136 The Winning of the West 



Backwoods society was simple, and the duties and 

 rights of each member of the family were plain and 

 clear. The man was the armed protector and pro- 

 vider, the bread-winner; the woman was the house- 

 wife and child-bearer. They married young and 

 their families were large, for they were strong and 

 healthy, and their success in life depended on their 

 own stout arms and willing hearts. There was 

 everywhere great equality of conditions. Land was 

 plenty and all else scarce ; so courage, thrift, and in- 

 dustry were sure of their reward. All had small 

 farms, with the few stock necessary to cultivate 

 them ; the farms being generally placed in the hol- 

 lows, the division lines between them, if they were, 

 close together, being the tops of the ridges and the 

 watercourses, especially the former. The buildings 

 of each farm were usually at its lowest point, as if 

 in the centre of an amphitheatre. 23 Each was on 

 an average of about 400 acres, 24 but sometimes 

 more. 25 Tracts of low, swampy grounds, possibly 



23 Doddridge's "Settlements and Indian Wars," (133) writ- 

 ten by an eye-witness ; it is the most valuable book we have 

 on old-time frontier ways and customs. 



84 The land laws differed at different times in different 

 colonies ; but this was the usual size at the outbreak of the 

 Revolution, of the farms along the western frontier, as, under 

 the laws of Virginia, then obtaining from the Holston to the 

 Alleghany, this amount was allotted every settler who built 

 a cabin or raised a crop of corn. 



25 Beside the right to 400 acres, there was also a preemp- 

 tion right to 1,000 acres more adjoining to be secured by a 

 land-office warrant. As between themselves the settlers had 

 what they called "tomahawk rights," made by simply dead- 



