ue northward the Great Smokies, and spent
the summer in the beautiful hill country where the springs of the
western waters flowed from the ground. He had never seen so lovely a
land. The high valleys, through which the currents ran, were hemmed in
by towering mountain walls, with cloud-capped peaks. The fertile loam
forming the bottoms was densely covered with the growth of the primaeval
forest, broken here and there by glade-like openings, where herds of
game grazed on the tall, thick grass.

Robertson was well treated by the few settlers, and stayed long enough
to raise a crop of corn, the stand-by of the backwoods pioneer; like
every other hunter, explorer, Indian fighter, and wilderness wanderer,
he lived on the game he shot, and the small quantity of maize he was
able to carry with him.[19] In the late fall, however, when recrossing
the mountain on his way home through the trackless forests, both game
and corn failed him. He lost his way, was forced to abandon his horse
among impassable precipices, and finally found his rifle useless owing
to the powder having become soaked. For fourteen days he lived almost
wholly on nuts and wild berries, and was on the point of death from
starvation, when he met two hunters on horseback, who fed him and let
him ride their horses by turns, and brought him safely to his home.

Such hardships were little more than matter-of-course incidents in a
life like his; and he at once prepared to set out with his family for
the new land. His accounts greatly excited his neighbors, and sixteen
families made ready to accompany him. The little caravan started, under
Robertson's guidance, as soon as the ground had dried after the winter
rains in the spring of 1771.[20] They travelled in the usual style of
backwoods emigrants: the men on foot, rifle on shoulder, the elder
children driving the lean cows, while the women, the young children, and
the few household goods, and implements of husbandry, were carried on
the backs of the pack-horses; for in settling the backwoods during the
last century, the pack-horse played the same part that in the present
century was taken by the canvas-covered emigrant wagon, the white-topped
"prairie schooner."

Once arrived at the Watauga, the Carolina new-comers mixed readily with
the few Virginians already on the ground; and Robertson speedily became
one of the leading men in the little settlement. On an island in the
river he built a house of logs with the bar