The incident, taken in connection with the plundering of a store kept by two whites in Holston Valley at the same time, and the unprovoked assault on Boon’s party in Powell’s Valley a year later, shows the extreme difficulty of preventing the worst men of each color from wantonly attacking the innocent.  There was hardly a peaceable red or law-abiding white who could not recite injuries he had received from members of the opposite race; and his sense of the wrongs he had suffered, as well as the general frontier indifference to crimes committed against others, made him slow in punishing similar outrages by his own people.  The Watauga settlers discountenanced wrong being done the Indians, and tried to atone for it, but they never hunted the offenders down with the necessary mercilessness that alone could have prevented a repetition of their offences.  Similarly, but to an even greater degree, the good Indians shielded the bad.[36]

For several years after they made their lease with the Cherokees the men of the Watauga were not troubled by their Indian neighbors.  They had to fear nothing more than a drought, a freshet, a forest fire, or an unusually deep snow-fall if hunting on the mountains in mid-winter.  They lived in peace, hunting and farming, marrying, giving in marriage, and rearing many healthy children.  By degrees they wrought out of the stubborn wilderness comfortable homes, filled with plenty.  The stumps were drawn out of the clearings, and other grains were sown besides corn.  Beef, pork, and mutton were sometimes placed on the table, besides the more common venison, bear meat, and wild turkey.  The women wove good clothing, the men procured good food, the log-cabins, if homely and rough, yet gave ample warmth and shelter.  The families throve, and life was happy, even though varied with toil, danger, and hardship.  Books were few, and it was some years before the first church,—­Presbyterian, of course,—­was started in the region.[37] The backwoods Presbyterians managed their church affairs much as they did their civil government:  each congregation appointed a committee to choose ground, to build a meeting-house, to collect the minister’s salary, and to pay all charges, by taxing the members proportionately for the same, the committee being required to turn in a full account, and receive instructions, at a general session or meeting held twice every year.[38]

Thus the Watauga folk were the first Americans who, as a separate body, moved into the wilderness to hew out dwellings for themselves and their children, trusting only to their own shrewd heads, stout hearts, and strong arms, unhelped and unhampered by the power nominally their sovereign.[39] They built up a commonwealth which had many successors; they showed that the frontiersmen could do their work unassisted; for they not only proved that they were made of stuff stern enough to hold its own against outside pressure of any sort, but they also made it evident that having won the