their families into clans and the clans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in the protection of each and all and a unit of hate against their common enemy.

Too often the fields which the pioneer planted with corn were harvested by the Indian with fire. The hardest privations suffered by farmers and stock were due to the settlers having to flee to the forts, leaving to Indian devastation the crops on which their sustenance mainly depended. Sometimes, fortunately, the warning came in time for the frontiersman to collect his goods and chattels in his wagon and to round up his live stock and drive them safely into the common fortified enclosure. At others, the tap of the express—as the herald of Indian danger was called—at night on the windowpane and the low word whispered hastily, ere the express ran on to the next abode, meant that the Indians had surprised the outlying cabins of the settlement.

The forts were built as centrally as possible in the scattered settlements. They consisted of cabins, blockhouses, and stockades. A range of cabins often formed one side of a fort. The walls on the outside were ten or twelve feet high with roofs sloping inward. The blockhouses built at the angles of the fort projected two feet or so beyond the outer walls of the cabins and stockades, and were fitted with portholes for the watchers and the marksmen. The entrance to the fort was a large folding gate of thick slabs. It was always on the side nearest the spring. The whole structure of the fort was bullet-proof and was erected without an iron nail or spike. In the border wars these forts withstood all attacks. The savages, having proved that they could not storm them, generally laid siege and waited for thirst to compel a sortie. But the crafty besieger was as often outwitted by the equally cunning defender. Some daring soul, with silent feet and perhaps with naked body painted in Indian fashion, would drop from the wall under cover of the night, pass among the foemen to the spring, and return to the fort with water.

Into the pioneer's phrase-making the Indian influence penetrated so that he named seasons for his foe. So thoroughly has the term Indian Summer, now to us redolent of charm, become disassociated from its origins that it gives us a shock to be reminded that to these Back Country folk the balmy days following on the cold snap meant the season when the red men would come back for a last murderous raid on the settlements before winter should seal up the land. The Powwowing Days were the mellow days in the latter part of February, when the red men in council made their medicine and learned of their redder gods whether or no they should take the warpath when the sap pulsed the trees into leaf. Even the children at their play acknowledged the red-skinned schoolmaster, for their chief games were a training in his woodcraft and in the use of his weapons. Tomahawk-throwing was a favorite sport because of its gruesome practical purposes. The boys must learn to gauge the tomahawk's revolutions by the distance of the throw so as to bury the blade in its objective. Swift running and high jumping through the brush and fallen timber were sports that taught agility in escape. The boys learned to shoot accurately the long rifles of their time, with a log or a forked stick for a rest, and a moss pad under the barrel to keep it from jerking and spoiling the aim. They wrestled with each other, mastered the tricks of throwing an opponent, and learned the scalp hold instead of the toe hold. It was part of their education to imitate the noises of every bird and beast of the forest. So they learned to lure the turkey within range, or by the bleat of a fawn to bring her dam to the rifle. A well-simulated wolf's howl would call forth a response and so inform the lone hunter of the vicinity of the pack. This forest speech was not only the language of diplomacy in the hunting season; it was the borderer's secret code in war. Stray Indians put themselves in touch again with the band by turkey calls in the daytime and by owl or wolf notes at night. The frontiersmen used the same means to trick the Indian band into betraying the place of its ambuscade, or to lure the strays, unwitting, within reach of the knife.

In that age, before the forests had given place to farms and cities and when the sun had but slight acquaintance with the sod, the summers were cool and the winters long and cold in the Back Country. Sometimes in September severe frosts destroyed the corn. The first light powdering called hunting snows fell in October, and then the men of the Back Country set out on the chase. Their object was meat—buffalo, deer, elk, bear—for the winter larder, and skins to send out in the spring by pack-horses to the coast in trade for iron, steel, and salt. The rainfall in North Carolina was much heavier than in Virginia and, from autumn into early winter, the Yadkin forests were sheeted with rain; but wet weather, so far from deterring the hunter, aided him to the kill. In blowing rain, he knew he would find the deer herding in the sheltered places on the hillsides. In windless rain, he knew that his quarry ranged the open woods and the high places. The fair play of the pioneer held it a great disgrace to kill a deer in winter when the heavy frost had crusted the deep snow. On the crust men and wolves could travel with ease, but the deer's sharp hoofs pierced through and made him defenseless. Wolves and dogs destroyed great quantities of deer caught in this way; and men who shot deer under these conditions were considered no huntsmen. There was, indeed, a practical side to this chivalry of the chase, for meat and pelt were both poor at this season; but the true hunter also obeyed the finer tenet of his code, for he would go to the rescue of deer caught in the crusts—and he killed many a wolf sliding over the ice to an easy meal.

The community moral code of the frontier was brief and rigorous. What it lacked of the whereas and inasmuch of legal ink it made up in sound hickory. In fact, when we review the activities of this solid yet elastic wood in the moral, social, and economic phases of Back Country life, we are moved to wonder if the pioneers would have been the same race of men had they been nurtured beneath a less strenuous and adaptable vegetation! The hickory gave the frontiersman wood for all implements and furnishings where the demand was equally for lightness, strength, and elasticity. It provided his straight logs for building, his block mortars—hollowed by fire and stone—for corn-grinding, his solid plain furniture, his axles, rifle butts, ax handles, and so forth. It supplied his magic wand for the searching out of iniquity in the junior members of his household, and his most cogent argument, as a citizen, in convincing the slothful, the blasphemous, or the dishonest adult whose errors disturbed communal harmony. Its nuts fed his hogs. Before he raised stock, the unripe hickory nuts, crushed for their white liquid, supplied him with butter for his corn bread and helped out his store of bear's fat. Both the name and the knowledge of the uses of this tree came to the earliest pioneers through contact with the red man, whose hunting bow and fishing spear and the hobbles for his horses were fashioned of the pohickory tree. The Indian women first made pohickory butter, and the wise old men of the Cherokee towns, so we are told, first applied the pohickory rod to the vanity of youth!

A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country of Virginia or North Carolina would show, in primitive design, what is, perhaps, after all the perfect home—a place where the personal life and the work life are united and