A long period elapsed from the time emigration from the north of Ireland began until the Pennsylvania and Virginia plains had been filled; and the Yadkin, in North Carolina, was reached near the middle of the last century. So strong was the opposition, natural and human, encountered at every point, that only dauntless courage and determined spirit was able to overcome it. A wilderness had to be reduced in the face of a cruel and cunning foe. Being poor, they purchased small farms, and the number of their slaves was never large. Unlike the plantation lords of the South State coast, they devoted themselves to rigorous labor, the number being few who had time to devote to the cultivation of manners, or to pleasure, and fewer still had the financial ability to educate their children. Between 1750, the date of the first settlement on the upper Yadkin, and the Revolution, a period of 25 years, the best lands were occupied to the base of the Blue Ridge. Even that barrier was scaled, and the germs of civilized industry planted along the Holston before 1770. A character of the times, typical of a class of early settlers, was the famous Daniel Boone, whose life is the inspiration and light of western annals. Being but a lad, when his father removed from Pennsylvania, and settled on the Yadkin in 1754, the wildness and beauty of his new home made him a recluse of nature. In early youth he became a hunter, a trapper, and fighter of Indians. When the country around him filled up, he left his home and plunged again into the depths of the wilderness beyond the mountains. After a period, crowded with blood-chilling adventures in Kentucky, he returned to his old home, but the growth of settlement had deprived it of its romance. He again crossed the Blue Ridge and pitched his camp in the Watauga plateau. There is a curious old church record in existence, which shows that he cursed “with profane oaths” a fellow Baptist for building a cabin within ten miles of his. His ideal of complete happiness was to be alone in a boundless wilderness. He once said: “I am richer than the man mentioned in Scripture who owned the cattle on a thousand hills. I own the wild beasts in more than a thousand valleys.” He expired at a deer stand, with rifle in hand, in the year 1818. It was of him that Byron wrote: “Crime came not near him, she is not the child Of solitude. Health shrank not from him, for Her home is in the rarely trodden wild.”