e best light from the greased paper
windowpanes stood the spinning wheel and loom, on which the housewife
made cloth for the family's garments. Over the fireplace or beside the
doorway, and suspended usually on stags' antlers, hung the firearms and
the yellow powderhorns, the latter often carved in Indian fashion with
scenes of the hunt or war. On a shelf or on pegs were the wooden spoons,
plates, bowls, and noggins. Also near the fireplace, which was made of
large flat stones with a mud-plastered log chimney, stood the grinding
block for making hominy. If it were an evening in early spring, the men
of the household would be tanning and dressing deerskins to be sent out
with the trade caravan, while the women sewed, made moccasins or mended
them, in the light of pine knots or candles of bear's grease. The larger
children might be weaving cradles for the babies, Indian fashion, out of
hickory twigs; and there would surely be a sound of whetting steel, for
scalping knives and tomahawks must be kept keen-tempered now that the
days have come when the red gods whisper their chant of war through the
young leafage.

The Back Country folk, as they came from several countries, generally
settled in national groups, each preserving its own speech and its
own religion, each approaching frontier life through its own native
temperament. And the frontier met each and all alike, with the same need
and the same menace, and molded them after one general pattern. If the
cabin stood in a typical Virginian settlement where the folk were of
English stock, it may be that the dulcimer and some old love song of
the homeland enlivened the work--or perhaps chairs were pushed back and
young people danced the country dances of the homeland and the Virginia
Reel, for these Virginian English were merry folk, and their religion
did not frown upon the dance. In a cabin on the Shenandoah or the upper
Yadkin the German tongue clicked away over the evening dish of kraut or
sounded more sedately in a Lutheran hymn; while from some herder's but
on the lower Yadkin the wild note of the bagpipes or of the ancient
four-stringed harp mingled with the Gaelic speech.

Among the homes in the Shenandoah where old England's ways prevailed,
none was gayer than the tavern kept by the man whom the good Moravian
Brother called "Severe." There perhaps the feasting celebrated the
nuptials of John Sevier, who was barely past his seventeenth birthday
when he took to himsel