tainly an interesting question, and one the answer to which
will, in all likelihood, be wholly lost in a few generations
more. For contemporaneous history has, I believe, over-
looked the matter as beneath its dignity, nor do I know that
there is any account of the reasons to be found any where on
record or in print. Yet tradition has preserved them thus
far, and those who will search among the peculiar circum-



24 MIDDLE GEORGIA AND LAND LOTTERY.

stances which occurred in Georgia during the last years of
the last century, will find in them also a clear solution of the
novelty for novelty our Land Lottery system undoubtedly
was. None greater and more striking has ever occurred in
the polity of any country, in regard to its public lands. It
was a thing wholly new under the sun. No precedent for it
existed on all the files of the past. There was not any
where the shadow of a likeness to it, nothing analagous
even. Georgia originated and contrived it out of whole cloth,
and at once it acquired a strong popularity here which it
never lost. And yet no favor or following out of Georgia
did it ever find. It was never copied or imitated anywhere
else, consequently as soon as the State's public domain was
exhausted and no more lands remained to be distributed, the
invention died out at once right here on the spot of its birth,
and is now laid away forever among the innumerable by-
gone things interesting and important in their day, but
which are never more to be repeated or seen.

In some respects the two systems of Head Rights and the
Land Lottery, were not unlike. In both the aim was not
the enrichment of the treasury so much as the rapid settling
and development of the country. Having this main object
in view, they both regarded the public domain in the light
of a great fund to be distributed in free gifts or allotments of
land among the people. It was in the mode of effecting this
distribution that their difference consisted. The manner
under the Head Right System was, to treat the whole country
as one great blank, open to free competition, under the rule
that the first comers should he first served and all served in
the order of their coming. The process accordingly was to
issue to individual applicants, upon their paying certain of-
fice fees and also sometimes an almost nominal price for
the lands, certain authentic documents variously entitled
Head Rights, Land Warrants or Warrants of Survey, by
locating which on any particular lands, such individual ap-
plicants become the owners of those lands and entitled to
have a grant issued by the State therefor, provided no body



MIDDLE GEORGIA AND LAND LOTTERY. 25

else had already taken up and appropriated the same land.
This mode, however, though so universal, was always liable
to considerable objections. Under it land titles were much
exposed to difficulties and litigation by reason of the same
surface being often covered and always being more or less in
danger of being covered by conflicting Warrants or Head
Rights in favor of divers persons. And this danger was
everywhere greater in proportion as the lands were more de-
sirable and more sought after. Also the poorer and less at-
tractive lands would be neglected and very slowly taken up,
so that from both causes combined, the country was very apt
to become in the richer localities, a hot bed of law suits and
conflicting claims, and, in the poorer, a confused patchwork
of appropriated and unappropriated or vacant lands, which
would eventuate in making it difficult to know and pick out
what was vacant from what was not vacant. Moreover, to
the great majority of people, especially widows, orphans,
unmarried women and to the very poor generally, it was
not only onerous but next to impossible to make the person-
al explorations, without which the right to take out and
locate Head Rights was almost worthless. To all which
if we add the frequent errors, inaccuracies and abuses grow-
ing out of an ill-contrived, incompetent and untrustworthy of-
ficial machinery, we behold a formidable mass of evils the
tendency of which was to obstruct settlement and throw the
best lands into the hands of speculators and the rich and
crafty, to the exclusion pf a class who were by far the most
proper objects of public bounty.

It was, however, much less as an escape from these long
familiar and therefore not much regarded evils, than as a
violent, virtuous, indignant reaction against two huge, new
fangled villainies, which were still recent and in their inten-
sest odium, that the Land Lottery system first suggested
itself in Georgia, and found universal favor, and was
adopted, and permanently pursued by the State in prefer-
ence to all other modes of disposing of her public lands.
These two great villainies were the Pine Barren Specula-



2G MIDDLE GEORGIA AND LAND LOTTERY.

