by John Preston Arthur

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 Part 1

Note:  For your convenience we have provided two difference sources of information about the history of Watauga County. The first, created by the National Park Service is available by clicking the link above. The second is presented in it's entirety below:

Contents

Chapter I  The relation of Watauga County and it's residents to remainder of the mountains. Early settlers in eastern part of State. Difference between eastern and western settlers. Our Yankee ancestry. Critics eager to find fault. Our annals. Difference between "poor whites" and "mountain whites." Cooperation has ceased. Moonshinning an inheritance. Pennsylvania "Whiskey Rebellion."

Chapter II Similarity of Indians to Hebrews. A study in ethnology and philology. Speculations as to the beginning of things. Indians never residents of Watauga in memory of whites. Cherokees parted with title to land long ago. Old forts on frontier. Cherokee raids. First white settlers of Watauga. Linville family and falls.

Chapter IIIThe greed for land in the eastern section. Bishop Spangenberg sets out to get land for Moravians. He is misled and "wanders bewildered in unknown ways." Reaches delicious spring on Flat Top. Three Forks described. An Indian old Field. Caught in a mountain snow-storm. Their route from Blowing Rock. Conflicting claims as to locality described.

Chapter IV No direct Daniel Boone descendants. Other Boone relatives. Jesse and Jonathan Boone. Their Three Forks membership. Marking the Trail of Daniel Boone. Boone Cabin Monument. Locating Trail. Cumberland Gap pedestal. Boone's Trail in other States. Congress urged to erect bronze statue there. Boone's first trip across Blue Ridge. Probability of relocation of trail. Improbability of carving on the Boone tree. Boone's relations with Richard Henderson considered.

Chapter V Backwoods Tories. Samuel Bright, Loyalist. Patriots feared British influence with Indians. Bright's Spring and the Shelving Rock. Watauga County once part of Watauga Settlement. Doctor Draper's errors. W. H. Ollis's contribution. No camp on the Yellow. Cleveland's parentage and capture. His rescue, etc. Greer's Hints, of two kinks. The Wolf's Den. Riddle's execution. Killing of Chas. Asher and other Tories. Ben Howard. Marking old graves by United States. Its niggardly policy. Battlefield in Watauga.

CHAPTER VI The Yadkin Baptist Association. Three Forks Baptist Church. List of its early members and officers. A great moral force in the community. Church trials, grave and gay. Other ancient happenings. First churches. Revivals.

Chapter VII Order of the Holy Cross. Picture of Watauga Valley in 1840. Valle Crucis as first founded. Rt. Rev. L. S. Ives. Feeble and undignified imitation. Why Ives vacillated. Old buildings. Adobes and humble bees. Easter Chapel. Spiritual starvation on the Lower Watauga. The Mission store. Death of Mr. Skiles. Removal of St. John's. Reinstitution of Mission, and School for Girls. Summer resort, also.

Chapter VIII Light on the Jersey Settlement. Meagre facts considered. John Gano, preacher. Fairchild's diary. Adventures on road. Mr. Gano constitutes a church. A colonial document. Other ancient documents and facts. Letter from Morris Town, N. J., Church. The Fairchild ladies.

Chapter IX Democracy of the religion of the mountaineer. Our morals, as appraised by others. Pioneer Baptists. The Farthing family. A family of preachers. Rev. Joseph Harrison. Cove Creek Baptist Church. Bethel Baptist Church. Other early churches. Stony Fork Association. White's Spring Church. Methodist Churches. Henson's Chapel. A family of Methodist church preachers. M. E. Churches. Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans.

Chapter X Formation of county. Councill's influence. Three New England visitors. Doctor Mitchell's geological tour. Tennessee boundary line. Boundary line and Land Grant Warrants. Running State Line. Watauga County lines. Watauga County established. Changes in county lines. Avery County cut off. Jails and court houses. To restore lost records. First term Superior cour. Tied to a wagon-wheel. Roving spirit. Legislative and other officers. Watauga's contribution to Confederacy and Federals. Population and other facts. Mexican War soldiers. Weather vagaries. Agricultural and domestic facts. Forests. Altitudes.

Chapter XI Boone incorporated. Its attractions. Miss Morley's visit. First residents of Boone. First builders. Saw-mills for new town. The Ellingtons. Other builders. First merchants, J. C. Gaines, Rev. J. W. Hall. Post-bellum Boone. Coffey Bros. Their enterprises. Newspapers. Counterfeiters.

CHAPTER XII.Too many troops for limits of book. Keith Blalock. Four Coffey Bros. Danger from Tennessee side. Longstreet's withdrawal. Kirk's Camp Vance raid. Death of Wm. Coffey. Murder of Austin Coffey. Other "activities." Michiganders escape. Camp Mast. Watauga Amazons. Camp Mast surrender. Sins of the children. Retribution? Paul and Reuben Farthing. Battle of the Beech. Stoneman's raid. Official account. A real home guard. Mrs. Horton robbed. No peace. Fort Hamby. Blalock's threat.

CHAPTER XIII. Some Thrice-Told Tales.-- Calloway sisters. Pioneer hunters. James Aldridge. His real wife appears. Betsy Calloway. Delila Baird. A belated romance. Colb McCanless, sheriff. His death by Wild Bill. Bendent E. Baird. Zeb Vance's uncle makes inquiry. Peggy Clawson. Other old stories. Joseph T. Wilson, or "Lucky Joe." "Long-Distance." An African romance. James Speer's fate. Joshua Pennell frees slaves. Jesse Mullion. Crosscut suit. Absentee landlord. "School Butter." Lee Carmichael. The musterfield murder. A Belle of Broadway.

CHAPTER XIV.Fine Watauga County scenery. Cove Creek. Our flowers. Valle Crucis. Sugar Grove. Blowing Rock. along the Blue Ridge. Moses H. Cone. Brushy Fork. Shull's Mills. Linville Valley and Falls. The Ollis Family. Elk Cross Roads. Banner's Elk. A trip on foot. Meat Camp. Rich Mountain. The "Tater Hill." The Grandfather and Grandmother. Grafting French chestnuts. Beaver Dams. Boone's Beaver Dams trails. Beech Creek and Poga.

Chapter XV Ante-bellum education. Peculiarities of speech. We speak the best and purest English. Place-names. Kephart's dissertations. Ante-bellum pedagogues. Our schools. Penmanship. Phillip Church. Jonathan Norris. Eli M. Farmer. Burton Davis. Todd Miller. The "Twisting Temple." Lees-McRae Institute. School-teachers. Normal school at Boone. "Skyland Institute. T. P. Adams' long service. Silverston public school. Walnut Grove Institute. Valle Crucis School for Girls. First agricultural instruction. Promiment in education. Lenoir School lands. School-house Loan Fund. T. L. Clingman, a teacher. Mount Mitchell controversy.

Chapter XVI Gold mines and mining. First owners of Cranberry. Iron forges. Iron bounties. Some old hammermen. Clingman's mining.

Chapter XVII First wagon roads. First across Blue Ridge. Caldwell and Watauga Turnpike. Yonahlossee Turnpike. Early road legislation. Earliest stopping places. First paper railroads.

