In the old days it took the traveler weeks to go from Pennsylvania or the Potomac river to the valley of east Tennessee. He might camp in the woods, living on the few provisions he could carry and on what he could shoot in the forest, or he might share the humble homes of chance settlers on the way.

Now he enters a vestibuled train and is rolled over a smooth iron road along the streams and between the mountains. Starting one day, he will find when he wakes the next morning that the sun is rising over the Great Smokies, while around him are the rich rolling fields that border the Tennessee river.

If the traveler wishes to see the land and learn what men have done in a hundred years, he will leave the train at Knoxville. A carriage or an electric car will carry him between blocks of fine buildings to a modern hotel, where he will find food and bed and places to read, write, rest, or do business, as he likes. Around him is a busy city stretching up and down its many hills. Before long he will wander down to the banks of the Tennessee river and see the boats tied at the wharf, or he will cross the great bridge to the hills beyond and look back over the city.

On those hilltops are pits dug in the woods, and some veteran of the Union or the Confederate army will tell him that these are ammunition pits. The old soldier will point across to where Fort Sanders stood, and will describe those days in 1863 when Longstreet came up and laid siege to the town, which was garrisoned by Burnside and his army.

Our traveler need do little more than cross the great bridge at Knoxville to find quarries of marble; and if he goes up and down for a few miles, he will see rich deposits of this stone. It is prized because it shows many colors,—cream, yellow, brown, red, pink, and blue. The colors often run into each other in curious and fantastic ways, and the slabs and blocks when polished are beautiful indeed. These marbles have been used to adorn some of the finest buildings in America, including the National Capitol.

Around Knoxville are fine farms also, just as we find them about Harrisburg, Hagerstown, Winchester, and almost everywhere else in the Great Valley. Our view (Fig. 52) is taken near Knoxville and shows sloping fields always ready to bear good crops. The soils have been made by the wasting of the top parts of these same beds of marble and of other rocks found along with it.

In Knoxville, on the edge of the city, is the University of Tennessee, with many buildings upon its campus. It is an excellent school and an old one as well, having been founded in 1794. It was first named Blount College, from one of the prominent public men of the valley at that time, and is now one of the foremost schools of the South.

Only seven years before that date two old Revolutionary soldiers rode through the woods and picked out these lands, which were given to them as a reward for their service in the war. Here they built as a defense against the savages a wooden fort, with log cabins at the corners and a stockade with a stout barred gate. Such a fort was greatly needed in those days whenever a new settlement was made. After the two soldiers had planted corn they went back to North Carolina to bring their families over the mountains. This was the beginning of Knoxville, which grew up around the fort and soon spread over the hills and down to the river. The settlement was named in honor of Henry Knox, who was an able general in the Revolution and a good friend of George Washington.

Now the railroads reach out in every direction. They bring in the iron ore and the limestones of the valley. They also run up into the Cumberland Gap, and to Harriman, Tennessee, and bring back stores of coal, thus making Knoxville a place for working iron. To the east the Southern Railroad leads up the French Broad (Fig. 61) through deep gorges into the heart of the Great Smokies at Asheville, and across the Blue Ridge to the lowlands of North Carolina.

All this is very different from the samp mortars and the puncheon floors of early times, but the pioneers had a keen eye for the soil and the waters and the trees, and it is these which have helped to make the valley rich to-day.

We must not forget that off to the west James Robertson had founded a city that is even older than Knoxville. In the great bend of the Cumberland, on its south bank, in northern Tennessee, stands Nashville, as we have already seen.

If we visit a large city in one of the countries of Europe, we are quite likely to be told, or to read in our guidebook, that its history goes back hundreds of years, and any town that was started only a hundred years ago would there seem young. But we measure age differently in America, and a town like Nashville, founded in 1780, we think is old indeed. It is not easy to remember, as we ride along the streets and see the shops and mansions of Nashville to-day, that this was once a place of log cabins, and that the first settlers had to sleep always with one ear open for the Indian’s war cry.

That James Robertson had to learn to read from his wife did not keep Nashville from becoming one of the centers of education and refinement in the South. It would take several lines to record the names of all the colleges and universities that now have their seat in this city. Robertson was the sort of man who, with the opportunities of to-day, might have been the president of one of these schools, or he might perhaps have gained a fortune with which to help in their support. Farther west, on the Mississippi river, stands Memphis, a city still larger than Nashville; indeed, few southern states can boast of so many cities as Tennessee possesses. Besides these, there are fertile valleys, fine rivers and mountains, productive forests, beds of iron ore and coal, comfortable farms, and thriving towns. The state is rich, too, in historical associations. Every part of Tennessee saw the dark days of the Civil War, and in the fields south of Nashville a great battle was fought.

When John Sevier went down the Tennessee river on his Indian raids he noticed that the stream, making a great bend, turns away from the valley and flows by a deep gorge through the highlands of the Cumberland plateau. We can take the train now at Knoxville, and a ride of a little more than a hundred miles will bring us to this place.

By the river is a steep, high ground known as Cameron hill. Let us go up to the top and look around. Stretching away at our feet on the east is Chattanooga. Part of the city as we see it from Cameron hill is shown in the picture (Fig. 70). Beyond is the Tennessee, and we are looking up the river to the northeast. The bridge which we see is the only bridge across the river at Chattanooga, even though it is now a large and busy city. In the distance is high ground, a part of Missionary Ridge, famous in the story of the Civil War.

