nd had reached
the Roanoke River, when a party of Cherokees surprised them, and took
Salling prisoner, while Marlin escaped. Carried captive into Tennessee,
Salling remained with those Indians for several years, and became
domesticated among them. While on a buffalo-hunting excursion to the
Salt Licks of Kentucky, a middle or debateable ground of hunting and
war, the Flanders of the Northern and Southern Indians, with a party of
them, he was at length captured by a band of Illinois Indians. They
carried him to Kaskaskia, where an old squaw adopted him for a son.
Hence he accompanied the tribe on many distant expeditions, once as far
as the Gulf of Mexico. But after two years the squaw sold him to some
Spaniards from the Lower Mississippi, who wanted him as an interpreter.
He was taken by them northward, and finally, after six years of
captivity and wanderings through strange tribes and distant countries,
he was ransomed by the Governor of Canada, and transferred to New York.
Thence he made his way to Williamsburg, in Virginia. About the same time
a considerable number of immigrants had arrived there--among them John
Lewis and John Mackey. Lewis was a native of Ireland. In an affray that
occurred in the County of Dublin, with an oppressive landlord and his
retainers, seeing a brother, an officer in the king's army, who lay sick
at his house, slain before his eyes, he slew one or two of the
assailants. Escaping, he found refuge in Portugal, and after some years
came over to Virginia with his family, consisting of Margaret Lynn,
daughter of the Laird of Loch Lynn, in Scotland, his wife, four sons,
Thomas, William, Andrew, and Charles, and one daughter. Pleased with
Salling's glowing picture of the country beyond the mountains, Lewis and
Mackey visited it under his guidance. Crossing the Blue Ridge and
descending into the lovely valley beyond, where virgin nature reposes in
all her native charms, the three determined to fix their abode in that
delightful region. Lewis selected a residence near the Middle River, on
the border of a creek which yet bears his name, in what was denominated
Beverley Manor; Mackey chose a spot farther up that river, near the
Buffalo Gap; and Salling built his log cabin fifty miles beyond, on a
beautiful tract overshadowed by mountains in the forks of the James
River.[428:A] John Lewis erected on the spot selected for his home a
stone-house, still standing, and it came to be known as Lewis's Fort. It