tion of 1794-5, and the Yazoo Fraud of the same era. In-
censed to the highest degree by these two monstrous in-
iquities practised upon the honor and property of the State,
whereby organized bands of corrupt and corrupting specu-
lators Avere enabled to cheat, swindle and make profit to the
tune of millions, the honest, outraged people of Georgia
resolved that in all subsequent dispositions of their public
lands they would sacrifice all other objects to the paramount
one of closing every door and providing every security
against the future perpetration of such like, or any other
land frauds or villainies. Out of this feeling so honorable
and redeeming to the State, was born the Land Lottery
System. Under it the public lands, as they were from time
to time freed from Indian occupancy, were at public cost sur-
veyed into small lots of uniform size, and marked, num-
bered and mapped, and the whole returned to the Surveyor
General's Office, from whence by commissioners chosen by
the Legislature for the purpose, the State caused all the lots
to be thrown into the Lottery wheel, and to become fortune's
gifts as well as her own to her people.

By this course it is obvious, every temptation and means
for the practice of fraud and corruption was taken away.
For who was going to bribe the members of the Legislature
or other public functionaries, high or low, when it was ren-
dered utterly impossible by the very system adopted, for the
corruptor to make or secure anything by means of the brib-
ery? Who would ever think of bribing surveyors to meas-
ure or mark lots falsely or make forged or fictitious returns
of surveys, when nobody could possibly know or foresee to
whom any particular lots would be drawn, in the corning
lottery? And how could speculators, single or combined,
practice frauds upon the State, in regard to the lands, where
every lot of land had already passed out of the State into pri-
vate ownership, before it could become an object of speculation?

In addition to all which it was a high recommendation of
the system that it gave to all, the poor as well as the rich,
to the feeble as well as the strong, to women as well as to
men, and to widows and to orphans, an equal and fair



THE PINE MOUNTAIN. 27

chance. It also gave instantly to every lot of land, an owner
with an unquestionable title, and by this means, and by
preventing the accumulation of large bodies of land in the
hands of (speculative individuals and companies, it promoted
greatly the rapid settlement and improvement of the new re-
gions, beyond any other system that could have been devised.



IV.



THE PINE MOUNTAIN.

Nature, when she drew near the completion of Middle
Georgia, ere she put her finishing hand to the work, paused
and said : What, shall be the last touch ? What crowning
gift shall I bestow ? What impress set that shall never be-
come commonplace? What proud, striking feature call
forth on this Westernmost expanse that shall make it unique
among the Midlands of the South, a charm and a glory to all
beholders and through all time ?

And she said I will give it a mountain, a mountain where
mountains are not wont to be ; a mountain, too, rich in
precious inner treasures as well as in charms attractive to the
eye. And as she spake, Behold ! Earth, heaved and the Pine
Mountain uprose in modest grandeur and beauty, adorned
as to its umbrageous sides and fertile, close clinging valleys
and-breezy cerulean summits, not only with pines, but with
other trees also unnumerable. Far down to the South, it
uprose in lonely loveliness and isolation, further down, and
nearer to the sea, by more than one hundred miles, than
any other mountain, or mountain knob, or outlier. And
at its Eastern end, nature allowed a little river, the first
that turned away from the Atlantic slope and went to
woo the blue waters of the Gulf, to pierce its yet unharden-



28 THE PINE MOUNTAIN.

ed mass, and to seek the sea in a straight, onward course
through its disrupted sides. But as the young mountain
grew towards the West, it grew also compact and rock-
ribhed. It swelled out larger and towered up higher, and
at length after stretching away for some fifty miles, became
too strong for even the mighty Chattahoochee, child of the
eternal Alleghanies, forcing the impetuous river to bend
conquered around its Western base, and to go fretting, foam-
ing, writhing, tumbling over many a mile of rocky, unre-
lenting rapids down to where Columbus sits in long waiting
at the foot of those first falls and all their vast water power.
But mourn not, fair Coweta,* daughter of the ever-roaring,
soul-attuning waters ! Nor let thy firm heart fail thee un-
der the trying fortunes that have been thy lot ! How often
does time justify bright dreams whose fulfillment has been
long deterred! And may it not be in coming years
when haply redundant capital flowing thither from
afar shall become wedded by ties tight and strong to
hungry labor in our new-ordered South as already in other
lands, that those who shall then roam the green earth
shall see thy long river staircase, from Columbus to
West Point, one climbing street of pallatian mills, from
whose lofty windows toward that street's upper end, the
caged operatives will often look out and regale their eyes
and hearts with the ever fresh aerial beauty of the Pine
Mountain. Most probably, however, ere that great specta-
cle shall present itself, it will have for its forerunner,
another hardly less inspiring, though of a very different
sort. Around that mountain with its naturally fine circum-
jacent lands, its gushing wealth of pure healthful waters,
and its delicious, salubrious climate, it has occurred to me
that earlier perhaps than any where else in the old cotton
belt proper of the State, there will be more and more seen a
white population in full, manly, working harmony with the
new condition of things with which the Southern people
have to grapple; a white population that will know no



