Late in February 1780, sixteen-year-old Ketty Petrie left the Moravian settlement of Salem where she had lived since she was eight years old. Her brother, Anson, had suddenly appeared out of the wilderness to take her to Fort Patrick Henry, where his family and a handful of others were waiting to begin a trip by flatboat down the Holston and Tennessee Rivers to a place west of the mountains—the French Lick on the Cumberland.