes in the free and growing West,[1] enables me to present some brief notice of one family associated with the early history of Tennessee. The name of Bledsoe is distinguished among the pioneers of the Cumberland Valley. The brothers of this name--Englishmen by birth--were living in 1769 upon the extreme border of civilization, near Fort Chipel, a military post in Wyth County, Virginia. It was not long before they removed further into the wild, being probably the earliest pioneers in the valley of the Holston, in what is now called Sullivan County, Tennessee, a portion of country at that time supposed to be within the limits of Virginia. The Bledsoes, with the Shelbys, settled themselves about twelve miles above the Island Flats. The beauty of that mountainous region attracted others, who impelled by the same spirit of adventure, and pride in being the first to explore the wilderness, came to join them in establishing the colony. They cheerfully ventured their property and lives, enduring the severest privations in taking possession of their new homes, influenced by the love of independence, equality, and religious freedom. The most dearly-prized rights of man had been threatened in the oppressive system adopted by Great Britain towards her colonies; her agents and the colonial magistrates manifested all the insolence of authority; and individuals who had suffered from their aggressions bethought themselves of a country beyond the mountains, in the midst of primeval forests, where no laws existed save the law of Nature--no magistrate except those selected by themselves; where full liberty of conscience, of speech, and of action prevailed. Yet, almost in the first year of their settlement, they formed a written code of regulations by which they agreed to be governed; each man signing his name thereto. The pioneer settlements of the Holston and Watanga, formed by parties of emigrants from neighboring provinces, traveling together through the wilderness, were not, in their constitution, unlike those of New Haven and Hartford; but among them was no godly Hooker, no learned and heavenly-minded Haynes. As from the first, however, they were exposed to the continual depredations and assaults of their savage neighbors, who looked with jealous eyes upon the approach of the white men, and waged a war of extermination against them, it was perhaps well that there were among them few men of letters. The rifle and the axe, their only weapons of civilization, suited better the perils they encountered from the fierce and marauding Shawnees, Chickamangas, Creeks, and Cherokees, than would the brotherly address of William Penn, or the pious discourses of Roger Williams.