The main line of the Southern Railway, between Washington and Knoxville, runs along the valley of the Holston river and crosses from Virginia into Tennessee at Bristol. After we come into Tennessee the ridges that separate the streams fall away again, and we find one great valley, about forty miles wide. On the northwest the Cumberland plateau and the Cumberland mountains rise above it. On the southeast there loom up the Great Smoky mountains on the border of North Carolina. Great Smoky is only another name for the Blue Ridge, for it is the same range, only higher and wider than it is farther north. Although this valley is a part of the Great Valley, it is commonly called the valley of east Tennessee, its people using the home name as they do in Virginia. The Holston, the Clinch, and Powell’s river are not the only branches of the Tennessee. Out of the Great Smoky mountains there flow from the east the French Broad, the Little Tennessee, and the Hiwassee. Knoxville stands a little below the place where the Holston and French Broad flow together, and Chattanooga is a hundred miles farther down, where the Tennessee, now a lordly stream, leaves the Great Valley and flows westward through a deep valley in the Cumberland plateau. This lesson in geography we must learn well, with the help of a map, and we shall then see what the pioneers did as they followed the rivers between the mountains. It is an old road that runs from Pennsylvania to Tennessee by the valley. It took the pioneer across the Potomac through Winchester and Staunton in Virginia. Farther on was a fortified place, Fort Chissel, built in 1758, which was on the way to the Watauga Settlement and Cumberland Gap. Of Watauga we must now tell, and of the Cumberland Gap in the next chapter. Watauga is the name of a small river which flows out of the mountains on the east, into the Great Valley, and enters the Holston. In a pleasant spot on the banks of this stream the first settlement of white men in Tennessee was made. Some of the people had come along the valley from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and others had climbed over the mountains from North Carolina because of the wrongs they had suffered there. Many of these men and women had come from the north of Ireland. They were not of Irish but of Scotch blood, their ancestors having originally come from Scotland to make the north of Ireland their home. For this reason they are often called Scotch-Irish, but whatever we name them, we are to remember that they were sturdy and intelligent people. Conscientious and loyal Presbyterians they were in faith, and by nature brave and full of endurance. Their fathers had shed their blood for freedom on Scottish fields, and the sons were not likely to be frightened by a wilderness full of red savages. [Illustration: FIG. 52. HILLY FARM LANDS IN THE GREAT VALLEY, NEAR KNOXVILLE]