PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST

CONTENTS

I. THE TREAD OF PIONEERS
II. FOLKWAYS
III. THE TRADER
IV. THE PASSING OF THE FRENCH PERIL
V. BOONE, THE WANDERER
VI. THE FIGHT FOR KENTUCKY
VII. THE DARK AND BLOODY GROUND
VIII. TENNESSEE
IX. KING'S MOUNTAIN
X. SEVIER, THE STATEMAKER
XI. BOONE'S LAST DAYS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST

Chapter I. The Tread Of Pioneers

The Ulster Presbyterians, or "Scotch-Irish," to whom history has
ascribed the dominant role among the pioneer folk of the Old Southwest,
began their migrations to America in the latter years of the seventeenth
century. It is not known with certainty precisely when or where the
first immigrants of their race arrived in this country, but soon after
1680 they were to be found in several of the colonies. It was not long,
indeed, before they were entering in numbers at the port of Philadelphia
and were making Pennsylvania the chief center of their activities in the
New World. By 1726 they had established settlements in several counties
behind Philadelphia. Ten years later they had begun their great trek
southward through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia and on to the Yadkin
Valley of North Carolina. There they met others of their own race--bold
men like themselves, hungry after land--who were coming in through
Charleston and pushing their way up the rivers from the seacoast to the
"Back Country," in search of homes.

These Ulstermen did not come to the New World as novices in the shaping
of society; they had already made history. Their ostensible object
in America was to obtain land, but, like most external aims, it was
secondary to a deeper purpose. What had sent the Ulstermen to America
was a passion for a whole freedom. They were lusty men, shrewd and
courageous, zealous to the death for an ideal and withal so practical to
the moment in business that it soon came to be commonly reported of them
that "they kept the Sabbath and everything else they could lay their
hands on," though it is but fair to them to add that this phrase is
current wherever Scots dwell. They had contested in Parliament and with
arms for their own form of worship and for their civil rights. They
were already frontiersmen, trained in the hardihood and craft of border
warfare through years of guerrilla fighting with the Irish Celts. They
had pitted and proved their strength against a wilderness; they had
reclaimed the North of Ireland from desolation. For the time, many of
them were educated men; under the regulations of the Presbyterian Church
every child was taught to read at an early age, since no person could be
admitted to the privileges of the Church who did not both understand and
approve the Presbyterian constitution and discipline. They were brought
up on the Bible and on the writings of their famous pastors, one of
whom, as early as 1650, had given utterance to the democratic doctrine
that "men are called to the magistracy by the suffrage of the people
whom they govern, and for men to assume unto themselves power is mere
tyranny and unjust usurpation." In subscribing to this doctrine and
in resisting to the hilt all efforts of successive English kings to
interfere in the election of their pastors, the Scots of Ulster had
already declared for democracy.

PIONEERS OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST