part
of the great hunting-grounds of the Shawnees, Cherokees, Creeks,
Chickamaugas, Chickasaws, and even the Iroquois of New York. The basin
of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, that part now Tennessee and
Kentucky, was claimed by each of these tribes as its own, not as home
but as a hunting-ground, and when bands of hunters of rival tribes met
in the territory each fought the other as an invader, and their battles
gave to Kentucky its Indian name, meaning in the Indian tongue the "Dark
and Bloody Ground."

But Old Coonrod kept pace with all of them and prospered from their
friendship, and an Indian trail turned and led close to where he lived.
The last of the Indians passed through the valley in 1842.

As Old Coonrod prospered he bought land and slaves, and was a large
owner of both in his day. He was a cautious and judicious purchaser of
realty. The court records show that at some time or other he was the
owner of the most desirable parts of Fentress county. He held title to
the land upon which Jamestown, the county seat, now stands, which is the
"Obedstown" of Mark Twain's "Gilded Age." He owned "Rock Castle," a
tract of hardwood timber that is enclosed by mountains and can be
reached by but one passageway, a place that became famous during the
Civil War. He bought and sold much of the county's best farming-land
along Yellow Creek.

Fentress was made a county of Tennessee in 1823 and the first four pages
of the new county's records of deeds show that within eighteen months
Conrad Pile had added, through a number of trades, over six hundred
acres to his already large holdings.

So cautious in land titles was he that at the time of his death he owned
three rights to his home-place including the farming-land along Wolf
River. The first was his squatter's rights, which he had homesteaded.
But against this, North Carolina in ceding the territory of Tennessee to
the United States Government reserved title to the land grants the state
had offered to her soldiers of the Revolutionary War, and "one Henry
Rowan" of North Carolina entered warrants given him on March 10, 1780.
The Revolutionary soldiers had twenty years to locate their grants, and
in 1797 Rowan appeared with surveyors, claiming by his entry of 1780 the
"Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." He operated under two land
warrants of 320 acres each, and in his registry of one of them he
specified "a tract on the north side of Spring Creek (now Wolf River),
toge