United States or Mali ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In 1769, the year that Boon first went to Kentucky, the first permanent settlers came to the banks of the Watauga, the settlement being merely an enlargement of the Virginia settlement, which had for a short time existed on the head-waters of the Holston, especially near Wolf Hills.
My camp was in a bleak, wind-swept valley, high among the mountains which form the divide between the head-waters of the Salmon and Clarke's Fork of the Columbia. All night I had lain in my buffalo-bag, under the lea of a windbreak of branches, in the clump of fir-trees, where I had halted the preceding evening.
It is with a reverence such as is stirred by the sight of the head-waters of some mighty river that one looks back to these village-moots of Friesland or Sleswick. It was here that England learned to be a "mother of Parliaments."
Already adventurous individuals, and even families of hardy pioneers had extended their migrations to the Eastern base of the "Blue Ridge," and selected locations on the head-waters of the Yadkin and Catawba rivers. In 1734, Gabriel Johnston was appointed Governor of North Carolina. He was a Scotchman by birth, a man of letters and of liberal views.
In France the forests at the head-waters of the Rhone and the Seine were cut down and fierce floods began to pour down the valleys each year, bringing destruction to property and crops all along their way.
The parties were fast advancing to that happy state which would have insured ample cause for the next day's repentance; and the bees were already beginning to buzz about their ears, when a messenger came spurring to the camp with intelligence that Wyeth's people had got entangled in one of those deep and frightful ravines, piled with immense fragments of volcanic rock, which gash the whole country about the head-waters of the Blackfoot River.
Through the whole state stretches the granite backbone of the Sierra Nevadas with its highest crest or ridge at the head-waters of the Kings and Kern rivers near Fresno. Here Mount Whitney and a dozen other great peaks of the High Sierras or California Alps lift their heads over thirteen thousand feet in the air.
The first settlements, known as the Watauga, or afterwards more generally as the Holston, settlements, grew up while keeping close touch with the Virginians, who lived round the Tennessee head-waters, and also in direct communication with North Carolina, to which State they belonged.
A number belonging to the Tobacco Nation eventually reached the upper waters of the Mississippi where they met the Sioux, or Dacotahs, a fierce nation belonging to a family quite distinct from the Algonquins and Iroquois, and generally found wandering between the head-waters of Lake Superior and the Falls of St. Anthony.
"There's young McAndrew: he was sent to an outpost up the Mackenzie his second year in the service, where he was all but starved, and had to live for about two weeks on boiled parchment. Then there's poor Forrester: he was shipped off to a place the name of which I never could remember somewhere between the head-waters of the Athabasca Lake and the North Pole.
Word Of The Day