Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 131 



they had become as emphatically products native to 

 the soil as were the tough and supple hickories out 

 of which they fashioned the handles of their long, 

 light axes. Their grim, harsh, narrow lives were 

 yet strangely fascinating and full of adventurous 

 toil and danger ; none but natures as strong, as free- 

 dom-loving, and as full of bold defiance as theirs 

 could have endured existence on the terms which 

 these men found pleasurable. Their iron surround- 

 ings made a mold which turned out all alike in the 

 same shape. They resembled one another, and they 

 differed from the rest of the world even the world 

 of America, and infinitely more the world of Eu- 

 rope in dress, in customs, and in mode of life. 



Where their lands abutted on the more settled 

 districts to the eastward, the population was of 

 course thickest, and their peculiarities least. Here 

 and there at such points they built small backwoods 

 burgs or towns, rude, straggling, unkempt villages, 

 with a store or two, a tavern, sometimes good, of- 

 ten a "scandalous hog-sty," where travelers were 

 devoured by fleas, and every one slept and ate in one 

 room, 18 a small log school-house, and a little 

 church, presided over by a hard-featured Presbyte- 

 rian preacher, gloomy, earnest, and zealous, prob- 

 ably bigoted and narrow-minded, but nevertheless 

 a great power for good in the community. 19 



18 MS. Journal of Matthew Clarkson, 1766. See also "Voy- 

 age dans les Etats-Unis," La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Paris, 

 L'an, VII., I., 104. 



19 The borderers had the true Calvinistic taste in preach- 

 ing. Clarkson, in his journal of his Western trip, mentions 



