Fort Nashborough, also known as Fort Bluff, Bluff Station, French Lick Fort, Cumberland River Fort and other names, was the stockade established in early 1779 in the French Lick area of the Cumberland River valley, as a forerunner to the settlement that would become the city of Nashville, Tennessee. The fort was not a military garrison. The log stockade was square in shape and covered . It contained 20 log cabins and was protection for the settlers against wild animals and Indians. James Robertson and John Donelson are considered the founders, and colloquially, the "founders of Tennessee". The fort was abandoned in 1794, but the settlement, now the town of Nashville, became the capital of the new state of Tennessee in 1796. Background The American Revolution broke out one month after Richard Henderson's purchase agreement with the Cherokee for the lands of the proposed Transylvania settlement was signed in March, 1775. The purchase included land above the Cumberland River in North Carolina (now north central Tennessee). Though much of the purchase had been invalidated by Virginia in 1778, lands in the vicinity of the Cumberland were still outstanding. Most Cherokee towns wished to stay neutral in the growing contest between the colonists and Britain, but Chief Dragging Canoe considered the war an opportunity to resist the continual encroachment by frontiersmen on traditional Cherokee territories. American retaliatory raids against his Cherokee towns in eastern Tennessee eventually forced Dragging Canoe to move his people farther to the south and west –down the Tennessee River. In 1779 they settled along Chickamauga Creek (near present-day Chattanooga, Tennessee), becoming known as the Chickamauga Cherokees. Later they were forced to move even further west and southwest, where they established the "Five Lower Towns", and were often thereafter referred to as the "Lower Cherokee". Dragging Canoe had admonished the settlers that encroachment would result in "dark and bloody ground", and he would make good on his word. Establishment Preparations Aside from a short-lived trading post established in 1689 by fur trader Martin Chartier, no attempt had previously been made to permanently settle the area then known only as French Lick along the banks of the Cumberland River. In 1779, John Buchanan Sr. migrated with his family from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, to North Carolina. He first went to the "over-mountain" area of Virginia (modern day eastern Kentucky) in order to leave the party's women and small children in