A doll had a personality in those times, and has yet, to a few simple backwoods souls, even in this day and generation.

He sat over the fire, close over it, as he had done in the backwoods many a night, smoking the old brier pipe that had cheered him in his hours of solitary watching, and thinking with a grim bitterness that it would have been better for him if he had been knocked on the head the night of the raid at Salisbury Plain.

" "Still out in the backwoods?" asked Bertie.

" "Yes, he's still in the backwoods, as you call it," responded Howard; "and from what he says I should think he's having a pretty hard time of it; though, of course, he doesn't complain: there are some men still left who don't complain."

In crossing the ocean, in the backwoods-experience which everywhere precedes cultivation, in the excitement which has followed the obliteration of social monopolies and the throwing open of the wealth of a continent to free competition, the old traditional precautions have been lost, the old household wisdoms, the old economies of health; and these we have now to reproduce for ourselves.

Joe and Henri devoted themselves almost exclusively to trapping beaver, in which pursuit they were so successful that they speedily became wealthy men, according to backwood notions of wealth.

* Backwood's is, as usual, strong in the martial element, and is further proof that in the present conflict there is no excluding rivalry between pen and sword, but plenty of room for both.

Or you'll die all by yourself, in some backwood or other.

You're only a dandy boy, you know, and they don't get married to backwood Southern girls.

The locality looked like a plagiarism from the Ohio backwoods.

The extraordinary little backwoods state of Franklin began and ended a career unique in our annals.

The valley of the Ohio already belonged to the Americans by right of conquest and of armed possession; it was held by rifle-bearing backwoods farmers, hard and tenacious men, who never lightly yielded what once they had grasped.

Folk of the common backwoods type were as yet more numerous than any others among the settlers.

[Footnote: Autobiography of Peter Cartwright, the Backwoods Preacher.]

Of the other frontiersmen who went into the Spanish territory, some, like Boone, continued to live as hunters and backwoods farmers.

They were backwoods farmers, each man preferring to live alone on his own freehold, which he himself tilled and from which he himself had cleared the timber.

Louisiana was added to the United States because the hardy backwoods settlers had swarmed into the valleys of the Tennessee, the Cumberland, and the Ohio by hundreds of thousands; and had already begun to build their raw hamlets on the banks of the Mississippi, and to cover its waters with their flat-bottomed craft.

What was much more important, the mouth of the Mississippi was commanded by the important seaport of New Orleans, which was accessible to fleets, which could readily be garrisoned by water, and which was the capital of a region that by backwoods standards passed for well settled.

Suffice it to say that the control of the mouth of the great Father of Waters was of direct personal consequence to almost every tree feller, every backwoods farmer, every land owner, every townsman, who dwelt beyond the Alleghanies.

This was the attitude of the backwoods people as with sinewy, strenuous shoulder they pressed against the Spanish boundaries.

On the other hand, a backwoods army could move down stream with comparative ease; and even though such an expedition were defeated, it was certain that the attempt would be repeated again and again, until by degrees the mob of hardy riflemen changed into a veteran army, and brought forth some general like "Old Hickory," able to lead to victory.

Backwoods folk, their deeds; their pressure on the Spanish dominions; they were the real factors in acquiring Louisiana.

Books in the backwoods.

Currency in the backwoods.

Trade in the backwoods.