Where their lands abutted on the more settled districts to the eastward,
the population was of course thickest, and their peculiarities least.
Here and there at such points they built small backwoods burgs or towns,
rude, straggling, unkempt villages, with a store or two, a
tavern,--sometimes good, often a "scandalous hog-sty," where travellers
were devoured by fleas, and every one slept and ate in one room,[18]--a
small log school-house, and a little church, presided over by a
hard-featured Presbyterian preacher, gloomy, earnest, and zealous,
probably bigoted and narrow-minded, but nevertheless a great power for
good in the community.[19]

However, the backwoodsmen as a class neither built towns nor loved to
dwell therein. They were to be seen at their best in the vast,
interminable forests that formed their chosen home. They won and kept
their lands by force, and ever lived either at war or in dread of war.
Hence they settled always in groups of several families each, all banded
together for mutual protection. Their red foes were strong and terrible,
cunning in council, dreadful in battle, merciless beyond belief in
victory. The men of the border did not overcome and dispossess cowards
and weaklings; they marched forth to spoil the stout-hearted and to take
for a prey the possessions of the men of might. Every acre, every rood
of ground which they claimed had to be cleared by the axe and held with
the rifle. Not only was the chopping down of the forest the first
preliminary to cultivation, but it was also the surest means of subduing
the Indians, to whom the unending stretches of choked woodland were an
impenetrable cover behind which to move unseen, a shield in making
assaults, and a strong tower of defence in repelling counter-attacks. In
the conquest of the west the backwoods axe, shapely, well-poised, with
long haft and light head, was a servant hardly standing second even to
the rifle; the two were the national weapons of the American