LEGENDS OF LOUDOUN
CHAPTER I
THE EARLIER INDIANS
Loudoun County, Virginia
The county of Loudoun, as now constituted, is an area of 525 square miles, lying in the extreme northwesterly corner of Virginia, in that part of the Old Dominion known as the Piedmont and of very irregular shape, its upper apex formed by the Potomac River on the northeast and the Blue Ridge Mountains on the northwest, pointing northerly. It is a region of equable climate, with a mean temperature of from 50 to 55 degrees, seldom falling in winter below fahrenheit zero nor rising above the upper nineties during its long summer, thus giving a plant-growing season of about two hundred days in each year.
The county exhibits the typical topography of a true piedmont, a rolling and undulating land broken by numerous streams and traversed by four hill-ranges—the Catoctin, the Bull Run and the Blue Ridge mountains and the so-called Short Hills. These ranges are of a ridge-like character, with no outstanding peaks, although occasionally producing well-rounded, cone-like points. The whole area is generously well watered not only by the Potomac, flowing for thirty-seven miles on its border and the latter's tributary Goose Creek crossing the southern portion of the county, but also by many smaller creeks or, as they are locally called, "runs"; and by such innumerable springs of most excellent potable water that few, if any, of the farm-fields lack a natural water supply for livestock. These conditions most happily combine to create a climate that for healthfulness and all year comfortable living is without peer on the eastern seaboard and, indeed, truthfully may be said to be among the best and most enjoyable east of the Mississippi.
Before the advent of the white man, the land was covered by a dense forest of oak, hickory, walnut, sycamore, locust, ash, pine, maple, poplar and other varieties of trees—not by any means unbroken, for here and there the Indian tribes that roamed the area, had burned out great clearings for grazing-grounds to entice the wild animals they hunted and in which the native grasses then quickly and indigenously sprang up; attracting particularly the buffalo, in those days, and at least until as late as 1730, to be found in vast numbers all through the Piedmont region and always in the forefront as an unending supply of flesh-food to their Indian hunters. With the buffalo were great herds of "red and fallow deer" and wolves, foxes in abundance, bears in the mountains, opossum, racoons, and, along the streams, otter and beaver (later to be so greatly valued for their pelts) and whose presence, with that of other fur-bearing animals, was to have its influence on the history of the region.