Late in the summer of the following year Boone marched under the command of the noted Indian-fighter of the border, Colonel Hugh Waddell, in his campaign against the Cherokees. From the lips of Waddell, who was outspoken in his condemnation of Byrd's futile delays in road-cutting and fort-building, Boone learned the true secret of success in Indian warfare, which was lost upon Braddock, Forbes, and later St. Clair: that the art of defeating red men was to deal them a sudden and unexpected blow, before they had time either to learn the strength of the force employed against them or to lay with subtle craft their artful ambuscade. In the late autumn of 1761, Daniel Boone and Nathaniel Gist, the son of Washington's famous guide, who were both serving under Waddell, temporarily detached themselves from his command and led a small party on a "long hunt" in the Valley of the Holston. While encamping near the site of Black's Fort, subsequently built, they were violently assailed by a pack of fierce wolves which they had considerable difficulty in beating off; and from this incident the locality became known as Wolf Hills (now Abingdon, Virginia). [92] From this time forward Boone's roving instincts had full sway. For many months each year he threaded his way through that marvelously beautiful country of western North Carolina felicitously described as the Switzerland of America. Boone's love of solitude and the murmuring forest was surely inspired by the phenomenal beauties of the country through which he roamed at will. Blowing Rock on one arm of a great horseshoe of mountains and Tryon Mountain upon the other arm, overlooked an enormous, primeval bowl, studded by a thousand emerald-clad eminences. There was the Pilot Mountain, the towering and isolated pile which from time immemorial had served the aborigines as a guide in their forest wanderings; there was the dizzy height of the Roan on the border; there was Mt. Mitchell, portentous in its grandeur, the tallest peak on the continent east of the Rockies; and there was the Grandfather, the oldest mountain on earth according to geologists, of which it has been written: Oldest of all terrestrial things--still holding Thy wrinkled forehead high; Whose every seam, earth's history enfolding, Grim science doth defy! Thou caught'st the far faint ray from Sirius rising, When through space first was hurled The primal gloom of ancient voids surprising, This atom, called the World! What more gratifying to the eye of the wanderer than the luxuriant vegetation and lavish profusion of the gorgeous flowers upon the mountain slopes, radiant rhododendron, rosebay, and laurel, and the azalea rising like flame; or the rare beauties of the water--the cataract of Linville, taking its shimmering leap into the gorge, and that romantic river poetically celebrated in the lines: