42 North American Forests and Forestry 



extreme. But undeniably these people were men 

 no weakling natures were produced by the life in 

 the forests. There was a strong love of adventure 

 developed in many of these characters, which gave 

 evidence of a hidden power of creative imagination. 

 At a later time, when the scattered forest settle- 

 ments had grown into comparatively populous com- 

 munities, this latent power came to the aid of the 

 men who shaped the laws under which these new 

 States were to live. For the laws and institutions 

 of these western commonwealths had to be changed 

 from those of the East not a little to fit the altered 

 circumstances. The fact that the original immi- 

 grants settled on isolated homesteads sometimes 

 miles away from the nearest neighbor had much 

 to do with the unwillingness to co-operate with 

 others for common purposes, or to submit to any 

 kind of discipline, which later on was shown so 

 often and sometimes with disastrous results by 

 the people of the Middle West. 



Among the people who took up their abode in 

 the backwoods were men of all the nationalities 

 represented in the motley population of the colo- 

 nies. In the North, people of English descent 

 predominated. But in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and 

 the Carolinas the backwoodsmen were more apt to 

 be either of German or Scotch-Irish stock. As 

 these colonies were more immediately contiguous 

 to the country west of the Alleghanies, it was in this 

 section that the type of the backwoodsman devel- 

 oped in its greatest perfection. No matter what 



