"
This is but one of the many valley settlements made by "Long Hunters" in
the Appalachian Mountains. Adventurous families in the last days of the
Colonies and in the years that came after the Revolution, followed the
hunters, and log cabins and "cleared spaces" appeared in the valleys and
on the mountainsides. And from them sprang another race of long hunters
who went out from the mountains down into the valleys of the Ohio and
the Mississippi, returning to tell of the land and the game they had
found. Not far from Pall Mall, as the crow would rise and journey, is a
carving upon a tree that is believed, to historically mark the path of
the most noted of the "Long Hunters," and it says:
"D Boon CillED a BAR On Tree in ThE yEAR 1760."
Emigrants of those days settled as Coonrod Pile and his companions took
up their "squatter's rights" in the Valley o' the Wolf. As
canvas-covered mountain-schooners carrying families of the settlers
moved westward they followed the trails of the hunters and stopped where
it appealed to them. Wagon-tracks grew into roads as the travel
increased. And the roads unvaryingly led to the passes and the gaps in
the mountains that offered the least resistance to progress. So
scattered throughout the ranges of the Appalachians are many homes and
settlements off from the old, beaten, wagon-trails, far distant from the
railroads of to-day, reached only over rocky, rarely-worked roadways.
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