Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/276

 *ston, which derive their source in that part of the Alleghany Mountains situated in Virginia, each of {231} which are more than a hundred fathoms broad at their embouchure. Both are navigable to an immense distance, and particularly the Holston, which is so for two hundred miles. The river French Broad, one of the principal branches of the Holston, receives its waters from the Nolachuky, is about twenty fathoms broad, and is navigable in the spring. Thus the Tennessea, with the Holston, has, in the whole, a navigable course for near eight hundred miles: but this navigation is interrupted six months in the year by the muscle shoals, a kind of shallows interspersed with rocks, which are met with in its bed two hundred miles from its embouchure in the Ohio. From West Point the borders of this great river are yet almost entirely uninhabited. The signification of the name of Tennessea, which it bears, is unknown to the Cherokees and Chactaws that occupied this country before the whites. Mr. Fisk, who has had several conversations with these Indians, never heard any precise account; in consequence of which it is most likely that this name has {232} been given to it by the nation that the Cherokees succeeded.[56]

The Cumberland Mountains are but a continuation of Laurel Mountain, which itself is one of the principal links of the Alleghanies. These mountains, on the confines of Virginia, incline more toward the west, and by the direction which they take, cut obliquely in two the state of Tennessea, which, in consequence, divides East and West Tennessea into two parts, both primitively known by the names of the Holston and Cumberland settlements,