om their plantations, where black slaves and
indentured servants labored, and from their coastwise and overseas
trade. Their battles with forest and red man were long past. They had
leisure for diversions such as the chase, the breeding and racing
of thoroughbred horses, the dance, high play with dice and card,
cockfighting, the gallantry of love, and the skill of the rapier. Law
and politics drew their soberer minds.

Very different were the conditions which confronted the pioneers in the
first American "West." There every jewel of promise was ringed round
with hostility. The cheap land the pioneer had purchased at a nominal
price, or the free land he had taken by "tomahawk claim"--that is by
cutting his name into the bark of a deadened tree, usually beside a
spring--supported a forest of tall trunks and interlacing leafage. The
long grass and weeds which covered the ground in a wealth of natural
pasturage harbored the poisonous copperhead and the rattlesnake and,
being shaded by the overhead foliage, they held the heavy dews and bred
swarms of mosquitoes, gnats, and big flies which tortured both men and
cattle. To protect the cattle and horses from the attacks of these
pests the settlers were obliged to build large "smudges"--fires of green
timber--against the wind. The animals soon learned to back up into the
dense smoke and to move from one grazing spot to another as the wind
changed. But useful as were the green timber fires that rolled their
smoke on the wind to save the stock, they were at the same time a menace
to the pioneer, for they proclaimed to roving bands of Cherokees that
a further encroachment on their territory had been made by their most
hated enemies--the men who felled the hunter's forest. Many an outpost
pioneer who had made the long hard journey by sea and land from the old
world of persecution to this new country of freedom, dropped from the
red man's shot ere he had hewn the threshold of his home, leaving his
wife and children to the unrecorded mercy of his slayer.

Those more fortunate pioneers who settled in groups won the first heat
in the battle with the wilderness through massed effort under wariness.
They made their clearings in the forest, built their cabins and
stockades, and planted their cornfields, while lookouts kept watch and
rifles were stacked within easy reach. Every special task, such as a
"raising," as cabin building was called, was undertaken by the community
chiefly because