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Unaka and the Pisgah

  • wcu_great_smoky_mtns-10605.jpg
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  • The region has an intensely interesting historic past. Along its western base was the greatest of all the Indian trails, “The Great Indian Warpath”,4 extending from the Creek territory in Alabama to Pennsylvania. It is a valley or lowland counterpart of the crestline Appalachian Trail. Along its streams, the Holston and New Rivers, the pioneers from Pennsylvania made their way to settle Kentucky and Tennessee. It was a barrier to immigration from the east; it determined the route of the resistless immigrant and the destiny of the Trans-Alleghany states. As early as 1671, Batts and Fallam, on one of the Colonel Arthur Woods’ expeditions, reached New River from Appomattox, Virginia. Gradually the frontier receded under the unceasing pressure of the immigrants but this region was to be the scene of the most desperate and destructive of all the Indian warfare. The southwestern trend of settlement was in violation of the Indian treaties and resisted by the British authorities, as far as they were able to exercise any prohibition, but by 1770 a considerable settlement had developed on the Watauga River, near the present site of Elizabethton, Tennessee. These settlers were too busily engaged in securing their precarious footholds in the East Tennessee wilderness to participate actively in the Revolutionary War, yet the two campaigns of these frontiersmen had most far-reaching effects. In October, 1780, when Tarleton’s threat to bring fire and sword to their doors alarmed the transmontane settlements, the frontiersmen gathered at Sycamore Shoals and marched east. Then followed the desperate battle of King’s Mountain and the ---------------------------------------------------------------- 4. See INDIAN TRAILS OF THE SOUTHEAST by W. E. Myer, 42nd. Annual Report of American Bureau of Ethnology, 1925-5, pp. 749-764. -5-
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