io8 Singing Valleys 



gee-gaws and firearms. It was thought an exorbitantly generous 

 price at the time. And so it was, compared to what Calvert 

 gave for Maryland, or Peter Minuit paid for Manhattan 

 Island. But Henderson believed that land which would grow 

 corn and tobacco that could be floated down the Mississippi 

 to be sold in New Orleans was worth that price ten times over. 

 History proved he was right. 



James Robertson and John Sevier who pushed the frontier 

 on to the Watauga River in Tennessee were mountain-bred 

 men. They, too, dreamed of an agricultural colony there and 

 cleared lands for corn on all sides of their blockhouse. All the 

 backwoodsmen were more interested in blazing new trails west- 

 ward to new farming lands than in riding the traveled roads 

 eastward to the sea. In the highlands they created a new type 

 of American, distinct from the New Englander and from the 

 Tidewater planter. This was the Backwoodsman; the tall, lank, 

 quiet man in buckskins and coonskin cap; the first American 

 to cut his ties with Europe completely; the first American to 

 look westward for tomorrow. 



These men measured their boyish growth against a hoe 

 handle in their fathers' cornfields. They had put in hours at 

 the tin gritter, grating corn from the cobs. They were raised 

 on corn dodgers, with wheat cakes to mark Sundays on the 

 family calendar. They had made pones and baked them in the 

 ashes of campfires on lonely trails. They had hastened their 

 steps coming home at dusk, axe on shoulder, knowing there 

 would be Brunswick stew and hot cracklin' bread waiting for 

 them on the hearth. Most of them had made corn whiskey in 

 stills patterned after those stewing in every bog in Ireland. 

 The glass bottles molded like miniature log cabins in honor 

 of William Henry Harrison during the campaign of 1840 

 were filled with "corn" to remind Whig voters that their 

 candidate represented the men and the ideals of the Back 

 Woods. The log cabin was not American, but Swedish. The 

 first of these were built by Peter Minuit's Swedes on the Dela- 

 ware. But the vigor of the backwoodsmen who adopted this 



