Alexander Spotswood was a famous governor of the colony of Virginia. He was of Scottish parentage, but he was born in Morocco, where his father was a surgeon. The lad grew up to serve his country as a soldier, and was wounded by a cannon ball in a great war then going on in Europe. In 1710 the king sent him to Virginia to be governor, an office which he filled for twelve years. The people liked him, though he made some enemies because he kept his soldierly ways and did not always speak in gentle phrases. He was a kind, warm-hearted man, nevertheless, loving his family and friends. His energy, too, was well known, and he was always ready to further a new scheme.

Because he started the first iron furnaces in America he was called the “Tubal Cain of Virginia,” Tubal Cain being known in sacred history as the first of metal workers. Nothing was more important to the colonists than iron, for they could not always bring tools and kettles and nails and gun metal from England. The governor showed his practical ability in other ways. He brought over Germans who knew how to raise grapes and make wine. He was interested in teaching the Indians, and at one time he sent out ships and caught “Blackbeard,” who, with his fellow-pirates, was prowling about the coast. When the young Benjamin Franklin, in Boston, heard of the capture he wrote a poem about it.

In that day nearly all of Virginia was in the “tide-water country,” but Spotswood had often heard of the valley beyond the Blue Ridge. He made up his mind to go and see this region, and brought together a party to make the journey. They took their servants and pack horses and carried provisions and many bottles of the wine which the Germans had made. There was good hunting in the unbroken forest and they had all the venison and other wild meat they could have wished.

A good map of Virginia will show us Harpers Ferry, where the Potomac river runs through a deep gap in the Blue Ridge. Looking along the range to the southwest, we shall find, about eighty miles away, Swift Run Gap, not so low a pass, but one which made it easy to cross the mountains and go down into the lowlands along the Shenandoah river.

Spotswood and his friends climbed one of the peaks of the Blue Ridge and named it Mt. George, after the king. Another peak was named Alexander for the governor. Down by the Shenandoah they buried a bottle (the historian of Virginia thinks that by this time they must have had several that were empty), and in the bottle was a paper stating that they took possession in the name of the king. They called the river the Euphrates, but the name did not cling to it. We may be glad of that, for the Indian name of Shenandoah is much more musical.

If Spotswood had crossed the lowlands, he would have found himself among other mountains running parallel to the Blue Ridge. Between the two ranges is the valley of the Shenandoah, or, as it is quite as often called, the valley of Virginia. The land is flat and the soil deep and rich. The soft shales and limestone of ancient higher lands have wasted away here, between the higher mountains on either side, and thus we find a valley and a fertile valley floor.

The place was wild and lonely when this band of explorers visited it, but to-day it is a country rich in interest and associations. If we go northeast we shall pass Winchester, which became famous in the Civil War. In another part of the valley is Luray, where the limestones have been dissolved under the ground, making a large cavern with beautiful stalactites. Still going northward, we shall pass Harpers Ferry on our right and cross the Potomac. On our right also, after we cross the river, is Antietam, where a severe battle was fought between Lee and McClellan. A little farther on is Hagerstown, Colonel Rochester’s old home, in the state of Maryland.

The next move would take us over into Pennsylvania, through Chambersburg and Carlisle, about which we already know, and across the Susquehanna to Harrisburg. On our right, as we go up into Pennsylvania, is the low South mountain, which is the Blue Ridge continued. All this time we are in the Great Valley. The valley of Virginia is but a part of the whole, which reaches through several states and everywhere has the Blue Ridge on the southeast and other ridges of the Appalachian mountains on the northwest. Every part of the valley is thickly settled and has fine houses and homes, because its soil produces good crops and makes the people prosperous.

Spotswood’s journey opened the way for families from the tide-water region to settle beyond the mountains, but they were not the only settlers. It was easy for the people of the Great Valley in Pennsylvania, where the land was earlier taken up, to push to the southwest along the same valley. They found smoother traveling and better farms than if they had gone up into the mountains on the west. So we see that the valley, leading southwest, guided the stream of emigrants in that direction. The result was that the valley of Virginia was occupied partly by people entering through Pennsylvania, and partly by those who, like Spotswood, came through passes in the Blue Ridge. It was thirty years later, when most of the land was still a wilderness, that we find George Washington crossing these same mountains to survey for Lord Fairfax. His path lay between Harpers Ferry and Swift Run Gap.

