Biography

John Sevier (pronounced “severe”) was born in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and was married by 16. He supported his family the usual frontier ways: furs, farming, land, and a tavern. The family moved to what now is Tennessee (then part of North Carolina) in the 1770s, and he was elected to the N.C. Provincial Congress. He fought Native Americans immediately prior to the Revolution. In 1776 he was named lieutenant colonel in the Washington District Militia, which he led four years later as part of the Overmountain Campaign resulting in victory at King’s Mountain, S.C. His wife died a few months before. Later he married a woman he had caught, literally, after she rescued herself from a Cherokee attack and climbed into Fort Watauga. Much of his war action was against Loyalists and the Cherokees, including a raid across the mountains in 1781 that destroyed