the abodes of the poorest class of Irish emigrants.

After a year or two, Crockett, with his little family, crossed the
almost pathless Alleghanies. Father, mother, and children trudged
along through the rugged defiles and over the rocky cliffs, on foot.
Probably a single pack-horse conveyed their few household goods. The
hatchet and the rifle were the only means of obtaining food,
shelter, and even clothing. With the hatchet, in an hour or two, a
comfortable camp could be constructed, which would protect them from
wind and rain. The camp-fire, cheering the darkness of the night,
drying their often wet garments, and warming their chilled limbs
with its genial glow, enabled them to enjoy that almost greatest of
earthly luxuries, peaceful sleep.

The rifle supplied them with food. The fattest of turkeys and the
most tender steaks of venison, roasted upon forked sticks, which
they held in their hands over the coals, feasted their voracious
appetites. This, to them, was almost sumptuous food. The skin of the
deer, by a rapid and simple process of tanning, supplied them with
moccasons, and afforded material for the repair of their tattered
garments.

We can scarcely comprehend the motive which led this solitary family
to push on, league after league, farther and farther from
civilization, through the trackless forests. At length they reached
the Holston River. This stream takes its rise among the western
ravines of the Alleghanies, in Southwestern Virginia. Flowing
hundreds of miles through one of the most solitary and romantic
regions upon the globe, it finally unites with the Clinch River,
thus forming the majestic Tennessee.