Looking Westward from the muddy banks of the foe they had crossed, not with ease and satisfaction, but praying hearts and quaking knees, they bent low to pray for guidance on the way. Roll, roll, turn and turn again. The forest is dark, heavy and many eyes look and quick ears listen akin to fear, at the strange sounds, the ducking wheels, ever turning, bang my people nearer. A valley not large, but deeply and tightly held by the toes of a range of mountains, yet unnamed. Long since gone are the red men.
Silence reigns again in the valley.
The end of a journey, now the gate to the frontier, John Woodall and wife Arminda Cupp Woodall, and five children, John II, William Samuel, and three other children of whom I do not know the names, John's brothers, Samuel, Charlie and Pachard Woodall with their families and three single sisters left Adaresville, Georgia, in 1843. They were moving to the western wilderness to homestead new land. They spent about two years in Alabama, headed westward again in early 1845. They stopped at Alpine, Arkansas, Clark County, in the Autumn of 1845, scouted the land in Clark and Pike Counties and settled in a valley over the first range of mountains, south of Kirby, east of highway 27 toward Murfreesboro. The country was a wilderness.