After the Revolution, when the Cherokees went on the warpath, the Virginia settlement was in a state of great alarm. Men, women, and children met together, and decided that it would be safer to camp in the woods in a body at night rather than run the risk of being burned to death in houses that they could not defend. They went into the depths of the woods and made an encampment. One night while they were around a fire, cooking their supper, suddenly the report of a gun was heard, and then there was a cry of "Indians!" The men seized their guns; but they hardly knew where to turn, or what to do. Suddenly a lad who had not lost his head emptied a bucket of water on the fire. This was the thing to do, but no one else had thought of it. The name of the lad was Meriwether Lewis. He went into the regular army, became the private secretary of President Jefferson, and was selected to head the party that explored the Territory of Louisiana, which had been bought from France. Meriwether Lewis selected for his companion Captain Clark, an old army friend and comrade. Leading the party, Lewis and his friend Clark left St. Louis, and pushed westward to the Pacific coast, through dangers and obstacles that few men would have cared to meet. The famous expedition of Lewis and Clark has now become a part of the history of the country. Lewis took possession of the Pacific coast in the name of the United States. There was a controversy with Great Britain some years afterwards as to the title of Oregon, but that which Lewis and Clark had established was finally acknowledged to be the best. Meriwether Lewis won a name in history because the opportunity came to him. His name is mentioned here because he was a representative of the men who settled Upper Georgia,--the men who kept the fires of liberty alive in the State, and who, after helping to conquer the British and the Tories, became the conquerors of the wilderness that lay to the west of them. From Wilkes, Burke, Elbert, and the region where Clarke and his men had fought, the tide of emigration slowly moved across the State, settling Greene, Hancock, Baldwin, Putnam, Morgan, Jasper, Butts, Monroe, Coweta, Upson, Pike, Meriwether, Talbot, Harris, and Muscogee counties. Some of the more adventurous crossed the Chattahoochee into Alabama, and on into the great Mississippi Valley and beyond. Their descendants live in every part of the South; and Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas have had Georgians for their governors, and their senators and representatives in Congress,--men who were descended from the Virginia and North Carolina immigrants. One of the most brilliant of these was Mirabeau B. Lamar, scholar, statesman, and soldier, the president of Texas when that Territory had declared itself a free and an independent republic. THE COTTON GIN.