Nor are the old mansions and towns the only surviving landmarks along its way. The famous Big Spring still rises in as steady volume as of yore; the Tuscarora and Goose Creeks, no longer needfully forded but now spanned by modern concrete bridges, still flow complacently in their old-time channels and between them, on the west side of the present road and two and a half miles south of Leesburg, still stand the old Indian mounds.
These mounds, for there are others scattered to the west of the one so noticeable from the highway, have always excited local interest but the present generation has all but forgotten their traditional story. Somewhere in the neighbourhood of the house of Mr. T. W. Gaines, on whose land rises the mound nearest the road, or perhaps over the land where the mounds themselves now stand, there was fought a hardly contested Indian battle at about the time the first of the white pioneers were coming into that neighbourhood. Many years ago the late Mrs. William H. Martin, then a bride recently come to Leesburg, with the assistance of the late Miss Lizzie Worsley, who gave a lifetime of study to the past of Leesburg and Loudoun, carefully gathered up what she then could of the old story which had been handed down from generation to generation and incorporated it in a gracefully written "History and Traditions of Greenway" which was published in the _Record_ of Leesburg, then edited by her husband.
"Numberless were said to be dead warriors," wrote Mrs. Martin, "who found their last resting place so far from their native lands beneath the mounds that were easily distinguishable in the gloom of the thick forest. This battle had been between the Catawbas of the Carolinas and the Delawares.[38] An hereditary enmity existed between these two tribes, distant as they were, the one from the other. A large band of Delawares, pushing into the territory of the Catawbas had severely punished that tribe, and victorious, were travelling northward to their home. The Catawbas followed and unexpectedly fell upon them, having overtaken them at the Potomac. Terrible and swift was their revenge, yet such were the fighting qualities of the Delawares thus brought to bay, that the Catawbas were forced to retreat, without prisoners. But when the remaining Delaware warriors looked upon their dead they saw the flower of their tribe, stark in death, and too far to be carried to their own hunting grounds. So there they were buried...."[39]