e, which was lost upon
Braddock, Forbes, and later St. Clair: that the art of defeating
red men was to deal them a sudden and unexpected blow, before
they had time either to learn the strength of the force employed
against them or to lay with subtle craft their artful ambuscade.

In the late autumn of 1761, Daniel Boone and Nathaniel Gist, the
son of Washington's famous guide, who were both serving under
Waddell, temporarily detached themselves from his command and led
a small party on a "long hunt" in the Valley of the Holston,
While encamping near the site of Black's Fort, subsequently
built, they were violently assailed by a pack of fierce wolves
which they had considerable difficulty in beating off; and from
this incident the locality became known as Wolf Hills (now
Abingdon, Virginia).

From this time forward Boone's roving instincts had full sway.
For many months each year he threaded his way through that
marvelously beautiful country of western North Carolina
felicitously described as the Switzerland of America. Boone's
love of solitude and the murmuring forest was surely inspired by
the phenomenal beauties of the country' through which he roamed
at will. Blowing Rock on one arm of a great horseshoe of
mountains and Tryon Mountain upon the other arm, overlooked an
enormous, primeval bowl, studded by a thousand emerald-clad
eminences. There was the Pilot Mountain, the towering and
isolated pile which from time immemorial had served the
aborigines as a guide in their forest wanderings; there was the
dizzy height of the Roan on the border; there was Mt. Mitchell,
portentous in its grandeur, the tallest peak on the continent
east of the Rockies; and there was the Grandfather, the oldest
mountain on earth according to geologists, of which it has been
written:

Oldest of all terrestrial things--still holding
Thy wrinkled forehead high;
Whose every scam, earth's history enfolding,
Grim science doth defy!

Thou caught'st the far faint ray from Sirius rising,
When through space first was hurled
The primal gloom of ancient voids surprising,
This atom, called the World!

What more gratifying to the eye of the wanderer than the
luxuriant vegetation and lavish profusion of the gorgeous flowers
upon the mountain slopes, radiant rhododendron, rosebay, and
laurel, and the azalea rising like flame; or the rare beauties of
the water--the cataract of Linville, taking its shimmering leap
into the gorge,