xperience they had undergone in the mother country had tamed them
to such a degree that they had no desire to brave the future in the
wilderness. Adventures of that kind were left for the hardy North
Carolinians and Virginians who first settled what was then known as
Upper Georgia. After the Revolution, this tide of immigration increased
very rapidly, and it was still further swelled by the profits that the
Whitney gin enabled the planters of Georgia to make out of their cotton
crops.

The settling of Georgia began with the charitable scheme of Oglethorpe.
The making of Georgia began when the North Carolinians and Virginians
began to open up the Broad River region to the north of Augusta. It was
due to the desperate stand taken by these hardy pioneers that Georgia
continued the struggle for American independence. To Upper Georgia
came some of the best families from Virginia and North Carolina,--the
Grattons, the Lewises, the Clarkes, the Strothers, the Crawfords,
the Reeses, the Harrises, the Andrewses, the Taliaferros (pronounced
Tollivers), the Campbells, the Barnetts, the Toombses, the Doolys,
and many other families whose names have figured in the history of
the country. Here also settled James Jack, the sturdy patriot who
volunteered to carry the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence to
Philadelphia. The Congress then in session chose to shut its eyes to
that declaration, but it was the basis and framework of the Declaration
afterwards written by Thomas Jefferson.

After the Revolution, when the Cherokees went on the warpath, the
Virginia settlement was in a state of great alarm. Men, women, and
children met together, and decided that it would be safer to camp in
the woods in a body at night rather than run the risk of being burned to
death in houses that they could not defend. They went into the depths
of the woods and made an encampment. One night while they were around a
fire, cooking their supper, suddenly the report of a gun was heard, and
then there was a cry of "Indians!" The men seized their guns; but they
hardly knew where to turn, or what to do. Suddenly a lad who had not
lost his head emptied a bucket of water on the fire. This was the
thing to do, but no one else had thought of it. The name of the lad
was Meriwether Lewis. He went into the regular army, became the private
secretary of President Jefferson, and was selected to head the party
that explored the Territory of Louisiana, which had been boug