terms, for not only were their lives forfeit but their crops and
cattle had been destroyed and the holdings on which their
ancestors had lived for many centuries taken from them. The
descriptions of the scenes attending their leave-taking of the
hills and glens they loved with such passionate fervor are among
the most pathetic in history. Strong men who had met the ravage
of a brutal sword without weakening abandoned themselves to the
agony of sorrow. They kissed the walls of their houses. They
flung themselves on the ground and embraced the sod upon which
they had walked in freedom. They called their broken farewells to
the peaks and lochs of the land they were never again to see;
and, as they turned their backs and filed down through the
passes, their pipers played the dirge for the dead.

Such was the character, such the deep feeling, of the race which
entered North Carolina from the coast and pushed up into the
wilderness about the headwaters of Cape Fear River. Tradition
indicates that these hillsmen sought the interior because the
grass and pea vine which overgrew the innercountry stretching
towards the mountains provided excellent fodder for the cattle
which some of the chiefs are said to have brought with them.
These Gaelic herders, perhaps in negligible numbers, were in the
Yadkin Valley before 1730, possibly even ten years earlier. In
1739 Neil MacNeill of Kintyre brought over a shipload of Gaels to
rejoin his kinsman, Hector MacNeill, called Bluff Hector from his
residence near the bluffs at Cross Creek, now Fayetteville. Some
of these immigrants went on to the Yadkin, we are told, to unite
with others of their clan who had been for some time in that
district. The exact time of the first Highlander on the Yadkin
cannot be ascertained, as there were no court records and the