They were in the wilderness. The hour of the day was determined by the shadow cast by the sun upon the home-made dial; the time of the night was reckoned from the positions of particular stars in the firmament. Years and months they measured by moons. From the course, color and velocity of clouds, from the temperature and from the direction of the winds, they foretold the weather. They also observed the habits of animals and birds of passage, as aids to their weather bureau; and they watched and studied closely the development and growth of plants, herbs, vines, vegetables and the cereals, as helps to their agricultural department.[B]
The country in which Andrew Jackson made his home for about two years deserves a name and place in history not yet fully given to it. In its wild and picturesque magnificence, in the rugged honesty and frank simplicity of the people who settled it, in their love and struggle for liberty, “home rule” and local self-government, it was a counterpart of the Switzerland of tradition and story.
The sun shone nowhere upon a land of more ravishing loveliness and awe-inspiring sublimity—silver threads of river and streamlet, and gem of valley set in emerald of gorgeous luxuriance; waters murmuring and thunderous, striking every note in the gamut of nature’s weird minstrelsy, dashing and bounding to the sea; every acclivity a Niagara of color flashing from rhododendron and mountain magnolia, elysian fields without Rhenish castles or Roman towers; grooved with fastnesses, terraced with plateaus and monumented with peaks upheaved into a very dreamland of beauty and grandeur, all overlooked by the majestic Roan—
“The monarch of mountains—
They crowned him long ago,
On a throne of rock, in a robe of clouds,
With a diadem of snow!”
About one hundred and thirty years ago, the first permanent white settlement was made on the Watauga river, near where Elizabethton now stands. Up to the winter of 1770-1, there were in all probability twenty families in the new settlement.
May 16, 1771, the “Regulators” fought the famous but disastrous battle of the Alamance, about forty miles northwest of Raleigh. During the summer and fall following this battle, settlers came in considerable numbers to “the new world west of the Alleghanies,” and cast their lot with the settlers on the Watauga; and about this time settlements were made on the Holston and Nolichucky rivers.
Who were these people? Whence and why did they come? I answer: