📘 Read Now 📥 Download
"The book will have a permanent place in our historical literature." -The American Historical Magazine, 1899"Interesting reading." - The American Historical Review, 1900"Interesting and valuable work and its author is one of the most promising young writers of the South." - Southern History Association, 1900 The story of Tennessee's early settlement and history is so adventurous and thrilling it is not necessary to indulge the imagination notes William Thomas Hale in his 1899 book "The Backward Trail. " "The Backward Trail" is a collection of short sketches treating of the early history and development of Tennessee with a number of stories of thrilling and heroic experiences in those frontier days when this state was in the far west. Indians and pioneers meet again on these pages and we have quite a vivid description of the privation and hardship and also the victories of those opening scenes of western progress.The story of Tennessee pioneers' early struggles and the formation of a state, the numerous Indian conflicts, together with an account of the mound builders, is told in an interesting way to make it stay with the reader. After reviewing the sanguinary and long continued struggle of Tennessee's pioneers with the Indians we are told of their subsequent heroic achievement at King's Mountain.Of the first Constitution of Tennessee, adopted in 1796, the author quotes the eulogium of Jefferson that "it was the least imperfect and most republican of the State Constitutions." Well merited tributes are paid to Gens. John Sevier and James Robertson, the fathers and founders of this fertile and progressive State. To the unselfish patriotism, statesmanship and soldierly qualities of these men Tennessee is more indebted than to any others in the long catalogue of her illustrious citizenship.Regarding the ancient mound builders and race of "giants" inhabiting ancient Tennessee, the author writes: " Across Smith Fork creek, a quarter of a mile from the mound, there was found a large grave in 1891 which caused considerable comment. It was very long, and the person buried there must have been of giant size. The jaw bone was said to have been large enough to slip with ease down over an adult’s head."In writing about the first settler of Middle Tennessee, a gigantic trapper by the name of Thomas Sharpe Spencer who arrived on the Cumberland in 1778, Hale notes: "It is related as historically true that he passed once not far from the cabin in which dwelt a hunter in the service of De Mumbreun, and that the hunter, seeing the imprint of his enormous foot, became frightened and fled through the wilderness to the French settlements on the Wabash."Spencer's gigantic figure, alone in the midst of the endless forests, wandering and hunting throughout their vast depths, the herald of a coming civilization, cool, courageous, and self-reliant, going to sleep at night by a solitary camp-fire, with the hooting of the owls and the screaming of panthers around him and with no assurance of the absence of a deadlier foe, is one of the most picturesque in the history of Tennessee pioneers.About the author:William Thomas Hale (1857-1926) was a merchant, lawyer and litterateur of Liberty; was born in 1857 at Liberty, De Kalb Co., Tenn. At the age of seventeen he began business life as a partner with his father in the mercantile firm of Hale & Son, and continued in the same business, in connection with his profession, which he entered in 1884, having at the same time found leisure enough to indulge his literary tastes. He is best known as an author.
eBook details
- Title: The Backward Trail: Stories of the Indians and Tennessee Pioneers (1899)
- Author : William Thomas Hale
- Release Date : *
- Genre: Kindle Store,Kindle eBooks,Travel
- Pages : * pages
- Size : * KB
Post a Comment for "[Download] The Backward Trail: Stories of the Indians and Tennessee Pioneers (1899) by William Thomas Hale ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free"