Volume I Part 8 (2/2)

147. ”History of Kentucky Baptists,” J. H. Spencer (Cincinnati, 1885)

13. Boon, though of English descent, had no Virginia blood in his veins; he was an exact type of the regular backwoodsman; but in Clark, and still more in Blount, we see strong traces of the ”cavalier spirit.” Of course, the Cavaliers no more formed the bulk of the Virginia people than they did of Rupert's armies; but the squires and yeomen who went to make up the ma.s.s took their tone from their leaders.

14. Many of the most noted hunters and Indian fighters were of German origin, (see ”Early Times in Middle Tennessee,” John Carr, Nashville, 1859, pp. 54 and 56, for Steiner and Mansker--or Stoner and Mansco.) Such were the Wetzels, famous in border annals, who lived near Wheeling; Michael Steiner, the Steiners being the forefathers of many of the numerous Kentucky Stoners of to-day; and Kasper Mansker, the ”Mr.

Mansco” of Tennessee writers. Every old western narrative contains many allusions to ”Dutchmen,” as Americans very properly call the Germans.

Their names abound on the muster-rolls, pay-rolls, lists of settlers, etc., of the day (Blount MSS., State Department MSS., McAfee MSS., Am.

State Papers, etc.); but it must be remembered that they are often Anglicized, when nothing remains to show the origin of the owners. We could not recognize in Custer and Herkomer, Kuster and Herckheimer, were not the ancestral history of the two generals already known; and in the backwoods, a man often loses sight of his ancestors in a couple of generations. In the Carolinas the Germans seem to have been almost as plentiful on the frontiers as the Irish (see Adair, 245, and Smyth's ”Tour,” I., 236). In Pennsylvania they lived nearer civilization (Schoolcraft, 3, 335, ”Journey in the West in 1785,” by Lewis Brantz), although also mixed with the borderers, the more adventurous among them naturally seeking the frontier.

15. Giving to the backwoods society such families as the Seviers and Lenoirs. The Huguenots, like the Germans, frequently had their names Anglicized. The best known and most often quoted example is that of the Blancpied family, part of whom have become Whitefoots, while the others, living on the coast, have suffered a marvellous sea-change, the name reappearing as ”Blumpy.”

16. To the western American, who was not given to nice ethnic distinctions, both German and Hollander were simply Dutchmen but occasionally we find names like Van Meter, Van Buskirk, Van Sweanngen, which carry their origin on their faces (De Haas, 317, 319. Doddridge, 307).

17. The Scandinavian names in an unlettered community, soon become indistinguishable from those of the surrounding American's--Jansen, Petersen, etc., being readily Americanized. It is therefore rarely that they show their parentage. Still, we now and then come across one that is unmistakable, as Erickson, for instance (see p. 51 of Col. Reuben T.

Durrett's admirable ”Life and Writings of John Filson,” Louisville and Cincinnati, 1884).

18. MS. Journal of Matthew Clarkson, 1766. See also ”Voyage dans les Etats-Unis,” La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Paris, L'an, VII., I., 104.

19. The borderers had the true Calvinistic taste in preaching. Clarkson, in his journal of his western trip, mentions with approval a sermon he heard as being ”a very judicious and alarming discourse.”

20. McAfee MSS.

21. In the McAfee MSS. there is an amusing mention of the skin of a huge bull elk, killed by the father, which the youngsters christened ”old ellick”; they used to quarrel for the possession of it on cold nights, as it was very warm, though if the hairside was turned in it became slippery and apt to slide off the bed.

22. On the mountains the climate, flora, and fauna were all those of the north, not of the adjacent southern lowlands. The ruffed grouse, red squirrel, snow bird, various Canadian warblers, and a peculiar species of boreal field-mouse, the _evotomys_, are all found as far south as the Great Smokies.

23. Doddridge's ”Settlements and Indian Wars,” (133) written by an eyewitness; it is the most valuable book we have on old-time frontier ways and customs.

24. The land laws differed at different times in different colonies; but this was the usual size at the outbreak of the Revolution, of the farms along the western frontier, as under the laws of Virginia, then obtaining from the Holston to the Alleghany, this amount was allotted every settler who built a cabin or raised a crop of corn.

25. Beside the right to 400 acres, there was also a preemption right to 1,000 acres more adjoining to be secured by a land-office warrant. As between themselves the settlers had what they called ”tomahawk rights,”

made by simply deadening a certain number of trees with a hatchet. They were similar to the rights conferred in the west now by what is called a ”claim shack” or hut, built to hold some good piece of land; that is, they conferred no t.i.tle whatever, except that sometimes men would pay for them rather than have trouble with the claimant.

26. McAfee MSS. (particularly Autobiography of Robert McAfee).

27. To this day it is worn in parts of the Rocky Mountains, and even occasionally, here and there, in the Alleghanies.

28. The above is the description of one of Boon's rifles, now in the possession of Col. Durrett. According to the inscription on the barrel it was made at Louisville (Ky.), in 1782, by M. Humble. It is perfectly plain; whereas one of Floyd's rifles, which I have also seen, is much more highly finished, and with some ornamentation.

29. For the opinion of a foreign military observer on the phenomenal accuracy of backwoods markmans.h.i.+p, see General Victor Collot's ”Voyage en Amerique,” p. 242.

30. MS. copy of Matthew Clarkson's Journal in 1766.

31. McAfee MSS. (Autobiography of Robert R. McAfee).

32. _Do._

33. Memoirs of the Hist. Soc. of Penn., 1826. Account of first settlements, etc., by John Watson (1804).

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