mpanions.

51. Haywood, DeHaas, Withers, McClung, and other border annalists, give
innumerable anecdotes about these and many other men, illustrating their
feats of fierce prowess and, too often, of brutal ferocity.

52. McAfee MSS. The story is told both in the "Autobiography of Robert
McAfee," and in the "History of the First Settlement on Salt River."

53. Incidents of this sort are frequently mentioned. Generally the woman
went back to her first husband. "Early Times in Middle Tennessee," John
Carr, Nashville, 1859, p. 231.

54. See "A Short History of the English Colonies in America," by Henry
Cabot Lodge (New York, 1886), for an account of these people.

55. The regulators of backwoods society corresponded exactly to the
vigilantes of the western border to-day. In many of the cases of lynch
law which have come to my knowledge the effect has been healthy for the
community; but sometimes great injustice is done. Generally the
vigilantes, by a series of summary executions, do really good work; but
I have rarely known them fail, among the men whom they killed for good
reason, to also kill one or two either by mistake or to gratify private
malice.

56. See Doddridge.

57. McAfee MSS.

58. Doddridge.

59. Said one old Indian fighter, a Col. Joseph Brown, of Tennessee, with
quaint truthfulness, "I have tried also to be a religious man, but have
not always, in a life of so much adventure and strife, been able to act
consistently."--_Southwestern Monthly_, Nashville, 1851, I., 80.

CHAPTER VI.

BOON AND THE LONG HUNTERS; AND THEIR HUNTING IN NO-MAN'S-LAND,
1769-1774.

The American backwoodsmen had surged up, wave upon wave, till their mass
trembled in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready to flood the continent
beyond. The peoples threatened by them were dimly conscious of the
danger which as yet only loomed in the distance. Far off, among their
quiet adobe villages, in the sun-scorched lands by the Rio Grande, the
slow Indo-Iberian peons and their monkish masters still walked in the
tranquil steps of their fathers, ignorant of the growth of the power
that was to overwhelm their children and successors; but nearer by,
Spaniard and Creole Frenchman, Algonquin and Appalachian, were all
uneasy as they began to feel the first faint pressure of the American
advance.

As yet they had been shielded by the forest which lay over the land like
an unrent mantle. All through the mountains, and far beyond, it
st