On the trail of the pioneers Author:John Thomson Faris Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. THROUGH THE GREAT WILDERNESS Here once Boone trod?the hardy pioneer? The only white man in the wilderness; Oh, how he loved alone to hunt the deer, Alone ... more »at eve his simple meal to dress; No mark upon the tree, nor print nor track, To lead him forward or to guide him back; He roved the forest, king by main and might, And looked up to the sky and shaped his course aright. ?Frederick VV. Thomas. Over the famous Wilderness Road the emigrants found their way by scores and by hundreds, during the Revolution, and after the war was over their numbers became greater than ever. Imlay, an early traveler, said in the volume he wrote about America: "I have seen upwards of ten thousand emigrants to arrive in the single state of Kentucky within a year, and from four to ten thousand in several other years. A large proportion of these Kentucky emigrants went by Boone road, as well as the emigrants to Tennessee." Following this route to Tennessee, James Robertson, who had been prominent in the organization of the Watauga Association, went, in 1779, with his son to the head of the Cumberland and made a new settlement which he called Nashborough, later Nashville. A few months later Colonel Donelson, accompanied by several hundred men, women and children, went in thirty boats down the Tennessee, up the Ohio and up the Cumberland, to Robertson's settlement. One of those in the party later became the wife of Andrew Jackson. Soon after his arrival at Nashborough, Donelson and Robertson joined others in forming an association for self-government, similar to the Watauga Association, of which there were two hundred and fifty-six members. Imlay, who wrote in 1793 concerning the Wilderness Road and Kentucky,1 told of the sources of the emigration to the new country: Emigration to this ...« less