f a wife. Or perhaps the dancing, in moccasined
feet on the puncheon flooring, was a ceremonial to usher into Back
Country life the new municipality John had just organized, for John at
nineteen had taken his earliest step towards his larger career, which we
shall follow later on, as the architect of the first little governments
beyond the mountains.

In the Boone home on the Yadkin, we may guess that the talk was solely
of the hunt, unless young Daniel had already become possessed of his
first compass and was studying its ways. On such an evening, while the
red afterglow lingered, he might be mending a passing trader's firearms
by the fires of the primitive forge his father had set up near the
trading path running from Hillsborough to the Catawba towns. It was said
by the local nimrods that none could doctor a sick rifle better than
young Daniel Boone, already the master huntsman of them all. And perhaps
some trader's tale, told when the caravan halted for the night, kindled
the youth's first desire to penetrate the mountain-guarded wilderness,
for the tales of these Romanies of commerce were as the very badge of
their free-masonry, and entry money at the doors of strangers.

Out on the border's edge, heedless of the shadow of the mountains
looming between the newly built cabin and that western land where they
and their kind were to write the fame of the Ulster Scot in a shining
script that time cannot dull, there might sit a group of stern-faced
men, all deep in discussion of some point of spiritual doctrine or of
the temporal rights of men. Yet, in every cabin, whatever the national
differences, the setting was the same The spirit of the frontier was
modeling out of old clay a new Adam to answer the needs of a new earth.

It would be far less than just to leave the Back Country folk without
further reference to the devoted labors of their clergy. In the earliest
days the settlers were cut off from their church systems; the pious had
to maintain their piety unaided, except in the rare cases where a pastor
accompanied a group of settlers of his denomination into the wilds. One
of the first ministers who fared into the Back Country to remind the
Ulster Presbyterians of their spiritual duties was the Reverend Hugh
McAden of Philadelphia. He made long itineraries under the greatest
hardships, in constant danger from Indians and wild beasts, carrying
the counsel of godliness to the far scattered flock. Among the Highland