From the pleasant vales about Galbraith the route was south to Morristown, and thence southeast along the valley of the French Broad River, through Unaka Pass of the Great Smoky Mountains, to North Carolina. Many writers have exhausted the dictionary of adjectives in describing the romantic beauties of the French Broad, but the stream, and its intervales, bedighted with marvelous cliffs, continues as nature made it, beyond the power of description. The course of this lovely stream cuts through the charming hills about Asheville and pours its crystal waters through a narrow gorge until it passes the blockade of the Smoky Mountains. In this space of forty miles the French Broad is indeed a “racing river,” to which the Cherokees applied the name _Tahkecostee_, which has that significance, for it is impetuous, torrential, terrific. From a gentle stream above Asheville, by the contraction of its banks below, the river becomes angry, and the roar of cataract as it rushes over opposing bowlders fills the air with noise like thunder. At Stack House the current dashes over a fall twenty feet high, and at Mountain Island it makes another leap and then becomes a noisy rapid to a point known as “Deep Water.” Here the mountains close in upon the river, forcing it through a narrow channel only one hundred and fifty feet wide and forty feet deep. The railroad to reach the opposite bank, crosses the river diagonally by an iron bridge, with a clear span of two hundred and sixty feet, squeezing itself, as it were, around the rocky face of the mountain on the right bank, to be received with the same grudging hospitality by the hard face of the left bank, and twists itself by a very short curve into line, which in a very few minutes brings it into the beautiful, smiling valley of Hot Springs. No one has ever been able to convey a just idea of the remarkable magnificence of this wonderful cañon, with its wild and ceaseless splendor of tumultuous waters, its overhanging cliffs, its noble mountains and fairy islets. In the time of stage-coaching it was an experience never to be forgotten—the day’s journey from Asheville to the Warm Springs, along the turnpike which followed the old Indian trail and lay between the river and the cliffs, hemmed in by the whirling emerald waters of the first and overhung by the fern-draped escarpments of the last, with vistas of wild and yet wilder beauty opening at every step.