for a very long period
intense. The very name invariably aroused the worst passions. To kill a
gauger was considered anything but a crime; wherever it could be done
with comparative safety, he was hunted to the death."

Thus we see that the townsman's weapon against the government was graft,
and the mountaineer's weapon was his gun--a hundred and fifty years ago,
in Ireland, as they are in America to-day. Whether racial character had
much to do with this is a debatable question. But, having spoken of
race, a new factor, and a curious one, steps into our story. Let it be
noted closely, for it bears directly on a problem that has puzzled many
of our own people, namely: What was the origin of our southern
mountaineers?

The north of Ireland, at the time of which we have been speaking, was
not settled by Irishmen, but by Scotchmen, who had been imported by
James I. to take the place of native Hibernians whom he had dispossessed
from the three northern counties. These immigrants came to be known as
the Scotch-Irish. They learned how to make poteen in little stills,
after the Irish fashion, and to defend their stills from intrusive
foreigners, also after the Irish fashion. By and by these Scotch-Irish
fell out with the British Government, and large bodies of them emigrated
to America, settling, for the most part, in western Pennsylvania.

They were a fighting race. Accustomed to plenty of hard knocks at home,
they took to the rough fare and Indian wars of our border as naturally
as ducks take to water. They brought with them, too, an undying hatred
of excise laws, and a spirit of unhesitating resistance to any authority
that sought to enforce such laws.

It was these Scotchmen, in the main, assisted by a good sprinkling of
native Irish, and by the wilder blades among the Pennsylvania-Dutch, who
drove out the Indians from the Alleghany border, formed our rear-guard
in the Revolution, won that rough mountain region for civilization, left
it when the game became scarce and neighbors' houses too frequent,
followed the mountains southward, settled western Virginia and Carolina,
and formed the vanguard westward into Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and
so onward till there was no longer a West to conquer. Some of their
descendants remained behind in the fastnesses of the Alleghanies, the
Blue Ridge, and the Unakas, and became, in turn, the progenitors of that
singular race which, by an absurd pleonasm, is now commonly known as
t