went away on seven other occasions.1 He gathered about him, in the shadow of the wilderness, a library of the best books in history, literature and the arts, and read them. Other men of his class did the like in all respects. It was their necessary way of life; an antidote for a sedentary and immobile existence and their endless battle with the rude conditions of a new country. But the other sort of people had no such diversions. The forest fell before the "greatest wielders of the ax the world has known;" the smell of burning wood hung always in the air; a haze of smoke drifted over the clearing.

Gradually, as the regions still farther to the southward were invaded by the white race there came increasing rumors back to the northward of their fertility and mildness of climate. Rumors at length changed to more or less authentic information, and then began a slow but constantly increasing stream of travel toward them from New England and the middle colonies. Some of the more important movements of the sort have already been mentioned. The Carolinas had been occupied by various driblets of immigration from other colonies during the period from 1653 to 1740, and several parties from abroad had also arrived. The Ashley River region was peopled by the English in 1670, and two years later saw the site of Charleston occupied. Quite a number of Huguenot refugees also came to the country after the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685, and settled along Cooper River. By the year 1689 the territory now known as North Carolina and South Carolina held some five or six thousand inhabitants, and in 1693 the region was

1 He tells of these various things in his "Journal."

The large part of his books is now in the Athaneum in Boston. See list of early organized migrations in Chapter III. Some of those who journeyed into the Carolinas from Virginia did so in order to escape the harsh measures of govern ment that followed an insurrection in the last named colony.

divided into two colonies. The population of the northernmost of the two at that time had been mainly secured through migrations from other American settlements,' and the principal points at which the newcomers had gathered were around the Albemarle section. It was to Albemarle that the New Englanders came and to which the Virginians fled after the uprising there. The southern colony, on the contrary, was more strongly influenced and peopled by settlers direct from England, Scotland and Ireland, and their first important centers of activity were the Ashley River and Charleston. Gradually the coast settlements spread and threw off fragments that made their way into the interior.

Georgia did not appear on the map of American territory permanently occupied by the English speaking race until 1733. In the previous November Oglethorpe had reached Charleston from England with thirty-five families chosen to be the nucleus of a new invasion, and leaving them in the South Carolina town he set out to visit the unknown country that was his destination. Travelling by canoe he finally reached the spot destined to become Savannah, bought land from the Indians there, and his little company took up in its turn the conquest of the wilderness. The progress of Oglethorpe's colony was slow, despite the arrival of several parties of Italians, Salzburgers and Scotch during the next few years. In 1736 Oglethorpe brought over two hundred and two more colonists, among whom was John Wesley. Augusta, which was founded in 1734, had but forty-seven in

1 Though about the beginning of the eighteenth century a few Swiss and Germans settled at Newbern. Other elements that entered into the early population of South Carolina were parties of German Palatines that came over after 1720, and some Swiss that settled near the Savannah River about 1732.

3 He had received a grant from the Crown.

A hundred and thirty souls, all told.

habitants in 1741, exclusive of a small garrison of soldiers, and in 1752, when the colony's charter was surrendered to the crown of England it contained only about two thousand three hundred white people and a thousand slaves. They had made scarcely any impression on the forests that surrounded them, and moved about hardly at all.

But little more need be said concerning general conditions in the South as they were just before the commencement of the population movements that introduced a new era into the history of America. Florida was merely the shuttlecock of foreign wars, alternately held by Spain and England, and her affairs bore no relation to the greater events of permanent human progress. Alabama was an unknown country with a slight fringe of settlements along the coast. Mobile, the chief of them, was a little town. hedged in by a stockade and held by the English from 1763. New Orleans, like Florida, was the shifting prize of European warfare. France owned the Louisiana province until 1762, when she ceded it to Spain, and England was scheming to possess it. New Orleans had already become a place of considerable importance and contained some eight hundred houses and about four thousand inhabitants. It was surrounded by the inevitable stockade, two and a half miles in diameter. Nearly six thousand other people lived in the neighborhood of the city, whose activities extended up the Mississippi to a little French settlement called St. Louis, far off in the interior of the continent. Boats sometimes went up the river to St. Louis, taking two or three months for the trip, but, as has already been said, the navigation of the Mississippi at that time, or during its control by European nations, was not a factor in the development of the American travel system.

CHAPTER VII

THE FIRST AMERICANS WHO MARCHED TO THE WEST THEIR ANCESTRY, QUALITIES, APPEARANCE AND MANNER OF LIVING LOG CABINS, THEIR CONSTRUCTION, FURNISHINGS AND INDUSTRIES · NATURE OF THE EDUCATION OF THE HILL PEOPLE OF THE SOUTH THEIR PECULIAR FITNESS FOR THEIR APPROACHING TASK THE REPUBLIC OF WAUTAGA

WE may now return to the region included at present

in western and southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, and consider the people who were the first Americans to take up their march toward the West, together with the conditions that produced them and out of which their performance grew. Those men and women were Americans by birth and habit, and although the date of the exploits soon to be told was as early as the period between 1769 and 1779, the population that performed them could even then look back through several generations of ancestry which, like themselves, had grown up within the shadow of the woods and fought for life and substance with the same primitive conditions. They were the descendants of the bands of restless spirits that came down by overland marches from the more northern localities of Pennsylvania and New England during the north-and-south migrations of the period from 1735 onward, and who had brought with them into the South not only the traditional knowledge of

border existence but a lifetime of personal experience as well.

So as a race they had no new things to learn. The instinct of the pioneer was in them, and a cool caution, surprising alertness, bravery and entire self-reliance

27.-A backwoodsman and his dog. The cabin dwellers' clothing was all of home fabrication, and made of linsey-woolsey or deer skin. Original sketch by Joshua Shaw. This and the following fifteen illustrations, to No. 42 inclusive, constitute a series showing conditions of pioneer life and travel in the wilderness.

marked all their acts. They had no schools, but a boy's education nevertheless began as soon as he could walk. His lessons were not mere words for the brain to memorize and the tongue to repeat; they were the methods in which things were done and results accomplished by people older than himself, and it was his duty to observe those