128 The Winning of the West 



tion of their own clergy. For generations their whole 

 ecclesiastic and scholastic systems had been funda- 

 mentally democratic. In the hard life of the frontier 

 they lost much of their religion, and they had but 

 scant opportunity to give their children the school- 

 ing in which they believed; but what few meeting- 

 houses and school-houses there were on the border 

 were theirs. 11 The numerous families of colonial 

 English who came among them adopted their relig- 

 ion if they adopted any. The creed of the back- 

 woodsman who had a creed at all was Presbyterian- 

 ism; for the Episcopacy of the tide-water lands ob- 

 tained no foothold in the mountains, and the Meth- 

 odists and Baptists had but just begun to appear in 

 the West when the Revolution broke out. 12 



These Presbyterian Irish were, however, far from 

 being the only settlers on the border, although more 

 than any others they impressed the stamp of their 

 peculiar character on the pioneer civilization of the 

 West and Southwest. Great numbers of immi- 

 grants of English descent came among them from 

 the settled districts on the east; and though these 

 later arrivals soon became indistinguishable from 

 the people among whom they settled, yet they cer- 

 tainly sometimes added a tone of their own to 

 backwoods society, giving it here and there a slight 



11 The Irish schoolmaster was everywhere a feature of 

 early Western society. 



12 McAfee MSS. MS. Autobiography of Rev. Wm. Hick- 

 man, born in Virginia in 1747 (in Col. R. T. Durrett's library). 

 " Trans- Alleghany Pioneers," 147. "History of Kentucky 

 Baptists." J. H. Spencer (Cincinnati, 1885). 



