To provide defense against these sporadic attacks, the early settlers erected a series of forts in the area. Wood's Fort guarded the Forks-of-the-River just downstream from Newport, and McCoy's Fort and Whitson's Fort defended the area to the south.
The Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun, with most of the remaining mass contained in Jupiter.
The naturalistic story of the solar system goes back 4.5 billion years. In this view the solar system began as a cloud of dust and gas that collapsed on itself. A star began to form as the cloud was compressed by some unknown force. As the star spun and collected more mass, a disk of dust began to form the planets.