Some became rather attached to the officers who came among them; others grew rather to dislike them: most felt merely a vague sentiment of distrust and repulsion, alike for the haughty British officer in his scarlet uniform, and for the reckless backwoodsman clad in tattered homespun or buckskin.

Washington's Continentals gave the west its freedom; and took in return for themselves and their children a share of the land that had been conquered and held by the scanty bands of tall backwoodsmen.

Some of the better backwoodsmen strongly protested against this outrage; but the mass of them were excited and angered by the rumor of Indian hostilities, and the brutal and disorderly side of frontier character was for the moment uppermost.

The average American backwoodsman was quite as brutal and inconsiderate a victor as the average British officer; in fact, he was in all likelihood the less humane of the two; but the Englishman deliberately made the deeds of the savage his own.

No doubt, to the heart of the chivalrous backwoodsman those smoke-dried lips were yet the altar of early passion,as that rather ungrammatical tongue was still the music of the spheres; but the unattractiveness of that conjugal counterblast is Nature's own protest against smoking.

Among the many daring backwoodsmen who were his followers and companions the traditions pay particular heed to one Phouts, "a stout, thick Dutchman of uncommon strength and activity.

But these two, the scoffing, analytical doctor, and the honest, dogged backwoodsman, each sat trembling in the depths of his being.

Boon was essentially a type, and possesses his greatest interest for us because he represents so well the characteristics as well as the life-work of his fellow backwoodsmen; still, it is unfair not to bear in mind also the leading part he played and the great services he rendered to the nation.

The population on the Cumberland did not increase very fast for some years after the close of the Revolutionary War; and the settlers were, as a rule, harsh, sturdy backwoodsmen, who lived lives of toil and poverty.

But these two, the scoffing, analytical doctor, and the honest, dogged backwoodsman, each sat trembling in the depths of his being.

The ignorant and violently prejudiced backwoodsmen naturally believed all manner of evil of their British foes; but it is singular that writers who ought to be well informed should even now continue to accept all their wild assertions as unquestioned facts.

[Footnote: The Germans of up-country North Carolina were guilty of as brutal massacres as the Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen of Pennsylvania.

Standing one day at the Craigie House gate he was accosted by a lank backwoodsman: "Say, stranger, I have come from way back; kin you tell me how I kin git to see the great North American poet?"

These deer hunters were now with the oncoming backwoodsmen, and declared that they knew the ground well.

Naturally, there was little love lost between the bitterly prejudiced old army officer, fixed and rigid in all his ideas, and the equally prejudiced backwoodsmen, whose ways of looking at almost all questions were antipodal to his.

He did much in creating a strong feeling of attachment to the Union among the rough backwoodsmen with whom he had thrown in his lot.

Skilled backwoodsmen scattered out, Indian fashion, but their less skilful or more panic-struck brethren, and all regulars or ordinary militia, kept together from a kind of blind feeling of safety in companionship, and in consequence their nimble and ruthless antagonists destroyed them at their ease.

The non-slaveholding backwoodsmen formed the vanguard of settlement on each frontier in turn; the small slaveholders followed on their heels and crowded each fertile district until the men who lived by hunting as well as by farming had to push further westward; finally the larger planters with their crowded carriages, their lumbering wagons and their trudging slaves arrived to consolidate the fields of such earlier settlers as would sell.

After the chastisement inflicted upon the former by the united forces of all the southern backwoodsmen, treaties were held with them,

The west would never have been settled save for the fierce courage and the eager desire to brave danger so characteristic of the stalwart backwoodsmen.

the motley crowd from Accomac were no fit adversaries for those stern backwoodsmen.

The population on the Cumberland did not increase very fast for some years after the close of the Revolutionary War; and the settlers were, as a rule, harsh, sturdy backwoodsmen, who lived lives of toil and poverty.

Among the hunters, surveyors, and explorers who came into the wilderness in 1773 was a band led by three young men named McAfee,typical backwoodsmen, hardy, adventurous, their frontier recklessness and license tempered by the Calvinism they had learned in their rough log home.

He was an uneducated backwoodsman, famous for his great size, and his skill with the rifle, no less than for the curious mixture of courage, rough good humor, and brutality in his character.

No one, perhaps among the numberless thousands who did hear him, ever knew what the power was, by which this unlettered backwoodsman swayed multitudes at his will.