held themselves above the most renowned 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 wonderful 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] Previous 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 little diminutive, red-headed white man,” a runaway convict servant from one of the tide-water counties of Virginia.  In the first impulse of anger at finding that he was the criminal, one of the McAfees rushed at him to kill him with his tomahawk; but the weapon turned, the man was only knocked down, and his assailant’s gusty anger subsided as quickly as it had risen, giving way to a desire to do stern but fair justice.  So the three captors formed themselves into a court, examined into the case, heard the man in his own defence, and after due consultation decided that “according to their opinion of the laws he had forfeited his life, and ought to be hung”; but none of them were willing to execute the sentence in cold blood, and they ended by taking their prisoner back to his master.

The incident was characteristic in more than one way.  The prompt desire of the backwoodsman to avenge his own wrong; his momentary furious anger, speedily quelled and replaced by a dogged determination to be fair but to exact full retribution; the acting entirely without regard to legal forms or legal officials, but yet in a spirit which spoke well for the doer’s determination to uphold the essentials that make honest men law-abiding; together with the good faith of the whole proceeding, and the amusing ignorance that it would have been in the least unlawful to execute their own rather harsh sentence—­all these were typical frontier traits.  Some of the same traits appear in the treatment commonly adopted in the backwoods to meet the case—­of painfully frequent occurrence in the times of Indian wars—­where a man taken prisoner by the savages, and supposed to be murdered, returned after two or three years’ captivity, only to find his wife married again.  In the wilderness a husband was almost a necessity to a woman; her surroundings made the loss of the