In this valley, during the Civil War, “Stonewall” Jackson, Sheridan, and other well-known generals took their armies up and down, and fought a number of battles. The rich farms and full barns of the valley played no small part in the strife by furnishing food for the soldiers.

The headwaters of the James river are in the Great Valley. One branch flows southwest and another northeast. These come together and go out to the southeast by a gap in the Blue Ridge. To-day we come up the Shenandoah by the Norfolk and Western Railway, which continues along these branches of the James. Before long we reach Roanoke, a flourishing city just inside the Blue Ridge. Then follows the crossing of the New river, which flows northwest across the valley on its long course to the Ohio.

Now we are looking toward Tennessee, and the Great Valley soon takes us to several long streams which help to form the Tennessee river. The heads of these streams we shall find in Virginia, and their names are the Holston, the Clinch, and Powell’s river. The Great Valley in this southwestern part of Virginia is really divided into several valleys by long and rather high ridges that separate these rivers.

The main line of the Southern Railway, between Washington and Knoxville, runs along the valley of the Holston river and crosses from Virginia into Tennessee at Bristol.

After we come into Tennessee the ridges that separate the streams fall away again, and we find one great valley, about forty miles wide. On the northwest the Cumberland plateau and the Cumberland mountains rise above it. On the southeast there loom up the Great Smoky mountains on the border of North Carolina. Great Smoky is only another name for the Blue Ridge, for it is the same range, only higher and wider than it is farther north.

Although this valley is a part of the Great Valley, it is commonly called the valley of east Tennessee, its people using the home name as they do in Virginia. The Holston, the Clinch, and Powell’s river are not the only branches of the Tennessee. Out of the Great Smoky mountains there flow from the east the French Broad, the Little Tennessee, and the Hiwassee. Knoxville stands a little below the place where the Holston and French Broad flow together, and Chattanooga is a hundred miles farther down, where the Tennessee, now a lordly stream, leaves the Great Valley and flows westward through a deep valley in the Cumberland plateau. This lesson in geography we must learn well, with the help of a map, and we shall then see what the pioneers did as they followed the rivers between the mountains.

It is an old road that runs from Pennsylvania to Tennessee by the valley. It took the pioneer across the Potomac through Winchester and Staunton in Virginia. Farther on was a fortified place, Fort Chissel, built in 1758, which was on the way to the Watauga Settlement and Cumberland Gap. Of Watauga we must now tell, and of the Cumberland Gap in the next chapter.

Watauga is the name of a small river which flows out of the mountains on the east, into the Great Valley, and enters the Holston. In a pleasant spot on the banks of this stream the first settlement of white men in Tennessee was made. Some of the people had come along the valley from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and others had climbed over the mountains from North Carolina because of the wrongs they had suffered there.

Many of these men and women had come from the north of Ireland. They were not of Irish but of Scotch blood, their ancestors having originally come from Scotland to make the north of Ireland their home. For this reason they are often called Scotch-Irish, but whatever we name them, we are to remember that they were sturdy and intelligent people. Conscientious and loyal Presbyterians they were in faith, and by nature brave and full of endurance. Their fathers had shed their blood for freedom on Scottish fields, and the sons were not likely to be frightened by a wilderness full of red savages.

Besides the Scotch-Irish, there were many Germans who had followed the valley from Pennsylvania, and there were Huguenots also, besides a few Hollanders and Swedes. A fort was built on the little river, and around this defense grew up the Watauga Settlement. There was no Tennessee in those days.

Many of the settlers had followed down the valleys from earlier homes in Virginia, and it never occurred to them that they were not still living in Virginia, and able to call on the colony for help. But after a time a man came to the settlement who was a surveyor, and for some reason he thought that he would run the boundary line of Virginia farther west. When he had done it, what was the surprise of every one to find that they were not in Virginia at all! If they belonged to any colony, it was to North Carolina. Unfortunately there was a lack of good government in that colony, and the prospect of belonging to it was not a pleasant one; indeed, some of the settlers had run away from North Carolina, and had felt safer because the great mountains rose between them and their former home.

There seemed nothing to do but to make a government of their own, so they formed the Watauga Association, about which writers of American history have said a good deal. It would be interesting to see a copy of the constitution that was drawn up by these backwoodsmen, but it has been lost, with little hope that it will ever be recovered. It is known, however, that there was a committee of thirteen, really a legislature. This committee chose five of their own number to form a court, which had a clerk and a sheriff and made laws for all the settlers. Roosevelt, in his Winning of the West, says that these pioneers were the first to build a “free and independent community” in America.

The two most important men of this little state in the wild forest show us that the settlers came from widely different places. James Robertson was one, and he came over the mountains from North Carolina. John Sevier was the other, and he came down the valley from Virginia. We shall need to know what sort of men these were.

James Robertson belonged to the Scotch-Irish people. He was not one of the very first settlers at Watauga, but came in the second year, 1770. He had no early education, and his wife, an intelligent woman, taught him to read. He went alone over the mountains, with only his horse and gun, in search of a place for a home. He found the settlers and admired the place which they had chosen, but on his way back in the fall he lost his horse and got his powder wet. He wandered about, almost starved, until he met some hunters, who helped him home. He told his neighbors of the lands in the valley, and as soon as the winter was over his own family and sixteen others started out for Watauga. He built a log house, went to work on the land, and by his wisdom and energy soon came to be a leader of the new colony.

John Sevier did not come until 1772. His father had been a settler in the Shenandoah valley, and John followed the streams, as we have traced them, to the Great Valley. He was by birth a gentleman, using that word to mean a man born of cultivated parents and familiar with the world. He was well educated and was acquainted with prominent men, such as Franklin and Madison. Both he and Robertson were good fighters, as we shall see.

It was not long before seven hundred Indian warriors, angry because the white people had made homes on their hunting grounds, stole in upon the settlement. An Indian woman, Nancy Ward by name, who felt kindly toward the whites, secretly warned them of the attack, so that when the savages came they found all the men, women, and children in the fort. It was not much of a fort, but it saved their lives. The Indians kept up the attack for six days, but the colonists, led by Sevier and Robertson, held out against them and killed a number of their braves. When nearly a week had passed the red men, tired of the siege, went off through the forest.

At one time, when some lawless whites had killed an Indian without reason, the members of the tribe were very angry and threatened to avenge the murder. Robertson, thinking that he could soften their anger, went alone among the fierce Cherokees. He told them that the Watauga people were very sorry the man had been killed, and that they would try to find and punish the murderer. As the Indians believed Robertson to be an honest man, they did as he asked them to do and the settlers were not disturbed.

The Watauga colonists had to live in a very rough and simple way. They built their cabins of logs, with what were called puncheon floors,—that is, floors made of thick, rude slabs. Frequently a big slab served for a table, three-legged stools for chairs, and a row of pegs for a wardrobe. Roosevelt says that the dress of the men was largely copied from that of the Indians, and included a fur cap, leggings of buckskin or elk hide, and a fringed hunting shirt. A heavy rifle was carried, which was usually fired from a rest.

Garments and bed clothing were made of wool, which was spun at home by the wives and daughters. The women worked hard from morning till night, and the men had many things to do. There were lands to be cleared, crops to be raised, and game to be hunted and dressed. Besides all these occupations it was necessary to keep a constant lookout for hostile savages and to have all means of defense ready in case of a sudden attack. The Indians were so crafty and deceitful that only the closest watchfulness saved the palefaces from danger and death. Sometimes an unwary hunter, hearing the gobbling of a turkey or the call of an owl, would come out into an open place only to be laid low by the red man’s bullet. These experiences developed a strong and brave people.

The settlers often bartered things because they had no money, and they were ignorant of many of the ways of civilized life. Some of the frontiersmen did not know that tea leaves should be steeped and used for a drink, and tried to eat them with butter or salt.

When a boy was twelve years old he had to begin to take a man’s part. A gun was given to him, and he was placed at a loophole in the fort to help keep off the savage foe. Thus the boys grew up to be real men, knowing little fear, able to take care of themselves, and helping to build one of the great states of the American Union.