* Indian name of the site of Columbus and the Falls of the Chattahoochee.



THE PINE MOUNTAIN. 29

shrinking from rough, hard, rural toil, from daily labor in
the field throughout the day, throughout the year, under
summer and autumnal, as well as under wintry and vernal
suns; a population, consequently, which will be freed from
dependence on the negro; and under whose superior indus-
try and management, that lair region will be made to re-
spond fully to its great natural advantages and to become a
fit ornate setting to the central mountain gem which it en-
circles.

Of the various routes, two on the Eastern side of Flint
river and five between the Flint and Chattahoochee, by
which I had occasion to cross the Pine Mountain in old
times when it was yet an interesting novelty, most of
them being at points of great depression, such as the roads
usually seek, presented no very striking views or other in-
teresting features of scenery ; and indeed the very sight of
the mountain itself was hidden from the approaching
traveler in those days, by the thick tall forests which every-
where environed it, so that the first notice of being near it
was the actual climbing of its sides. I must, however, make
an exception, here, of the direct route between Hamilton
and LaGrange, which was first opened some forty-five or six
years ago, to supersede the old roundabout way by King's
Gap. This new road struck the mountain some few miles
north-west from Hamilton, and by a gentle sidling ascent,
rose gradually, above the continually expanding campaign
below, of which the rider on horseback caught glimpses
larger and larger through the surrounding trees, which
grew thinner and freer irom undergrowth as he "ascended.
Thus he was well prepared, by the time he reached the
crest of the mountain, to turn his horse's head to the South
and stand at gaze. It was but for a few moments, however,
that he would thus stand, for quickly he saw that he was at
the most depressed point of that narrow crest and that it
stretched away westwardly by a rapid, smooth ascent over
a bare, gravelly surface, with a thin growth of mountain
oaks inviting the horseman by its openness. After follow-



30 THE PIXE MOUNTAIN.

ing this ascent for a few hundred yards, again he stood at
gaze, and was satisfied not to stir another step. A fair,
vast, uniform scene, which the axe had not yet perceptibly
marred, was embraced at once by the eye, above all blue,
below all green, the intermediate ether filled from Heaven
to Earth with a profusion of intense summer sunlight, one
single ray of which would suffice to illuminate the World.*
Away beyond Flint river on the East and beyond the Chat-
tahoochee on the West, the hills rose to meet the kiss of the
bending skies. Not so toward the South, not so towards
the fierce clime beneath which the great American Mediter-
ranean rolls. There the green earth declined lower and
lower in the distance and sank away more and more in love-
ly maiden withdrawal from the stooping Heavens, which at
length when the strained eye could reach no further, de-
scended curtain-like to the low-lying emerald expanse, shut-
ting out from view all beyond.

On turning to the North, the contrast was very striking.
Whereas to the South the country sloped away in a long,
interminable, inclined plain till it reached the sea, on the
Northern side it rose rapidly as it receded, the rivers and all
their tributary streams running downward toward the
mountain. Hence the prospect in that direction was soon
shut in and bore no comparison with the view on the South-
ern side.

