Spread of English-Speaking Peoples 151 



own game, and held themselves above the most re- 

 nowned warriors. But these men carried the spirit 

 of defiant self-reliance to such an extreme that their 

 best work was always done when they were alone 

 or in small parties of but four or five. They made 

 long forays after scalps and horses, going a won- 

 derful distance, enduring extreme hardship, risking 

 the most terrible of deaths, and harrying the hostile 

 tribes into a madness of terror and revengeful 

 hatred. 



As it was in military matters, so it was with the 

 administration of justice by the frontiersmen; they 

 had few courts, and knew but little law, and yet they 

 contrived to preserve order and morality with rough 

 effectiveness, by combining to frown down on the 

 grosser misdeeds, and to punish the more flagrant 

 misdoers. Perhaps the spirit in which they acted 

 can be best shown by the recital of an incident in the 

 career of the three McAfee brothers, who were 

 among the pioneer hunters of Kentucky. 52 Previ- 

 ous to trying to move their families out to the new 

 country, they made a cache of clothing, implements, 

 and provisions, which in their absence was broken 

 into and plundered. They caught the thief, "a lit- 

 tle diminutive, red-headed white man/' a runaway 

 convict servant from one of the tide-water counties 



annalists, give innumerable anecdotes about these and many 

 other men, illustrating their feats of fierce prowess and, too 

 often, of brutal ferocity. 



52 McAfee MSS. The story is told both in the "Autobiog- 

 raphy of Robert McAfee," and in the ^' History of the First 

 Settlement on Salt River." 



