312 The Winning of the West 



name. These all lay to the southwest, some thirty 

 odd miles from Boonesborough. Every such fort 

 or station served as the rallying-place for the coun- 

 try round about, the stronghold in which the people 

 dwelt during time of danger; and later on, when all 

 danger had long ceased, it often remained in changed 

 form, growing into the chief town of the district. 

 Each settler had his own farm besides, often a long 

 way from the fort, and it was on this that he usually 

 intended to make his permanent home. This sys- 

 tem enabled the inhabitants to combine for defence, 

 and yet to take up the large tracts of four to four- 

 teen hundred acres, 16 to which they were by law 

 entitled. It permitted them in time of peace to live 

 well apart, with plenty of room between, so that 

 they did not crowd one another a fact much ap- 

 preciated by men in whose hearts the spirit of ex- 

 treme independence and self-reliance was deeply 

 ingrained. Thus the settlers were scattered over 

 large areas, and, as elsewhere in the Southwest, the 

 county and not the town became the governmental 

 unit. The citizens even of the smaller governmental 

 divisions acted through representatives, instead of 

 directly, as in the New England town-meetings. 17 



16 Four hundred acres were gained at the price of $2.50 

 per TOO acres, by merely building a cabin and raising a crop 

 of corn; and every settler with such a "cabin right" had 

 likewise a pre-emptio^ right to 1,000 acres adjoining for a 

 cost that generally approached forty dollars a hundred. 



17 In Mr. Phelan's scholarly "History of Tennessee," pp. 

 202-204, etc. , there is an admirably clear account of the way 

 in which Tennessee institutions (like those of the rest of the 

 Southwest) have been directly and without a break derived 



