27.  A very good account of this government is given in Allison’s Address, pp. 5-8, and from it the following examples are taken.

28.  A right the exercise of which is of course susceptible to great abuse, but, nevertheless, is often absolutely necessary to the well-being of a frontier community.  In almost every case where I have personally known it exercised, the character of the individual ordered off justified the act.

29.  Allison’s Address.

30.  Ramsey, log.  Putnam says 36 degrees 35’.

31.  Alexander Cameron.

32.  Haywood, 43.

33.  Meanwhile Carter’s Valley, then believed to lie in Virginia, had been settled by Virginians; the Indians robbed a trader’s store, and indemnified the owners by giving them land, at the treaty of Sycamore Shoals.  This land was leased in job lots to settlers, who, however, kept possession without paying when they found it lay in North Carolina.

34.  A similar but separate lease was made by the settlers on the Nolichucky, who acquired a beautiful and fertile valley in exchange for the merchandize carried on the back of a single pack-horse.  Among the whites themselves transfers of land were made in very simple forms, and conveyed not the fee simple but merely the grantor’s claim.

35.  Haywood says they were named Crabtree; Putnam hints that they had lost a brother when Boon’s party was attacked and his son killed; but the attack on Boon did not take place till over a year after this time.

36.  Even La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt (8, 95), who loathed the backwoodsmen—­few polished Europeans being able to see any but the repulsive side of frontier character, a side certainly very often prominent,—­also speaks of the tendency of the worst Indians to go to the frontier to rob and murder.

37.  Salem Church was founded (Allison, 8) in 1777, by Samuel Doak, a Princeton graduate, and a man of sound learning, who also at the same time started Washington College, the first real institution of learning south of the Alleghanies.

38.  “Annals of Augusta,” 21.

39.  See Appendix.

CHAPTER VIII.

LORD DUNMORE’S WAR, 1774.

On the eve of the Revolution, in 1774, the frontiersmen had planted themselves firmly among the Alleghanies.  Directly west of them lay the untenanted wilderness, traversed only by the war parties of the red men, and the hunting parties of both reds and whites.  No settlers had yet penetrated it, and until they did so there could be within its borders no chance of race warfare, unless we call by that name the unchronicled and unending contest in which, now and then, some solitary white woodsman slew, or was slain by, his painted foe.  But in the southwest and the northwest alike, the area of settlement already touched the home lands of the tribes, and hence the horizon was never quite free from the cloud of threatening Indian war; yet for the moment the southwest was at peace, for the Cherokees were still friendly.