But more serious still was the ceaseless western march of the American backwoodsmen, who were everywhere in conflict with the Indians.

William Trent, an Indian trader, and brother-in-law of Colonel George Croghan, was commissioned to raise a company of a hundred men from among the backwoodsmen along the frontier, and started at once for the Ohio country to get his men together and begin work on the fort, the main body to follow so soon as it could be properly equipped.

His backwoodsmen were wild and reckless fellows, incapable of discipline, and soon took themselves off to the settlements, while we toiled on westward through the now unbroken forest.

Most of the women were used to dangers and alarms, and placed implicit reliance in the power of their fathers, husbands, and brothers to protect them; and well they might, for a bolder set of stalwart men than these backwoodsmen never trod the wilderness.

We cannot say that the effect was startling, for these backwoodsmen had been born and bred in the midst of alarms, and were so used to them that a "bustin' steam biler" itself, unless it had blown them fairly off their legs, would not have startled them.

He became acquainted with the ways of the backwoodsmen and of the savage Indians.

"They may be dangerous to your backwoodsmen," said Braddock; "but to the trained soldiers of the king they can give no trouble at all.

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.

A country like Americalittle better than a mere forestthe inhabitants notoriously far behind Europeans in refinementfilled with wild Indians, rattle-snakes, bears, and backwoodsmen; ferocious hogs and ugly negros; and every other species of noxious and terrific animal!

The whole secret and cause of this guerre à mort, declared by the backwoodsmen against Messrs. Birkbeck and Flowers, was, that when they first settled upon the prairies, they attempted to act the patron and the benefactor, and considered themselves entitled to some respect.

The Ioways are a nation dwelling in the Missouri territory, and these hostages delivered themselves up pending the investigation of an affray that had taken place between their people and the backwoodsmen.

An officer who had seen a great deal of service on the frontiers, assured me that, from experience, he had rather fall into the hands of the Indians, than of the backwoodsmen.

The backwoodsmen had pushed the Spaniards from the Mississippi, had set up a slave-holding republic in Texas, and had conquered the Californian gold-fields, in the sheer masterful exercise of might.

Excellent persons then foretold ruin to the country from bringing into it a disorderly population of backwoodsmen, with the same solemnity that has in our own day marked the prophecies of those who have seen similar ruin in the intaking of Hawaii and Porto Rico.

THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTIONTHE SOUTHERN BACKWOODSMEN OVERWHELM THE CHEROKEES, 1776 XII.GROWTH AND CIVIL ORGANIZATION OF KENTUCKY, 1776 APPENDICES: APPENDIX ATO CHAPTER IV.

Showing Hamilton's route from Detroit to Vincennes; Clark's route from Redstone to the Illinois, and thence to Vincennes; Boon's trail, on the Wilderness Road to Kentucky; Robertson's trail to the settlement he founded on the Cumberland; the water route from the Watauga to Nashboro, that taken by the Adventure; the march of the backwoodsmen from the Sycamore Shoals to King's Mountain.

Moreover, the gulf coast, as well as the interior, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, was held by foreign powers; while in the north this was only true of the country between the Ohio and the Great Lakes during the first years of the Revolution, until the Kentucky backwoodsmen conquered it.

Their favorite arm was the light fowling-piece, for they were expert wing shots; unlike the American backwoodsmen, who knew nothing of shooting on the wing, and looked down on smooth-bores, caring only for the rifle, the true weapon of the freeman.

We have taken into our language the word prairie, because when our backwoodsmen first reached the land and saw the great natural meadows of long grasssights unknown to the gloomy forests wherein they had always dweltthey knew not what to call them, and borrowed the term already in use among the French inhabitants.

All their attributes seemed alien to the polished army-officers of old France; they had but little more in common with the latter than with the American backwoodsmen.

The entire frontier of this region was continually harassed by Indians; and it was steadily extended by the home-planting of the rifle-bearing backwoodsmen.

Canada lay north, and the tendency of the backwoodsman was to thrust west; among the Southern backwoodsmen, the tendency was south and southwest.

The Mississippi formed no barrier whatsoever to the march of the backwoodsmen.

The reports of the Spanish ecclesiastics of Louisiana dwelt continually upon the dangers with which the oncoming of the backwoodsmen threatened the Church no less than the State.

These were mostly merchants, farmers, artisans, millers, and backwoodsmen, the pioneers, who, with their Dutch neighbors, blazed the trail of civilization through that section, rolled back the savage redman, and marked along the banks of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers the sites of future towns and cities.