It led him to the base of one of these mountains, to a spring which
flowed clear and cool, a brook in size, from a low rock-ribbed cave.
By the spring he cooked his meal. His bread was baked upon a hot stone
and he drank water from a terrapin shell. As he ate his meal there came
the sound of breaking cane, a familiar welcomed vibration to a hunter. A
stone, that is still by the spring side, was used as a shelter and a
resting-place for the rifle, and a deer fell as it stopped, astonished
at the curling smoke that rose from its watering-place.
This was the first meal of the white man at the York spring or in the
"Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf," and for more than fifty years
the hunter lived within a hundred yards of where he camped that day. He
was Conrad Pile--or "Old Coonrod," as he is known, the descriptive
adjectives and byname ever coupled as though one word. He was the
great-great-grandfather of Sergeant Alvin Cullom York, and the earliest
ancestor of which he has account.
Above the spring in the rock-facing of the cliff is a large cave. Here
Coonrod Pile spread a bed of leaves and made his home. The camp-fire was
kept burning and its smoke was seen by other hunters, and Pearson
Miller, Arthur Frogge, John Riley and Moses Poor came to Coonrod in the
valley, and they too made their homes there, and Pall Mall was founded
and descendants of these men are today eighty per cent of the residents
in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf.
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