t less than ten years old. It was founded in 1779
by Captain James Robertson with a little company of nine. The next year
Colonel John Donelson, with a much larger party, including women and
children, came from Virginia to join his friend Robertson. His journey
was one of the most striking incidents in the peopling of the West, for
it was made in flatboats which passed down the Holston into the
Tennessee, down the Tennessee into the Ohio, up the Ohio into the
Cumberland, and up the Cumberland to Nashville. It took four months to
cover the two thousand miles or more, and there were bloody fights with
Indians, sickness, and death by the way. When, eight years later, after
an overland journey through a wilderness still almost unbroken and still
infested with Indians, Jackson came to Nashville, he found Mrs. Donelson
a widow, for her husband had been murdered; and he soon became an inmate
of her home.

It was well for a widow in that wild country if she could procure men
"boarders," even though she might not need to "take boarders" for a
living; for every household needed men to protect it from the Indians.
Immigration was increasing constantly, but the white population was
still far too small to be safe. Within seven miles of Nashville, during
the years 1780-1794, the Indians killed, on an average, one white person
every ten days.

Life in such a country was even rougher and barer than in the Waxhaws.
The houses were chiefly cabins made of unhewn logs, and the things which
in older communities make the inside of houses attractive were almost
wholly wanting. Such merchandise as was offered to the settlers had to
be fetched hundreds of miles,--usually from Philadelphia,--and grew very
dear by the time it reached them. For food, clothing, and shelter each
family relied mainly on the handiwork of its own members. As in all
frontier regions, the population was chiefly male. The brave women who
took their share of the common work and hardship were treated with much
respect, and did their part well, no doubt, but they had little leisure
for those arts which brighten the lives and refine the characters of
husbands and children.

Manners suited conditions. These builders of the West had more strength
than gentleness, more shrewdness than wisdom, more courage than culture.
They were the rough front which American civilization presented to the
wilderness and the savage,--brave, hard-handed, themselves somewhat
affected with the ba