The long grass and weeds
which covered the ground in a wealth of natural pasturage
harbored the poisonous copperhead and the rattlesnake and, being
shaded by the overhead foliage, they held the heavy dews and bred
swarms of mosquitoes, gnats, and big flies which tortured both
men and cattle. To protect the cattle and horses from the attacks
of these pests the settlers were obliged to build large
"smudges"--fires of green timber--against the wind. The animals
soon learned to back up into the dense smoke and to move from one
grazing spot to another as the wind changed. But useful as were
the green timber fires that rolled their smoke on the wind to
save the stock, they were at the same time a menace to the
pioneer, for they proclaimed to roving bands of Cherokees that a
further encroachment on their territory had been made by their
most hated enemies--the men who felled the hunter's forest. Many
an outpost pioneer who had made the long hard journey by sea and
land from the old world of persecution to this new country of
freedom, dropped from the red man's shot ere he had hewn the
threshold of his home, leaving his wife and children to the
unrecorded mercy of his slayer.
Those more fortunate pioneers who settled in groups won the first
heat in the battle with the wilderness through massed effort
under wariness.
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