John Preston Arthur

Chapter I

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Our Home and Heritage.--Our home is a very small part of that vast region known as the southern Appalachians, which a recent writer, Horace Kephart, has aptly called Appalachia. This elevated section covers parts of eight States, all of which are south of Mason and Dixon's line. It is in the middle of the temperate zone and, for climate, is unsurpassed in the world. The average elevation is about two thousand feet above tidewater. Blue Ridge is the name of the range of mountains which bounds this highland country on the east, though the western boundary is known by many names, owing to the fact that is is bisected by several streams, all of which flow west, while the Blue Ridge is a true water-shed from the Potamac to Georgia. The various names of the western ranges are the Stone, the Iron, the Bald, the Great Smoky, the Unaka and the Frog mountains. the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey has, however, of recent years, given the name Unaka to this entire western border, leaving the local names to the sections which have been formed by the passage of the Watauga, the Doe, the Toe, the Cane, the French Broad, the Pigeon, the Little Tennessee and Hiawassee rivers. With the exception of a few bare mountain-tops, which are covered by a carpet of grass, these mountains are wooded to the peaks. Between the Blue Ridge and the Unakas are numerous cross ranges, separated by narrow valley's and deep gorges. Over the larger part of this region are to be found the older crystalline rocks, most of which are tilted, while the forests are of the finer hardwoods whichm when removed, give places to luxuriant grasses. The apple finds it's home in these mountains, while maize, when grown, is richer in proteids than that of the prairie lands of Illinois.

Character of the Inhabitants in 1752. --Bishop Spangenberg, in the Colonial Records (Vol. IV, pp. 1311-1314), Wrote from

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Edenton, N. C., that he found everything in confusion there, the counties in conflict with each other, and the authority of the legislature greatly weakened, owing largely to the fact that the older counties had formerly been allowed five representatives in the general assembly; but, as the new counties were formed, they were allow buy two. It was not long, however, beforethe newer counties, even with their small representation, held a majority of the members, and passed a low reducing the representation of the older counties from five to two. The result of this was that the older counties refused to send any members to the assembly, but dispatched an agent to England with a view to the having their former representation restored. Before any result could be obtained, however, there was "in the older counties perfect anarchy," with frequent crimes of murder and robbery. Citizens refused to appear as jurors, and if court was held to try such crimes, not one was present. Prisons were broken open and their inmates released. Most matters were decided by blows. But the county courts were regularly held, and whatever belonged to their jurisdiction received the customary attention.

People of the East and West. --Bishop Spangenberg, in the same letter, divided the inhabitants of the eastern counties into two classed --natives, who could endure the climate, but were indolent and sluggish, and those from England, Scotland and Ireland and from the northern colonies of America, the latter being too poor to buy land there. some of these were refugees from justice, had fled from debt, or had left wife and children elsewhere--or, possibly, to escape the penalty of some crime. Horse thieves infested parts of this section, but he adds in a postscript written in 1753: "After having traversed the length and breadth of North Carolina, we have ascertained that towards the sestern mountains there are plenty of people who have come from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and even from New England." Even in 1752 "four hundred families, with horsed, wagons and cattle have migrated to North Carolina, and among them weregood farmers and very worthy people". These, in all probability, were the Jersey Settlers.

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The Great Pennsylvania Road. --On the 15th of February, 1751, Governor Johnston wrote to the London Board of Trade that inhabitants were flocking into North Carolina, mostly from Pennsylvania, and other points of America "already overstocked, and some directly from Eruope," many thousands having arrived, most of whom had settled in the West "so that they had nearly reached the mountains." Jeffrey's map in Congressional Library shows the "Great Road from the Yadkin River through Virginia to Philadelphia, Distance 435 Miles." It ran from Philadelphia, through Lancaster and York counties of Pennsylvania to Wichester, VA., thence up the Shenandoah Valley, crossing Fluvanna River at Looney's Ferry, thence to Staunton River and down the river, through the Blue Ridge. Thence southward, near the Moravian Settlement, to Yadkin River, just above the mouth of Linville Creek, and about ten miles above the mouth of Reedy Creek. It is added that those of our boys who followed Lee on his Gettysburg campaign in 1863 were but passing over the same route their ancestors had taken when coming from Youk and Lancaster counties to this State in the fifties of the eighteenth century. (Col. Rec. Vol. IV, p. xxi.)

Our Yankee Ancestry. --Our Yankee Ancestry.-- As, to Southerners, all people north of Mason and Dixon's line are Yankees, there seems to be no doubt, if the best authorities can be trusted, that we are the sons of Yankee sires. Roosevelt (Vol. I, p. 137) tells us that as early as 1730 three streams of white people began to converge towards these mountains, but were halted by the Alleghenies; that they came mostly from Philadelphia, though many were from Charleston, S.C., Presbyterian-Irish being prominent among all and being the Roundheads of the South. Also that Catholics and Episcopalians obtained little foothold, the creed of the backwoodsmen being generally Presbyterian. Miss Morley says that so many of the staunch northerners --Scotch-Irish after the events of 1730, and Scotch Highlanders after those of 1745--"came to the North Carolina mountains that they have given the dominant note to the character of the mountaineers" (p. 140). Kephart says that when James I, in 1607, confiscated the estates of the native Irish in six counties in Ulster, he planted them

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with Scotch and English Presbyterians, giving long leases, but that as these leases began to expire the Scotch-Irish themselves came in conflict with the Crown, and then he quotes Froude to the effect that thirty thousand Prostestants left Ulster during the two years following the American evictions and came to America. Many of these finally settled in our mountaing, among them being Daniel Boone and the ancestors of David Crockett, Samuel Houston, John C. Calhoun, "Stonewall" Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. He might have added, also, those of Cyrus H. McCormick, Admiral Farragut, Andrew Johnson, James K. Polk, John C. Breckenridge, Henry Clay, John Marshall and Parson Brownlow.

Huguenots, Germans and Swedes. --But others came also: French Huguenots, Germans, Hollanders and Swedes, who settled the British frontier from Massachusetts to the Valley of Virginia, the mountain men who counted more coming from Lancaster, York and Berks counties, Pennsylvania. "That was true in the days of Daniel Boone and David Crockett, and also in the days of John C. Calhun and William A. Graham, of these of Zeb Vance and Jeter C. Pritchard. There has not been one whit of admixture from any other source. Blood feuds have always been absent. The Tiffanys have been able to draw on these mountains for some of their most skillful wood-carvers--a revival of their ancient home industries. I have heard in Pennsylvania within the last thirty years every form of expression with which I am familiar in Western North Carolina, and some of them occur today around Worcester, Mass." (note 1) Hence, we have in these mountains the sauerkraut of Holland and the cakes of Scotland.

Scum or salt? -- So much has been written in detraction of the Southern mountaineers that ignorant people conclude that they are the very scum of the earth. In all the admirable things Horace Kephart had to say in his "Southern Highlanders," the Northern reviewers found but a few sentences worthy of their notice, and these were, of course, of an unfavorable nature.

Note 1 - Dr. Collier Cobb in an address before the National Geographic Society, in New York City, in April, 1914.

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These were quoted and commented on by a reviewer in the Review of Reviews for July, 1914. In the same number of this periodical (p. 49) there is a picture under which is printed: "Center Peak of Grandfather Mountain, in Pisgah Forest, recently acquired by the Government from the Estate of George W. Vanderbilt." As the Grandfather mountain is at least ninety miles north of Pisgah Forest, the ignorance of the publishers of this magazine of conditions in our mountains is apparent. Kephart's few remarks which caught the eye of Northern reviewers were that "although without annals, we are one in speech, manners, experiences and ideals, and that our deterioration began as soon as population began to press upon the limits of subsistence." An examination of the statistics of population and wealth of Buncombe, Haywood, Jackson, Swain and Cherokee counties in 1880, before the railroad was built, and of 1910, will convince anyone that "population has not yet pressed upon the limits of production." Kephart also said that our "isolation prevented them from moving West . . . and gradually the severe conditions of their life enfeebled them physically and mentally." As opposed to that, Archibald D. Murphey says (Murphey Papers, Vol. II, p. 105) that North Carolina "has sent half a million of her inhabitants to people the wilderness of the West, and it was not until the rage for emigration abated that the public attention was directed to the improvement of their advantages." This was written prior to November, 1819. Besides, anyone who will read the "Sketches of Prominent Families" in this volume will be convinced that Watauga County at least contributed its quota to the winning of the West. Miss Morley graciously records that, instead of deteriorating, the late George W. Vanderbilt put his main reliance on the native mountaineer in the development of his fairyland estate, Biltmore (p. 149). "They were put to work, and, what was of equal value in their development, they were subjected to an almost military discipline. For the first time in generations they were compelled to be prompt. Methodical and continuous in their efforts. And of this there was no complaint. Scotch blood may succumb to enervating surroundings, but at

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the first call to battle it was ready. Not only did the men do the manual labor, but, as time went on, the most capable of them became overseers in the various departments, until finally all the directors of this great estate, excepting a few of the highest officials, were drawn from the ranks of the people, who proved themselves so trustworthy and capable that in all these years only three or four of Biltmore's mountaineer employees have had to be dismissed for inefficiency or bad conduct."

Won the Revolution and Saved the Union.-- Line Tennyson's "foolish yeoman," we have been "too proud to care from whence we came," and it is a singular fact that in spite of all that has been written against us, no Southern mountaineer has taken the trouble to answer our detractors. And, when it is said that we have no annals, Mr. Kephart merely means that we have not written them, for he proceeds to prove that we have annals of the highest order. He credits the mountaineer with having been the principal force which drove the Indians from the Alleghany border (p. 151) and formed the rear-guard of the Revolution and the vanguard in the conquest of the West. He says: "Then came the Revolution. The backwoodsmen were loyal to the American government -- loyal to a man. They not only fought off the Indians from the rear, but sent many of their incomparable riflemen to fight at the front as well. They were the first English-speaking people to use weapons of precision -- the rifle, introduced by the Pennsylvania Dutch about 1700, which was used by our backwoodsmen exclusively throughout the war. They were the first to employ open-order formation in civilized warfare. They were the first outside colonists to assist their New England brethren at the siege of Boston . . . They were mustered in as the first regiment of the Continental Army (being the first troops enrolled by our Congress and the first to serve under a Federal banner). They carried the day at Saratoga, the Cowpens and King's Mountain. From the beginning to the end of the war, they were Washington's favorite troops." As to the Civil War, he says (p. 374): "The Confederated thought that they could throw a line of troops from Wheeling to the Lakes, and Captain Garnett, a West Point

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graduate, started, but got no further than Harpper's Ferry, when mountain men shot from ambush, cut down bridges, and killed Garnett with a bullet from a squirrel rifle at Harper's Ferry. Then the South began to realize what a long, lean, powerful arm of the Union it was that the Southern mountaineer stretched through its very vitals, for that arm helped to hold Kentucky in the Union, kept East Tennessee from aiding the Confederacy and caused West Virginia to secede from Secession!" There was no Breed's Hill nor Bull Run panic among them in the Revolution or in the Civil War period! Has New England, which has a superabundance of annals, any that will compare with these? And yet, it took an outsider to tell us of them!

"Not the Poor Whites of the South". --According to Kephart (p. 356), the poor whites of the South descended mainly from the convicts and indentured servants which England supplied to the Southern plantations before the days of slavery. The cavaliers who founded and dominated Southern society came from the conservative, the feudal element of England. "Their character and training were essentially aristocratic and military. They were not town dwellers, but masters of plantations . . . These servants were obtained from convicted criminals, boys and girls kidnaped from the slums, impoverished people who sold their services for passage to America (p. 357). It was when the laboring classes of Europe had achieved emancipation from serfdom and feudalism was overthrown, that Africa slavery laid the foundation for a new feudalism in the Southern States. Its effect upon white labor was to free them from their thraldom; but being unskilled and untrained, densely ignorant, and from a more or less degraded stock, these shiftless people generally became squatters on the pine barrens, and gradually sank lower in the scale till the slaves themselves were freed by the Civil War. There was then and still is plenty of wild land in the lowlands and they had neither the initiative nor the courage to seek a promised land far away among the unexplored and savage peaks of the western country."

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McKamie Wiseman's View. --This shrewd old mountaineer of Avery County, who is a wise man not only by name, but by nature also, had the true idea of the settlement of these mountains. He said that as population drifted westward from the Atlantic and downwards from western Virginia and Pennsylvania between the mountain troughs, the game was driven into the intervening mountains, and that only the bravest and the hardiest of the frontiersmen of the borders followed it and remained after it had been exterminated. Tradition and early documents bear out this view, the first settlers of the mountains having been almost without exception the men who lived on the mountain-tops, at the heads of creeks and in out-of-the-way places generally, disdaining the fertile bottom lands of the larger streams, preferring the most inaccessible places, because of the proximity to them of the game. Others, with more money and less daring, got the meadows and fertile valleys for agriculture, while the true pioneers dwelt afar in trackless mountains, in hunting camps and caverns, from which they watched their traps and hunted deer, bear and turkeys. The shiftless and disheartened poor whites would soon have perished in this wilderness, but the hunters waxed stronger and braver, and their descendants still people the mountain regions of the South. And he thought, also, that many came down from the New England States because of the religious unrest and dissensions which marked the earlier history of that region, and came where men might worship God in their own way, whether that way were the way of Puritan or Baptist. To use his words, "It was freedom that they were seeking, and it was freedom that they found in these unpeopled mountains." Kephart puts it in another form only when he says (307), "The nature of the mountaineer demands that he have solitude for the unhampered growth of his personality, wing-room for his eagle heart." As another said of the Argonauts, "The cowards never started, and the weaklings died on the way." Mr. Wiseman died in July, 1915.

No Festering Warrens for Them. --Mr. Kephart also tells us (309) that "our highlanders have neither emory nor tradition of ever having been herded together, lorded over, persecuted

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or denied the privileges of free men," and that, "although life has been one long, hard, cruel war against elemental powers, nothing else than warlike arts, nothing short of warlike hazards could have subdued the beasts and savages, felled the forests and made our land habitable for those teeming millions who can exist only in a state of mutual dependence and cultivation." And, more marvelous still, he adds, "By compulsion their self-reliance was more complete; hence, their independence grew more haughty, their individualism more intense. And these traits, exaggerated as they were by the force of environment, remain unweakened among their descendants to the present day."

