The race was widely and graphically advertised. In all the contests of equine speed, it would have no prototype in the past and no rival in the future. All upper East Tennessee was stirred into a ferment of excitement, which grew more intense every day, from the time of the announcement until the event took place. The coming horse-race became the absorbing, exclusive topic of conversation at the log-rollings, house-raisings, quiltings, distilleries, stores, school-houses, firesides, inns and before and after “meetin’.” Children caught the infection from the adults, and the dogs, if they have the intelligence with which they are credited, doubtless cast knowing winks at each other when their respective owners discussed the universal theme and speculated upon the outcome of the to-be-incomparable event. The place selected for the race was in Greasy Cove, on the farm now owned by the Loves. Tall mountains looked down on lower heights, and these in turn on the spot to be made historic--a poem of nature, a dream of beauty in a setting of scenic grandeur, embroidered with the silver fretwork of the Nolichucky’s restless billows. The track was a half-circle, half a mile long. The advertised day, in the summer or early fall of 1788, came at last, and with it the popular excitement pitched to the highest tension. And such a heterogeneous mass as swarmed into that sequestered valley--the old, the young, farmers, workers in wood and iron, lawyers, doctors, saints, sinners, and even preachers; on foot and horseback, singly, in groups and in vast cavalcades, from Washington, Greene, Hawkins, Sullivan, and from the Wolf Hills of Virginia. Civilization had not yet reached a sufficient development to produce a “moonshiner,” but “the rosy” flowed as copiously as if some magician had changed the neighboring streamlets into the crystal elixir, and the number of fisticuffs was in proportion to its consumption. As was the custom of the day, the fellows “spilin’ for a fight” stripped to the waist line and fought in a ring, and when one cried, “Take him off!” the mill ended, the bitten, gouged and bleeding combatants “made up,” washed, dressed, and sealed the pact of peace with a drink of whiskey from the same gourd. The men who met at Sycamore shoals, followed “the sword of the Lord and of Gideon” across the Alleghanies under Sevier and Shelby, drove the Hessian hordes from King’s Mountain and closed the final chapter of the Revolution with one of its grandest triumphs, were there. The pioneer who built his fort-cabin in the wilderness and shot the prowling savage through a chink in the wall, was there, with his faithful spouse and the rest of the family. The lovesick swain in his flax linen, with his bonnie lass in a gown of snowy cotton, who caused the mountain roses to pale with envy as she glided like a sylph among them, was there also. But the horse-race overshadowed everything else in interest and importance.