direction
of the Duke of Cumberland. When King George at last restrained his son
from his orgy of blood, he offered the Gaels their lives and exile to
America on condition of their taking the full oath of allegiance. The
majority accepted his terms, for not only were their lives forfeit but
their crops and cattle had been destroyed and the holdings on which
their ancestors had lived for many centuries taken from them. The
descriptions of the scenes attending their leave-taking of the hills and
glens they loved with such passionate fervor are among the most pathetic
in history. Strong men who had met the ravage of a brutal sword without
weakening abandoned themselves to the agony of sorrow. They kissed the
walls of their houses. They flung themselves on the ground and embraced
the sod upon which they had walked in freedom. They called their broken
farewells to the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to
see; and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the passes,
their pipers played the dirge for the dead.

Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race which entered
North Carolina from the coast and pushed up into the wilderness about
the headwaters of Cape Fear River. Tradition indicates that these
hillsmen sought the interior because the grass and pea vine which
overgrew the innercountry stretching towards the mountains provided
excellent fodder for the cattle which some of the chiefs are said to
have brought with them. These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible
numbers, were in the Yadkin Valley before 1730, possibly even ten years
earlier. In 1739 Neil MacNeill of Kintyre brought over a shipload of
Gaels to rejoin his kinsman, Hector MacNeill, called Bluff Hector from
his residence near the bluffs at Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. Some
of these immigrants went on to the Yadkin, we are told, to unite with
others of their clan who had been for some time in that district. The
exact time of the first Highlander on the Yadkin cannot be ascertained,
as there were no court records and the offices of the land companies
were not then open for the sale of these remote regions. But by 1753
there were not less than four thousand Gaels in Cumberland County,
where they occupied the chief magisterial posts; and they were already
spreading over the lands now comprised within Moore, Anson, Richmond,
Robeson, Bladen, and Sampson counties. In these counties Gaelic was as
commonly heard as English.