Co-operation Has Ceased. --In the early time, co-operation was the watchword of the day. Neighbor helped neighbor, freely, gladly and enthusiastically. But, according to Kephart, all this has ceased, and we have become non-sociable, with each man fighting for his own hand, recognizing no social compact. Each is suspicious of the other. "They will not work together zealously, even to improve their neighborhood roads, each mistrusting that the other may gain some trifling advantage over himself, or turn fewer shovelfuls of earth. Labor chiefs fail to organize granges or unions among them because they simply will not stick together . . ." He quoted a Miss Mills as saying, "The mountaineers must awake to a consciousness of themselves as a people." Including all the Southern highlanders, we constitute a distinct ethnic group of close on to four million souls, and with needs and problems identical. The population is almost absolutely unmixed, and completely segregated from each other (p. 311). The one redeeming feature is a passionate attachment for home and family, a survival of the old feudal idea, while the hived and promiscuous life in cities is breaking down the old fealty of kith and kin (p.312). "My family, right or wrong" is said to be our slogan, and it is claimed that this is but the persistence of the old clan fealty to the chief and clansmen.

Moonshining an Inheritance?. --Kephart seems to have made a study of blockading and moonshining, and to have reached the conclusion that they are really an inheritance, coming down to

Page 10 us from our Scotch and Irish ancestors, who resented the English excise law of 1659, which struck at the national drink of the Scotch and Irish, while the English themselves were then content to drink ale. Our forebears killed the gaugers in sparsely settled regions, while the better-to-do people of the towns bribed them. Thus the Scotch-Irish, settled by James I in the north of Ireland, to replace the dispossessed native Hibernians, learned to make whiskey in little stills over peat fires on their hearths, calling it poteen, from the fact that it was made in little pots. Finally, these Scotchh-Irish fell out with the British government and emigrated, for the most part, to western Pennsylvania, where they brought with them an undying hatred of the excise laws. When, therefore, after they had helped to establish a stable government, an excise law was adopted by Congress, these Scotch-Irish were the very first to rebel. And it was to George Washington himself that the task fell of suppressing their resistance to the United States!

The Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion. --Owing to bad roads and the want of markets, there was no currency away from the seaboard. But, condensed into distilled spirits, a ready sale and easy transportation were found for the product of the grin of the mountaineers. For they could carry many gallons and a single horse or in a single wagon and get a fair price from people living where money circulated. When, therefore, they were required to pay a heavy tax on their product, they rebelled. When the Federal excisemen went among them, they blackened themselves and tarred and feathered those intruders on their rights. These "revenuers" then resigned, but were replaced by others. If a mountaineer took out a license, a gang of whiskey boys smashed his still and inflicted bodily punishment on him. All attempts to serve warrants resulted resulted in an uprising of the people, and, on July 16, 1794, a company of mountain militia marched to the house of General Neville, in command of the excise forces, and he fired on them, wounding five and killing one. The next day a regiment of 500 mountain men, lead by Tom the Tinker, burned Neville's house and forced him to flee, one of his guard of United States soldiers being killed and several

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wounded. On August 1, 1794, 2,000 armed mountain men met at the historic Braddock Field, and marched on Pittsburg, then a village. A committee of Pittsburg citizens met them. The mob of 5,400 men were then taken into town and treated to strong drink, after which they dispersed. The Governor of Pennsylvania refused to interfere, and Washington called for 15,000 militia to quell the insurrection. He also appointed commissioners to induce the people to submit peacefully. Eighteen ring-leaders were arrested and the rest dispersed. Two of the leaders were convicted, but were afterwards pardoned. Even a secession movement was imminent, but as Jefferson soon became President, the excise law was repealed and peace restored. There was no other excise tax until 1812, when it was renewed, only to be repealed in 1817. From this time till 1862 there was no tax, and after that time it was only twenty cents a gallon. In 1864 it was raised to sixty cents a gallon and later in that year to $1.50, to be followed in 1865 by $2.00 a gallon. The result was again what it had been in Great Britain -- fraud around the centers of population and resistance in the mountains, the current price of distilled spirits even in the North being less than the tax. In 1868 the tax was reduced to fifty cents, and illicit stilling practically ceased, the government collecting during the second year of the existence of this reduced tax three dollars for every one that had been collected before (p. 163). Since then every increase has resulted in moonshining in the mountains and graft in the cities. The whiskey frauds of Grant's administration invaded the very cabinet itself. So it seems the spirit of resistance makes moonshiners of us all, just as Shakespeare said that conscience makes cowards of us all.

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Chapter II

Forerunners of Watauga.

Likeness of the Indians to the Hebrews.-- The following has been condensed from the Literary Digest for September 21, 1912, page 427: "William Penn saw a striking likeness between the Jews of London and the American Indians. Some claim that the stories of the Old Testament are legends in some Indian tribes. In the Jewish Encyclopedia it is said that the Hebrews, after the captivity, separated themselves from the heathern in order to observe their peculiar laws; and Manasseh Ben Israel claims that America and India were once joined, at Bering Strait, by a peninsula, over which these Hebrews came to America. All Indian legends affirm that they came from the northwest. When first visited by Europeans, Indians were very religious, worshipping one Great Spirit, but never bowing down to idols. Their name for the deity was Ale, the old Hebrew name for God. In their dances they said 'Hallelujah' distinctly. They had annual festivals, performed morning and evening sacrifices, offered their first fruits to God, practiced circumcision, and there were 'cities of refuge,' to which offenders might fly and be safe; they reckoned time as did the Hebrews, similar superstitions mark their burial places 'and the same creeds were the rule of their lives, both as to the present and the future.' They had chief-ruled tribes, and forms of government almost identical with those of the Hebrews. Each tribe had a totem, usually some animal, as had the Israelites, and this explains why, in the blessing of Jacob upon his sons, Judah is surnamed a lion, Dan a serpent, Benjamin a wolf, and Joseph a bough." There are also resemblances in their languages to the Latin and Greek tongues, Chickamauga meaning the field of death, and Aquone the sound of water.

A Study in Ethnology and Philology.-- We have seen that the legends show that the Indians came from the northwest. It must be remembered, however, that although they were of one

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color, they were of different tribes and spoke different tongues or dialects. There is not a labial in the entire Cherokee language, while the speech of the Choctaws, Creeks, Tuscaroras, Algonquins and many other tribes is full of them. They were nomads, wandering from place to place. The Cherokees were admittedly the most advanced of the Indians since the Spaniards decimated the Incas and Aztecs. They were certainly the most warlike. The name "Cherokee" has, however, no signifiance in their language, as they call themselves the Ani-Kituhwagi and the Yunwiga, or real people. This is likewise true of most of the names of streams and mountains which bear, according to popular belief, Indian names; for in the glossary, given in the Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1897, Part I, James Mooney, its author, shows that their meanings has been lost, if, indeed, they ever had a meaning in the Indian tongue. A glance through that collection of Cherokee words will dispel many a poetic idea of the significance of such words as Watauga, Swannonoa, Yonahlossee and others as mellifluous. How came this about? He offers no theory. but Martin V. Moore, who once did business in Boone, has published a small volume, "The Rhyme of Southern Rivers,"(1) in chich he makes it apper that most , if not all, of these names of streams and mountains have their roots in the languages of Europe and Asia. He cites an instance when an Indian was asked whether the Catawba tribe took their name from the Catawba River or the river from the tribe? The Indian answered by asking, "Which was here first?" If it was possible for one European or Asiatic tribe or clan to cross into America before Bering Strait divided the two continents, it was possible for many to have crossed also. If one tribe or clan spoke one tongue, other tribes which crossed probably spoke different languages. Thus, American might have become peopled with representatives of many peoples, each speaking a different dialect, and thus giving different names to the several streams and mountains along and among which they for a time abided. If this be so, it is easy to believe that the root or
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Note: (1) This was originally published in Harper's Monthly for February, 1883, but without its introductory. It was published in complete form by M. E. Church, South, Pub. Co., Nashville, Tenn., 1897.

