little shrinking from military
service.[49]

A backwoods levy was formidable because of the high average courage and
prowess of the individuals composing it; it was on its own ground much
more effective than a like force of regular soldiers, but of course it
could not be trusted on a long campaign. The backwoodsmen used their
rifles better than the Indians, and also stood punishment better, but
they never matched them in surprises nor in skill in taking advantage of
cover, and very rarely equalled their discipline in the battle itself.
After all, the pioneer was primarily a husbandman; the time spent in
chopping trees and tilling the soil his foe spent in preparing for or
practising forest warfare, and so the former, thanks to the exercise of
the very qualities which in the end gave him the possession of the soil,
could not, as a rule, hope to rival his antagonist in the actual
conflict itself. When large bodies of the red men and white borderers
were pitted against each other, the former were if any thing the more
likely to have the advantage.[50] But the whites soon copied from the
Indians their system of individual and private warfare, and they
probably caused their foes far more damage and loss in this way than in
the large expeditions. Many noted border scouts and Indian
fighters--such men as Boon, Kenton, Wetzel, Brady, McCulloch,
Mansker[51]--grew to overmatch their Indian foes at their own game, and
held themselves above the most renowned warriors. But these men carried
the spirit of defiant self-reliance to such an extreme that their best
work was always done when they were alone or in small parties of but
four or five. They made long forays after scalps and horses, going a
wonderful distance, enduring extreme hardship, risking the most terrible
of deaths, and harrying the hostile tribes into a madness of terror and
revengeful hatred.

As it was in military matters, so it was with the administration of
justice by the frontiersmen; they had few courts, and knew but little
law, and yet they contrived to preserve order and morality with rough
effectiveness, by combining to frown down on the grosser misdeeds, and
to punish the more flagrant misdoers. Perhaps the spirit in which they
acted can be best shown by the recital of an incident in the career of
the three McAfee brothers, who were among the pioneer hunters of
Kentucky.[52] Previous to trying to move their families out to the new
country, they made a cache