A ride of eight miles from the center of the plateau resort, will bring the traveler to Boone, the county seat of Watauga. Along the way several sweeping landscape prospects are afforded. In one of the dense woods I passed men engaged in clearing a laurel thicket. The soil where the laurel springs being generally rich, it requires, after its clearing, nothing but a slight plowing, and enough corn for planting, to have the
WATAUGA FALLS.
expanse, which, during the last season, was blooming with white and purple rhododendron flowers, transformed into a green and tasseled corn-field.
Boone, the most elevated county seat east of the Rocky mountains, is 3,222 feet above the sea. Its population numbers about 200, and lives along a street rising and falling with the hills. Due to the fact of no majestic mountains arising round it, there is, in its surroundings, less of the attractive features that distinguish the most of the mountain county seats. Near the stream which flows on one side of the town, Daniel Boone, the famous hunter, is said to have encamped while on a hunting tour. It is from this tradition of the camp that the village took its name.
An afternoon ride from Boone will land the traveler at Elk river. The scenery on the route is picturesque. In the valleys they were raking hay that August day. One valley in particular, by the Watauga, is of captivating loveliness. The mountains rise around it, as though placed there with no other purpose than to protect its jewel-like expanse from rough incursions of storm. It lay smooth and level under the warm sunlight. Nothing but grass and clover covered it—in some fields wholly standing, in others being laid low by the reapers. It is evidently a stock farm; for large droves of sleek, fat cattle were grazing in some of the meadows. A cheerful farm-house and large out-buildings stand on one side of the road. The noise of a spinning wheel, coming from the sunlight-flooded porch where a gray-haired matron was visible, blended with the sounds from the fields—the lowing of cattle, the noise of sharpening scythes, and laughter from rosy-cheeked girls and men, who, pausing in their work, looked for a moment at the travel-worn horse and rider. This valley I would love to live in.
As a county perfectly adapted for stock-raising, Watauga cannot be surpassed. One and three-quarters miles off the road you are now pursuing, is the Marianna falls of the Little Dutch creek. It is easily approached by the foot-traveler. After reaching the stream from above, by descending a winding, trail you come out on the flat rocks directly below and before the fall. It is eighty-five feet high and makes a perpendicular descent over mossed and lichened rocks.