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origin of many so-called Indian words can be found in the Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Persian, African, Chinese and Japanese languages. That many names of Southern rivers show such possibilities is is made plain by this little volume.

"The Other Way About," as the English say, would make it possible that these Appalachian mountains being the oldest land in the world --older far than that of the Nile, the Euphrates and the Jordan -- were really the birth-place and cradle of the ancestors of the polyglot raaces which now people Europe and Asia; for, if it was possible for people to come to AMerican from those countries, it was equally possible for people to go from America there. So that, instead of being the New World, America is really the Old World. But, to the proofs:

Words Derived from the Hebrews.-- According to Mr. Moore, "te" or "de" in Hebrew means "deep." In its oldest form in Hebrew, it is "te-am," or "te-ho-ma," meaning deep waters --"am" or "homa" denoting waters. "Pertetuity" in Hebrew was denoted by "na." "The fact is illustrated," to quote Mr. Moore's words, "in the Hebrew name 'ama-na' -- the river known in Isaiah,' lviii, v. II (p. 99). Chota, the City of Refuge, as it is called in Cherokee, " was governed by the same laws as those which obtained among the Jewish nations of antiquity" (p.89). . . . Telico, Jellico and Jerico (p. 44) are cognate words, and Pocataligo was the title of the river of that name in South Carolina, "long famed as one of the cities of refuge among the "aborigines." Likewise, he shows that "toath" or "toe" is from the Hebrew "neph-toah," "the name of a water noted in Jewish history" (p. 29).

Latin, Manchu and Persian.-- "The root word of the Mississippi river is traced to the Latin words, 'meto' and 'messis,' whence came our words 'meter' and 'measure,' denoting in the original sense a gathering together , tersely characteristic of a stream which gathers to itself the waters of so many different lands" (p. 77). He also trates the root word of "saluda" to the Latin "salio" to leap (p. 41) or a "stream springing out of high places." In "unaka" the name of the mountains south of the Little Tennessee River, unquestionably "a native Indian word,"

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he finds a marked likeness to the Latin "unus," and our English equivalent "unique" (p. 92). "Wataug" has the Latin root "aqua," meaning water. Then, too, "esta" or "aesta," in Latin, refers to summer months, or leisure time, which, combined with the Hebrew "toah" or "toe," makes up our "Estatoe" river (p. 29). "Esseeola" is given as the native name of the river now called Linville, "ola" being from the Manchu dialect work "ou-li," meaning river; and if Miss Morley is right in thinking tht it was named for the linden trees on its banks, one cannot help wondering if "esse," in Manchu, means linden! Mr. Moore thinks "catawba" is from the Persian root "au-ba" or "aub," of which the California writing is Yuba, meaning catfish, which is certainly characteristic of our Carolina stream of that name. He also calls attention to the fact that neither the Cherokees nor the Japanese use the letter "r" in their dialects; and that the old Romans used "l" and "r" interchangeably, just as do the Cherokees (p. 50).

The First Settlers of Watauga.-- The Cherokee Indians were the first settlers of this county, but there is no record that white men ever came into actual contact with them in what is now Watauga county. Boone does not seem to have encountered any on his trip in 1769 until he reached Kentucky. Neigher did Bishop Spangenburg on his trip in 1752. James Robertson saw none on his first trip to the Watauga Settlement in 1769, nor in 1770, when he brought his family with him to the new settlement on the Watauga River. Indeed, Virginia had concluded a treaty with the Cherokees in 1772 fixing the top of the Blue Ridge as the eastern boundary, and a line running due west from the White Top mountain (where North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee join), and the general impression then was that this line included the Watauga Settlement near what is now Jonesbora, Tenn. But in 1771 Anthony Bledsoe extended the Virginia line far enough west to satisfy himself that the Watauga Settlement was not in Virginia territory, and, therefore, not within the treaty limits of 1772. This fact caused those settlers to lease for eight years all the country on the waters of the Watauga River. On March 19, 1775, the Watauga settlers bought in fee

Page 16

simple all the land on the waters of the Watuga, Holston and New Rivers. The western boundary of this tract ran from six miles above Long Island of the Holston, south, to the dividing ridge between the Watauga and Toe rivers, thence in a south-easterly direction to the Blue Ridge, thence along the Blue Ridge to the Virginia line. This embraced the whole of Watauga, Ashe and Alleghany counties. So that, from 1775 on, the Indians had no right to be in this territory, and, although Wheeler tells us that Ashe was partially settled as early as 1755 by white people -- principally hunters -- there is nothing to tell us that the Indians ever lived here except arrow heads, broken bits of pottery and so forth.(1)

The Cherokees Kept Faith.-- Up to the commencement of the Revolutionary War there is no evidence that the Cherokees lived north of the dividing ridge between the Toe and Watauga clear up to the Virginia line. Thus, whether the lease and deed to the Watauga settlers near Jonesboro were legal or not, the untutored savage stood manfully to this agreement. It is true that war parties were sent through this territory to make trouble for the settlers east of the Blue Ridge, but they had no abiding place west of that divide. Bishop Spangenberg was here in December, 1752, but he saw no Indians, though speaking of an "old Indian field." There is a tradition in the settlement near Linvillle Falls and Pisgah Church (Altamont), now in Avery County, thaat William White was the first settler in that locality whose name is now remembered and lived where Melvin C. Bickerstaff now resides, but that another had preceded him at that place, and that while hunting one day he saw from a ridge a party of Indians kill two white men who were "lying out" in that locality in order to escape service in the Revolutionary War, and trample their bodies beyond sight in a mud-hole which then stood near the present residence of Rev. W. C. Franklin. This settler did not reveal himself to the Indians, but, hastening to his own cabin half a mile away, escaped with his wife and child to Fort Crider (which, in 1780, Dr. Draper tells us, p. 185, note, was situated on "a small eminence within the present limits of
_____________
Note: (1) Rev. W. R. Savage, of Blowing Rock, and W. S. Farthing, of Beaver Dams, have large ollections of Indian relics.

Page 17

Lenoir", after having been forced to eat while on the journey through the rough mountains the small pet dog which followed them. There is also another tradition that the American forces followed a party of marauding Cherokees to the rodk cliff just above Pisgah Church in that locality, but retreated because the savages were too strong for them. These, however, are the only traditions diligent enquiry had revealed. There is, however, other evidence of forys across the Blue Ridge by Cherokees from their towns on the Little Tennessee.

Some old Forts.-- According to Archibald D. Murphey (Murphey Papers, Vol. II, pp. 385, 386), "there was a chain of forts from Black Water of Smith's River in Rockingham near to the Long Island of Holston: 1, the fort of Bethabara; 2, Fort Waddell at the Forks of the Yadkin;3, Fort Dobbs on the Catawba; 4, Fort Chisholm on New River, and 5, Fort Stalnaker near the Crab Orchard." Just where the fort on New River was locatd it is now difficult to determine, though it was probably at borough to Long Island in the Holston. The Crab Orchard was most likely two miles west of what is now called Roan Mountain, just in the edge of Tennessee. It is now only a flag station, however, the Gen. John Winder road from Roan Mountain station through Carver's gap, three miles southeast of the gap of the Yellow, starting from the latter station to the top of Roan mountain, where, during the eighties, hundreds of visitors spent the "hay fever months" in comfort. The immense hotel there has been abandoned now, however, and the doors and windows are being carried away every day by marauders, the caretaker having left in 1914.

An Indian Incursion.-- The same author says (p. 381, Vol. II) of other forts east of the Blue Ridge: "Forts were erected at Moravian Old Town (Bethabara) by the twelve Moravians first sent out to Wachovia, and by the settlers in the Neighborhood two forts were erected: one in the town, including the forts the settlers in the Neighborhood and even from the Mulberry Fields near Wilkesborough took refuge, about seventy families in all, and here they continued in fort, occasionally, until

Page 18

the general peace of 1763. The people generally went to their homes in the fall or early in the winter, and returned to the forts in the spring, the winter being too severe for the Indians to make such long expeditions for the purpose of mischief. The forts were never attacked. The Little Carpenter, then the chief of the tribe [Cherokees], came at the head of 300 or 400 Indians and killed several of the inhabitants. They [the Indians] remained for six weeks in the neighborhood and then retruned. This was in the spring of 1755 or 1756."

Where They Crossed the Blue Ridge.--"They crossed the Blue Ridge at the head of the Yadkin and came down the valley of that river." They killed William Fish at the mouth of Fish's River. One Thompson, who was with him, was wounded with two arrows "while he and Fish wee riding together through a canebrake." Thompson escaped and gave the alarm at Bethabara. The people hastened to the forts, two men, Barnett Lashley and one Robinson, being killed near the block house the next morning. "Lashley's daughter, thirteen years old," went to her father's house to milk the cows. "Nine Indians pursued her, but she excaped by hiding in the canebrakes until after dark, when she went to the fort, and was not surprised to learn of her father's death." This was in March, 1755 or 1756. The Indians came from the Cherokee towns on the Little Tennessee River. None ever lived in Watauga or Ashe since the whites settled in the piedmont country. In 1759 or 1760 another raid was made to the mouth of Smith's River in Rockingham County (p. 383), where they killed Greer and Harry Hicks on Bean Island Creek, and carried Hick's wife and little son back to Tennessee with them. They, however, were recovered when Gen. Hugh Waddell marched to the Cherokee towns later on. A company of rangers was kept employed by the State, commanded by Anthony Hampton, father of Gen. Wade Hampton, of the Revolutionary War, and greatgrandfather of Gen. Wade Hampton, twice governor of South Carolina (p. 384). Daniel Boone belonged to thi company and he buried Fish, who had been killed by Little Carpenter.

First White Settlers of Watauga.-- A letter from Lafayette Tucker, of Ashland, Ashe County, states that the descendants of

Page 19

the original lewis who settled in that neighborhood claim that he came as early as 1730. Thomas Hodged, the first, came during the Revolutionary War and settled in what is now called Hodges Gap, two miles west of Boone, and Samuel Hix and James D. Holtsclaw, his son-in-law, settled at or near Valle Crucis at that time or before. Some of the Norrid family also came about that time, but which one or ones cannot be determined now. These were Tories. Ben Howard did not settle in thei county, but remained at his home on the Yadkin, though he took refuge in the mountains around Boone during the Revolutionary War, and for ten years prior to 1769 herded cattle in the Bottom lands around Boone. He built what is now know as the Boone cabin in front of the Boy's Dormitory of the Appalachian Training School, marked in 1912 by a monument erected by Col. W. L. Bryan.(1) A quarter of a mile north of the knob, looming above Boone village and known as Howard's Knob, is a shallow cave or cliff, called Howard's Rock House, in which he is said to have lived while hiding out from the Whigs. Howard remained loyal to the British crown till 1778, when he took the oath of allegiance. (Col. Rec. XXII, p. 172.) His daughter, Sally, was switched by the Whigs near her home on the Yadkin because she refused to tell where her father was. She afterwards married Jordan Council, Sr., and settled at what is now Boone, where Jesse Robbins has built a house, called the Buck-Horn-Tree place. Bedent Baird moved to balle Crucis some time after Samuel Hix went there, but Baird was a Whig. David Miller must have settled on Meat Camp early, for he went as a member of the legislature to Raleigh in 1810. Bedent Baird went to Raleigh as a member of the legislature in 1808. Nathan Horton, ancestor of the large and influential Horton family, was a member in 1800.

Linville Falls.(2)--One often wonders how these beautiful falls get their name of Linville. According to Archibald D. Murphey
___________
Note: (1)Colonel Bryan, however, thinks Howard did not build this cabin, as Jordan cCouncill the second, Howard's grandson, always called it Boone's cabin. Col. J. M. Isbell, now deceased, told the writer in May, 1909, that Burrell, an old African slave, told him that Howard used it for his herders.
(2)Some suppose that this river takes itss ame from the lin-tree, or as it is usually spelt, the lyn or linn, but the Linville familly is the source of its name. This tree is what the Germans all the linden. It is scarce in these mountains now because of the fact that its branches are among the first to swell and bud in early spring, and great trees were cut whenever found in the forests in order that the cattle might eat the tender limbs.

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(Murphey Papers, Vol. II, p. 386), "Two men named Linville from the forks of the Yadkin went to hunt on the Watauga River between 1760 and 1770. They employed John Williams, a lad of sixteen, to go with them, keep camp and cook for them. They were sleeping in the camp when the Indians came on them and killed the Linvilles. They shop Williams through the thigh," but he escaped and rode a horse from the mouth of the Watauga "Hollows in Surry" in five days. He recovered from his wound and became a man of influence. It is now almost certain that these falls have taken their name from these two men, who may have visited them before their last hunt and told the people of their location and beauty, for Dr. Draper (note, p. 183) records that the stream itself was named from the fact that in the "latter part of the summer of 1766 William Linville, his son and a yound man had gone from the ower Yadkin to this river to hunt, where they were surprised by a party of Indians, the two Linvilles killed, the other person, though baadly wounded, effecting his escape. The Linvilles were related to the famous Daniel Boone." It is a matter of record that a family by the name of Linvil---probably an economic way of spelling Linville---were members of Three Forks Baptist Church and lived on what is now known as Dog Skin Creek, or brnch, but which stream used to be called Linville Creek. The membership of that church shows that Abraham, Catharine and Margaret Linvil were members between 1790 and 1800, while the minutes show that on the second Saturday in June, 1799, when the Three Forks Church were holding a meeting at Cove Creek, just prior to giving that community a church o its own, Abraham Linvil was received by experience, and in July following, at the same place, Catharine and Margaret Linvil also were so received. Several of the older residents of Dog Skin, Brushy Fork and cove Creeks confirm the reality of the residence of the Linville family in that community. In September, 1799, Brother Vanderpool's petition for a constitution at Cove Creek was granted, Catherine Linvil having been granted her letter of dismission the previous August.

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Chapter III.

Watauga's First Visitor.