* I should not have thought of using this very strong expression, but for my
vivid recollection of the total eclipse of the sun in November, 1834. I stood
watchingforthe instant of entire obscuration. It lasted but for a moment.
The very next moment a single ray shot from the sun to the earth through
the darkness, fine as the finest thread, intensely luminous and visible throughout
the whole ninety-five millions of miles of length. It literally illuminated the
world, for it fell on every eye and alighted on every object. The next instant
a pencil of rays shot out, but it only created a greater not a more positive or
striking illumination. To not more than one in many millions of men, is it
given ever to see a total eclipse of the sun ; partly because it is a thing that so
rarely occurs, partly because when it does occur, it is visible on so small a por-
tion of the earth's surface. Well is the Astronomical Author of the American
Almanac for the year 1834, justified in pronouncing it "the most magnificent
and sublime of the phenomena of nature, compared with which Niagara sinks
into mediocrity."



THE PINE MOUNTAIN. 31

But what was done by nature for the Pine Mountain was
not all external. Deep within its howels she is and ever
has been busy in mysterious workings. There she lias
established her wonderful hidden laboratories: At the chief-
est of which no chymic hand save her own mixes and medi-
cates the inimitable waters of the Meriwether Warm Springs,
bursting in a lavish, chrystal sluice from the Mountain's
Northern side. No fires but of her kindling have kept them
through ages at the same exact happy temperature, delicious
and healthful for bathing, and it is said, too, medicinal for
drinking. Had such waters been found in any of the moun-
tains around ancient Rome, marble acqueducts would have
conveyed them to imperial palaces, marble bathing apart-
ments would have welcomed them as they came gushing.
There is nothing elsewhere, I have often heard it said, com-
parable to the delicate, exquisite luxury they afford. Cer-
tainly my own experience tallies with this belief, nor can I
conceive of anything superior. But then they are the only
Warm Springs that I Lave ever visited. The climate is
worthy of the waters and the site and scenery worthy of
both. In Ante Bellum times it was a place of great resort,
thronged by the best company, and so it will be again if ever
there shall be again money and means at the South for
pleasuring, and if our people shall be wise and Southern
enough to spend their means within their own borders, and
thus help towards adding the adornments and attractions of
art to the beauties and blessings by which nature appeals to
us to stay at home and cherish our own household gods.
How much better would this be on the part of the fortunate,
prosperous few among us than gadding abroad to empty
their pockets and air themselves, their silks and felts at the
North to the annual contemptious admiration of our con-
querors, robbers, oppressors there "that some of the rebels
should have some money left yet for summer flaunting and slwio
after all." To your tents, oh ! Israel! To your own sum-
mer resorts if a summering you go, even though you should
have nothing there better than tents or log cabins to shelter



32 THE PINE MOUNTAIN.

you ! The matrons and maidens of the South whom the
war left poor but heroines and patriots forever, stand ready
to settle this point aright for you. To their husbands,
fathers, brothers they exclaim, if we have money to spend,
let it be spent here at home where it will help to sustain and
cheer our own stricken Southern land.

But hereabouts and not far off are to be seen other kindred
displays of nature's liberality to the Pine Mountain. Mind-
ful of the Southern liver, often a prey to malaria, she has
considerately imbedded some where in the mountain some-
what or much what of brimstone and taught her purest wa-
ters to percolate there and to tarry long enough to become
impregned with its virtues and .then a little way off to the
North to bubble up in the White Sulphur Spring a resort
dear in former times to the hepatic and to staid, quiet people.

Nor was she unthoughtful of those who, victims of no
malady, might merely wish to spend a summer vacation in
relaxation and gaiety, and laying up a stock of fine health
for the future. Behold for these, in a sweet valley to the
South, the famed Chalybeate Spring renowned for its tonic
properties. Where lie the great subterranean iron ore beds
from which the generous fountain distills and draws its
strength, none can tell, save that they are deep hidden in
the mountain's hard bosom, safe there from the miner's pick
and the vagrant enterprise of searchers after "Mineral Rich-
es." And none need fear as long as that mountain shall
stand, that these its happily ferruginated waters will ever
fail, or lose aught of their health giving efficacy.

Nature's rich dowry to the Pine Mountain is yet further
augmented by another mineral spring which it has never
been my fortune to visit, but which from all I have ever
heard, ought not to be forgotten in an inventory of its
wealth. 'It is the Oak Mountain Spring, so called from a
neighboring spur or projection of that name from the main
mountain range. Owing, it is said, to the neglect of the
owner of the land to make or promote the making of provis-
ion for the entertainment and accomodation of visitors, this



THE PINE MOUNTAIN. 33

spring has hitherto been little known, being frequented only
by those who are willing and able to erect accommodations
arid provide in all respects ibr themselves. And yet in spite
of this drawback, its waters have acquired a high reputation
with the few that know them, foreshadowing a wide celeb-
rity and a thronged patronage whenever they shall fall
under a propitious management. They have never been an-
alyzed, and consequently their qualities are vouched for by
no chemical tests, and the warm praises and satisfactory ex-
perience of all who have ever given them a trial must be
accepted for the presentas the only certificates of their merit.
Cross we now Flint river from the West, and two or
three miles from its Eastern bank, in what was forty years
ago a wild sequestered glen of the mountain, close by the
side of a little rivulet, we encounter the greatest natural cu-
riosity of all, the greatest not only in this region, but the
greatest and most interesting it has ever happened to me to
see in Georgia or anywhere else. It is the Thundering
Spring, a boiling, uprushing column, six feet in diameter,
of purest water and finest sand intermixed. The column on
reaching the top of its deep cylindrical well overflows in a
ceaseless flood on the side next to the rivulet and runs into
it. So forceful is its upward rush that no dead or living
thing, animal or vegetable, nothing lighter than stone or
metal, can conquer it and go down. It is a wondrous Na-
ture's bath, the bather being doubly laved, water- washed
and sand-washed at the same time, treated over his whole
body to an exquisite, healthful cutaneous friction far sur-
passing all the appliances of hygene or "adulteries of art;"
bobbing perpendicularly up and down in the water mean-
while, incapable and fearless of sinking. Upon first leap-
ing into it, a man goes straight down under the water for
an instant, and then pops straight back up to the surface
again, like a submerged cork, and there floats at ease breast
high out of the water, gamboling mermaid-like as long
as he pleases. No bottom up to the time of my visit had
ever been found to this unparagoncd well, nor had it ever



34 THE PINE MOUNTAIN.

been at all ascertained that it had any other or more solid
bottom than the seemingly inexhaustible and consequently
interminably deep, loose, quicksands which it was forever
bringing to the top and discharging along with its waters
into the adjoining rivulet.

Of course, the hydrostatic principle which caused and
perpetuates this spring in all its up-shooting vehemence is
simple and obvious. But where shall we look for such an-
other exemplification of that principle ? Not certainly
on the Atlantic side of North America. Nor have I ever
heard of its match anywhere in the great trans-montane
"unknown" of the Pacific slope. I can recall nothing of
which I ever heard or read that is a match for it except the
Geysers of Iceland, and they are beyond doubt an over
match .

It is a thing that strikes the contemplative mind at once
curiously and pleasantly that Nature should have passed by
all the greater mountains and reserved this wonder of hers
for one so petty and unimportant in comparison as the Pinu
Mountain. Some where in its upper strata she saw fit to
construct in preference to all other places, her mighty reser-
voirs and to keep them perpetually filled with that ponder-
ous mass of waters whose downward pressure forcing them
along through some narrow, strong-walled subterranean
passage, they came at last against the quicksands of this
spot, where their further underground course being arrested
by unknown obstacles, they burst their way suddenly and
violently through the loose, overlying sands up to the
Earth's surface and to the light of the sun and the wonder-
ing eyes of men.

The name of Thundering Spring is supposed to have been
bestowed by the Indians whose exquisite sense of hearing
doubtless caught sometimes the sound of the surging wa-
ters as they raved and boiled in their sandy depths. But
its thunders have now long been silent or at least unheard,
unable to penetrate arid awaken the dull ear of Civilization.



KING'S GAP. KING'S TRAILS. 35



CHAPTER V.



KING'S GAP KING'S TRAILS.

King's Gap in the Pine Mountain, a few miles above
Hamilton in Harris county, on the road to Greenville, is the
last memento now remaining of a set of Indian Trails of that
name that in Indian times perforated in various directions
the upper part of the region between the Flint and Chatta-
hoochee and, I feel certain, also of a much larger scope of
the Creek Territory to the East, South and West. I first
visited the country North of the Pine Mountain, in the