as enacted that the
bridle path across the mountains should be chopped out and made into a
rough wagon road. [Footnote: However this was not actually done until
some years later.] The following spring the successful expedition
against the Chicamaugas temporarily put a stop to Indian troubles. The
growing security, the opening of the land office, and the increase of
knowledge concerning the country, produced a great inflow of settlers in
1779, and from that time onward the volume of immigration steadily
increased.

Character and Life of the Settlers.

Many of these new-comers were "poor whites," or crackers; lank, sallow,
ragged creatures, living in poverty, ignorance, and dirt, who regarded
all strangers with suspicion as "outlandish folks." [Footnote: Smythe's
Tours, I., 103, describes the up-country crackers of North Carolina and
Virginia.] With every chance to rise, these people remained mere squalid
cumberers of the earth's surface, a rank, up-country growth, containing
within itself the seeds of vicious, idle pauperism, and
semi-criminality. They clustered in little groups, scattered throughout
the backwoods settlements, in strong contrast to the vigorous and manly
people around them.

By far the largest number of the new-comers were of the true, hardy
backwoods stock, fitted to grapple with the wilderness and to hew out of
it a prosperous commonwealth. The leading settlers began, by thrift and
industry, to acquire what in the backwoods passed for wealth. Their
horses, cattle, and hogs throve and multiplied. The stumps were grubbed
out of the clearings, and different kinds of grains and roots were
planted. Wings were added to the houses, and sometimes they were roofed
with shingles. The little town of Jonesboro, the first that was not a
mere stockaded fort, was laid off midway between the Watauga and the
Nolichucky.

As soon as the region grew at all well settled, clergymen began to come
in. Here, as elsewhere, most of the frontiersmen who had any religion at
all professed the faith of the Scotch-Irish; and the first regular
church in this cradle-spot of Tennessee was a Presbyterian log
meeting-house, built near Jonesboro in 1777, and christened Salem
Church. Its pastor was a pioneer preacher, who worked with fiery and
successful energy to spread learning and religion among the early
settlers of the southwest. His name was Samuel Doak. He came from New
Jersey, and had been educated in Princeton. Possessed