The Greed for Land.-- All the land had been taken up in 1752 east of Anson county, which was then the westernmost county of the State. (Col. Rec. Vol. V, pp. 2,3.) It is now a small county just north of the South Carolina line. "As early as 1754 vacant public lands, as we would call them now, could be found in large bodies only the back settlements near the mountains, and settlers were coming in there in hundreds of wagons from the morthwards . . . The immigrants were said to be very industrious people, who went at once into the cultivation of hemp, flax, corn and breeding of horses and other stock." (Col. Rec. Vol. V, p. xxi.) The McCulloch lands, consisting of 1,200,000 acres, were granted on the 19th of May, 1737, upon condition that 6,000 Protestants should be settled thereon and four sillings quit rents should be paid for each 100 acres by the 14th of March, 1756. These lands were surveyed and located on the heads of the Pee Dee, Cape Fear and Neuse rivers in 1744, in tracts of 100,000 acres each. (Id. xxxii.)

Bishop Spangenberg's Visit.--"In August, 1752, Bishop Spangenberg and his party set out from Bethlehem, Pa., for Edenton, N. C., to locate lands bought the year before from the Earl of Granville for the Moravian settlement. Leaving Edenton about the middle of September, their route lay through Chowan, Bertie, Northampton,Edgecombe and Granville, to its western border near the Virginia line, and thence along the Indian Trading Path, as near as can now be ascertained, to the Catawba River, thence up that river to its upper waters, thence by mistake over the divide to New River, thence back to the head waters of the Yadkin and thence down the Yadkin to Muddy Creek, where, some ten miles from the river and from 'the upper Pennsylvania road,' they found some 100,000 acres of land in

Page 22

a body unoccupied, which they proceeded at once to take up. In January, 1753, they returned home, having surveyed 73,037 acres of land, to which were added 25,948 acres surveyed by Mr. Churton in the same tract, making in all 98,985 acres. A general deed for the whole tract was made on 7th of August, 1753." (Col. Rec. Vol. V, p.1146.) The names of themembers of Bishop Spangenberg's party were: August Gottlieb Spangenberg, Henry Antes, Jno. Merk, Herman Lash and Timothy Horsefield. Their guides were Henry Day, who lived in Granville county, near Mr. Salis'; Jno. Perkins, who lived on the Catawba River and was known as Andrew Lambert, a well known Scotchman, and Jno. Rhode, who lived about twenty miles from Captain Sennit on the Yadkin Road.

The First Visitor to Watauga County.-- So far as there is any authentic record to the contrary, Bishop Spangenberg and his party were the first visitor to Watauga county. Following is the record of this visit. (Col. Rec. Vol. IV, p. 10,, etc): "December 3, 1752. From the camp on a river in an old Indian fiedl, which is either the head or a branch of New River, which flows through North Carolina to Virginia and into the Mississippi River. Here we have at length arrived after a very toilsome journey over fearful mountains and dangerous cliffs,. A hunter whom we had taken along to show us the way to the Yadkin, missed the right path, and we came into a region from which there was no outlet, except by climbing up an indescribaly steep mountain. Part of the way we had to crawl on hands and feet; sometimes we had to take the baggage and saddles and the horses and drag them up the mountaains (for the horses were in danger of falling down backward--as we had once had an experience), and sometimes we had to pull the horses up while they trembled and quivered like leaves.

"Arrived at the top at last, we saw hundreds of mountain peaks all around us, presenting a spectacle like ocean waves in a storm. We refreshed ourselves a little on the mountain top, and then began the descent, which was neither so steep nor as deep as before, and then we came to a stream of water. Oh, how refreshing this water was to us! We sought pasture of our

Page 23

horses and rode a long distance, until in the night, but found none but dry leaves. We could have wept with sympathy for the poor beasts. The night had already come over us, so we could but put up our tent. We camped under the trees and had a very quiet night. The next day we journeyed on; got into laurel bushes and beaver dams and had to cut our way through bushes, which fatigued our company very much.

"Then we changed our course--left the river and went up the mountain, where the Lord brought us to a delicious spring and good pasturaage on a chestnut ridge. He sent us, also, at this juncture two deer, which were most acceptable additions to our larder. The next day we came to a creek so full of rocks that we could not possibly cross it, and on both side were such precipitous banks that scarcely a man, and certainly no horse, could climb them. Here we took some refreshments, for we were weary. But our houses had nothing--absolutely nothing; this pined us inexpressibly. Directly came a hunter who had climbed a mountain and had seen a large meadow. Thereupon we scrambled down to the water, dragged ourselves along the mountain and came before night into a large plain.

"This caused rejoicing for men and beasts. We pitched our tent, but scarcely had we finished when such a fierce wind storm burst upon us that we could scarcely protect ourselves aginst it. I cannot remember that I have ever in winter anywhere encountered so hard or so cold a wind. The ground was soon covered with snow ankle deep, and the water froze for us aside the fire. Our people became thoroughly disheartened. Our horses would certainly perish and we with them. The next day we had fine sunshine, and then warmer days, though the nights were 'horribly' cold. Then we went to examine the land. A large part of it is already cleared and there long grass abounds and this is all bottom.

"Three creeks flow together here and make a considerable river which flows into the Ohio, and thence into the Mississippi, according to the best knowledge of our hunters. In addition, there are almost countless springs and little runs of water which come from the mountains and flow through the country, making

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almost more meadow land than one could make use of. There is no trace of reeds here, but so much grass land that Brother H. Antes thinks a man could make several hundred loads of hay of the wild grass, which would answer very well if only it be cut and cured at the proper time. There is land here suitable for wheat, corn, oats, barley, hemp, etc. Some of the land will probably be flooded when there is high water. There is a magnificent chestnut and pine forest near here. Whetstones and mill stones, which Brother Antes regards the best he has seen in North Carolina, are plenty. The soil is here mostly limestone and a cold nature. The waters are all higher than on the east side of the Blue Ridge. We surveyed this land and took up 5,400 acres in our lines. We have a good many mountains, but they are very fertile and admit of cultivation. Some of them are already covered with wood and are easily accessible. Many hundred, yes, thousands--crab-apple trees grow here, which may be useful for vinegar. One of the creeks presents a number of admirable seats for milling purposes.

"This survey lies about fifteen miles from the Virginia line, as we saw the Meadow Mountain and judged it to be about twenty miles distant. This mountain lies five miles from the line between Virginia and North Carolina. In all probability this tract would make an admirable settlement for Christian Indians, like Gradenhutten in Pennsylvania. There is wood, mast, wild game, fish and a free range for hunting, and admirable land for corn, potatoes, etc. For stock raising, it is also incomparable." (From this favored spot they went through the mountains by Reddy's river to the Mulberry Fields and entered land in the neighborhood of what is now Wilkesborough and the Moravian Falls, which took its name from them.)

