which they had considerable difficulty in beating off; and from
this incident the locality became known as Wolf Hills (now
Abingdon, Virginia).


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 scam, earth's history enfolding,
Grim science doth defy!

Thou caught'st the far faint ray from Sirius rising,
When through space first was hurled