If we turn around and look southward, we shall see Lookout Mountain, rising fifteen hundred feet above the river. A battle was fought on the steep slopes of this mountain also; and a few miles to the southeast is Chickamauga, one of the bloodiest battle grounds of the war. On the edge of the city, kept with care, is the National Cemetery, where rest the bodies of more than twelve thousand soldiers, northern and southern, who perished in the neighborhood of Chattanooga. Now all the region is peaceful, and only the tablets of iron and bronze, set up by the government on every battlefield in the neighborhood, tell the story of the conflict as it raged about the city.

Like Knoxville, Chattanooga has much coal and iron, is the center of a number of railways, and does much business. The railways run up the valley to Virginia, and south to Atlanta and elsewhere in Georgia. They stretch even further southward to Mobile and New Orleans, while the lines to the west reach Memphis and Nashville. Chattanooga is sometimes called the “Gate City” because it stands near the opening of the Great Valley into the wide plains along the gulf of Mexico. The place, originally called Ross’s Landing, was not settled until 1836, when Knoxville and Nashville were about fifty years old. It has a noble site and may well become a great city.

Here passed the boats that bore the first settlers to Robertson’s colony on the Cumberland. There are no Indians now to shoot from the banks, and you will see on the river only rafts of logs floating down from the forests in the mountains.

Atlanta also is often called the “Gate City” of the South. It stands more than a thousand feet above the sea, in northern Georgia, where the Appalachian mountain range is tapering down toward the southern plains. Because Atlanta is so high it is cooler in summer than most southern cities, and is always free from the scourge of yellow fever and cholera.

It is a natural site for a city, for here at the end of the great mountain system the long lines of railway that follow the Atlantic coast swing around to the west, passing on to the Mississippi and down to Mobile and the ports on the gulf of Mexico. Other railways reach Atlanta from Chattanooga and Knoxville in the Great Valley, and still others lead the way to Savannah and the Atlantic coast. Thus twelve lines of railway reach out from Atlanta like the spokes of a wheel and connect the city with all parts of the South. Let us take a map of the United States and draw a line through Richmond, Louisville, Nashville, and New Orleans. Notice how many states lie southeast of this line, and remember that of all the towns which they contain Atlanta is the largest and most important. Indeed, in trade and influence it surpasses many northern cities which are much larger.

Atlanta saw stirring times in the Civil War. It was small then, having but about ten thousand people. In 1864 most of it was burned to the ground, and we may truly say that it has grown to its present size in the short period since that time. To-day its population numbers more than one hundred thousand. During the recent Spanish War the Department of the Gulf made its headquarters here, so that Atlanta appears to be sought both in war and in peace. The city was used as the capital of Georgia soon after the Civil War, and in 1877 the people of the state voted that it should always be the seat of government. Since that time they have erected a capitol costing a million dollars, adorning the interior with marbles from their own quarries.

A few years ago an exposition was held at Atlanta to show the world the achievements and hopes of the great South. Everybody knew that the South raised cotton, but Atlanta wished to prove that the South could also spin and weave her famous product. Mr. W. G. Atkinson was the governor of Georgia at that time. During the exposition a day was chosen in which something unusual should be done. Men went out into a field in the morning and picked some cotton. It was ginned and spun and woven in double-quick time. Then tailors took some of the cloth, cut it, fitted it, and sewed it into a suit of clothes. Governor Atkinson put on the suit and visited the grounds of the exposition. In the morning the cotton was in the field, in the evening it was on the governor. Suits are not made so quickly as that on ordinary days, but the South spins and weaves millions of dollars’ worth of cotton, turning the mill wheels with southern coal or with the waters of swift southern streams.

Atlanta is not only at the southern end of the mountains, but it is on the divide which separates the streams of the gulf from those of the Atlantic. On the one hand, not far away, is the Ocmulgee, flowing to the ocean, while westward, and distant but a few miles, the Chattahoochee flows toward the gulf. The latter river has been harnessed by man, and eleven thousand horse power measures the amount of energy that can be carried over the wires to Atlanta to move its cars and turn the wheels of its factories. The mills not only spin the cotton of the gulf plains but also turn out fertilizers, work up the timber of the region, and make a multitude of other things to swell the city’s trade with her neighbors.

Appropriate to her needs, Atlanta has had since 1887 a school of technology, in which she teaches her sons how to develop the great resources of the South. Here are shops and departments of engineering, and, not least, instruction in making textiles, so that the cotton of southern fields need no longer go to Massachusetts or to England to be spun and woven.

The youngest great town of the southern mountain region was started on an old cotton plantation in 1871, thirty-four years before the writing of these lines. The people knew that in Alabama as well as in Tennessee coal and iron are found close together. So men built an iron town and called it, after one of the greatest furnace towns in the world, Birmingham. It is a noisy, busy place, with wide streets, swift electric cars, and blazing furnaces. To see it grow is like watching a new Pittsburg rise up in the heart of the South.

From the Berkshire country at the north to the southern end of the Appalachians, there are to-day thriving towns and fertile fields. No longer does the mountain wall cut off the products of the West from the markets of the East. Yet hardly a hundred years ago the eastern strip of country was practically shut off from the whole territory drained by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Indian trails and rough roads were the only means of communication between the two sections. Great as are the natural resources of both regions, their prosperity has been bound up in the development of roads and railways, and is due in large measure to the energy, foresight, and self-sacrifice of those who crossed the barrier and made it easy for others to follow them.