Where Was This Indian Old Field?--The question arises as to the location of the old Indian field at the head of a prong of New River, where 5,400 acres of land were surveyed and taken up. It will help one to determine this by ascertaining the route by which it had been reached. The entry in the diary immediately proceding that of December 3d, the date on which this spot was described, is November 29, 1752, and was written

Page 25

at the camp "at the upper fork of the second or middle river which flows into the Catawba not far from Quaker Meadows." This indicates that there are three streams which flow into the Catawba at or near Quaker Meadows. There is nothing in the diary to indicate which he calls the first of these "little rivers," but there is no doubt as to the third. It is the entry of November 24th "from the camp in the fork of the third river which empties into the Catawba near Quaker Meadows, about five miles from Table Mountain," now called Table Rock. That could be none other than the Linville River, and, as Johns River is the next below that, it follows that it must necessarily be the "second" or "middle little river." Following up Johns River, he had come on the 25th to the mouth of Wilson's Creek, where he took up 2,000 acres. This is the lower fork of Johns River. The upper fork of this river is at Globe, where the Gragg prong joins the main stream and where Carroll Moore had a mill years ago. It was at this upper fork of middle little river that the following description of the Globe was written:

"With respect to this locality where we are now encamped, one might call it a basin or kettle. It is a cove in the mountains, and is very rich soil. Two creeks, one larger than the other, flow through it. Various springs of very sweet water form lovely meadow lands. Mills may easily be built, as there is fall enough. Below the forks the stream becomes quite a large one. Of wood there is no lack. Our horses find abundant pasture among the buffalo haunts and tame grass amoung the springs, which they eat greedily, and certainly the settlers of this place can very soon make meadows if they wish. Not only is the land suitable for hemp, oats, barley, etc., but there is excellent wheat land here also. There is also abundance of stone, not on the land, but on the surrounding mountains . . . This survey would contain in itself all the requisites to make comfortable farms and homes for about ten couples."

While there, "A hunter whom we had taken along to show us the way to the Yadkin missed the right path, and we came into a region from which there was no outlet except by climbing up an indescribably steep mountain. Part of the way we had to

Page 26

crawl on hands and feet. Sometimes we had to take the baggage and saddles and the horses and drag them up the mountains . . . and sometimes we had to pull the horses up, while they trembled and quivered like leaves. Arrived at the top, we saw hundreds of mountain peaks all around us, presenting a specctacle like ocean waves in a storm." Could this have been any other place than Blowing Rock?

Their Route from Blowing Rock.-- From this point they went down to a stream, where they got water, but no pasturage, and, consequently, they "continued on a long distance" the same day, camping, at last, after nightfall, beneath trees, but without having found pasturage for their horses. This stream must have been either Flannery's Fork--now Winkler's Mill Creek--or the middle fork of New River, but where they camped cannot be determined, though it seems certain that they camped there on the 30th of November. On the first of December they "journeyed on; got into laurel bushes and beaver dams" and had to "cut a way through the bushes," but, being fatigued with this task, they changed their course during this day and "left the river and went up the mountain, where the Lord brought us to a delicious spring and good pasturage on a chestnet ridge.: The next day, December 2nd, they came to a creek so "full of rocks that we could not possibly cross it, and on both sides were such precipitous banks that scarcely a man, and certainly no horse, could climb them." But there was no pasturage. It was then that "a hunter, who had climbed a mountain and had seen a large meadow," guided them "into a large plain," the spot described with so much particularity. But, on that night of December 2d, a terrible wind and snow storm assailed them and caused them to suffer very much, but it passed, and next day, December 3rd, they made their investigations and described the goodly land to which they thought they had been providentially guided.

Conflicting Claims.--Three forks of New River, near Boone, the old field at the mouth of Gap Creek, and Grassy Creek, in Ashe County, have characteristics similar to those described, but only Grassy Creek had the limestone formation. Unless the

Page 27

good Bishop knew where the Virginia-North Carolina line was, it is difficult to know why he stated that this spot was "about fifteen miles from the Virginia line," and the reason he gives for this conclusion is still more puzzling, as there is no mountain in Virginia five miles from the line now known as the Meadow Mountain, while the Bald, in Watauga County, is almost directly north of the three forks and apparently about twenty miles away. In reality, it is not over ten, but it is bald and looked like a meadow, at that time, with snow all over it. On the other hand, White Top is about twenty miles from Grassy Creek and four miles from Pond Mountain, the corner between North Carolina and Virginia and Tennessee. As this is bare around its crown of lashorns, it may be that it was called the Meadow Mountain at that time.

Col. W. L. Bryan's View.--After reading Bishop Spangenberg's account of his trip west of the Blue Ridge, Colonel Bryan, of Boone, thinks that the Bishop got to the stream that forms Cone's Lake, near Blowing Rock, and rode north along the top of Flat Top ridge "a long distance' and camped under trees November 30th. That on December 1st he got into laurel bushes and beaver dams on the middle fork of the south fork of New River, which he left and went back on Flat Top range to a spring, still known as Flat Top Spring, and now owned by Thomas Cannon, but which was first settled by Alex. Elrod sometime in the fifties. This spring is on land where there used to be large chestnut trees, and is the most noted spring near. On December 2d the Bishop was on either Winkler's Creek--formerly called Flannery's Fork--or on the middle fork, though the rocks and cliffs and precipices are more marked on Winkler's Creek than on middle fork, especially above or below what is now the Austin place, or where Moses Johnson has a mill. Colonel Bryan thinks that the mountain on which the hunter climbed was Flat Top peak, as from it the meadow in which the three forks join is plainly visible and the bald of Long Hope Mountain, lying almost due north, can be distinctly seen, and this was the mountain which the Bishop mistook for Meadow Mountain in Virginia, now known as White Top. Between the

Page 28 junction of the three creeks, forming Three Forks, and the first bend below that point there used to be a large crab orchard--say, about 1855--and on the new road from Boone to the new electric power dam on south fork whetstones can be found.

Captain W. H. Witherspoon, of Jefferson, thinks that the Meadow Mountain which Bishop Spangenberg waw was the Whit Top, and that the stream where three creeks meet were the Naked, Ravens and Beaver Creeks, flowing into the south fork of New River, four or five miles east of Jeffeson. He thought the Moravians had owned land there; that there is a limestone formation there, and that grindstones are found near. This is about fifteen miles from the Virginia line. White Top is visible from this point, and is about twenty miles distant. Also that there is a pine and chestnut forest south of the south fork of New River and between that river and the Blue Ridge.

Page 29

Chapter IV.

Daniel Boone.

No Direct Daniel Boone Descendants in North Carolina. -- According to Thwaites and Bruce, the children of Daniel Boone were James, Israel, Susannah, Jemima, Lavina, Rebecca, Daniel Morgan, John and Nathan. According to Bruce (p.87), John was a mere infant in arms when his mother started with her family for Kentucky in September, 1773. John's middle name was Bryan, in honor of his mother's family name. Neither Jesse nor Jonathan Boone, who lived afterwards in Watauga County, were sons of Daniel Boone, nor was Anna, who married William Coffey. So far as the writer knows, there are no direct lineal descendants of Daniel Boone in North Carolina or Tennessee.

Boone's Watauga Relatives. – There is a tradition that Anna, a niece of Daniel Boone, was married in the log house which formerly stood on the site of the present residence of Joseph Hardin, a mile or more east of the own of Boone. Jesse Boone, a nephew of Daniel, certainly lived near the top of the Blue Ridge in a cabin which used to stand in a five-acre field four miles above Shull's Mills, to the right of the old Morganton road. The foundation stones of the old chimney and the spring are still pointed out. The lnd on which that cabin stood was entered by Jesse November 7, 1814, and the grant for it was made November 29, 1817, the tract containing 100 acres, and beginning on Jesse Coffey's corner. (Ashe County deed book F, p. 170.) By a deed dated July 8, 1823, Jesse Boone conveyed to Wm. And Alex. Elrod 350 acres on Flannery's Fork (now Winkler's Mill Creek) of New River, and on Roaring Branch, two miles from the town of Boone, Mr. J. Watts Farthing now owning the deed. Anna Boone, the wife of Wm. Coffey, and Jesse Bone's sister, talked with this Mr. Farthing about the year 1871 while he was building a house for her grandson,

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