The log cabin of the Crockett family stood where the Limestone Creek joined the Nolichucky River, ten miles north of the great bend in the Bald Mountain range. There the rocky summits, angling abruptly about the watersheds of Indian Creek, are like fortifications of the Titans, crowned with battlements of the Appalachian range, whose peaks stand more than six thousand feet above the sea――higher than any others east of the Mississippi. From the rocky escarpments, between the black forests of pine and hemlock, shone the signal-fires of the Creek and Chickasaw, and from unseen nooks between their giant flanks the thump-thump-thump of the tom-tom caused the pioneer to look to his stockades and his flintlock guns. The fierce ebb and flow of war that had given Kentucky the name of “the Dark and Bloody Ground” had now and then swept over parts of Tennessee――the massacre at Fort Loudon was a red spot upon the pages of her history; but the rivalries of the English, French, and Spanish had promoted Indian raids in the disputable regions of the Ohio and the Mississippi, rather than in the lowlands of the western part of this state and in the Alabama plains. What Tennessee was spared in earlier days she knew in the Civil War in 1861 to 1865, when from Knoxville to Donelson and Shiloh, and from Lookout Mountain to the Cumberland Gap, her fields were filled with unknown graves and the wreck and misery of a terrible conflict. It was not until many years after the birth of Crockett that it became safe to travel the rugged roads between Virginia and North Carolina and the Nashville country. In the twenty or more trips that Andrew Jackson made between Jonesboro and Nashville in the days when he was foremost in the practice of the law, he had many a close call in Indian fights. More than a score of times he came upon the bodies of men, women, and children, robbed and slain and scalped. Little Davy, listening at nightfall beside the river, hearing above its murmur the hoot of the owl in the dismal trees, the howl of the wolf on the mountain-top, or the panther’s anguished cry, floating out of the vague unknown, would make good use of his sturdy little legs until he was safe at his mother’s side.