The Back Country folk, as they came from several countries, generally settled in national groups, each preserving its own speech and its own religion, each approaching frontier life through its own native temperament. And the frontier met each and all alike, with the same need and the same menace, and molded them after one general pattern. If the cabin stood in a typical Virginian settlement where the folk were of English stock, it may be that the dulcimer and some old love song of the homeland enlivened the work--or perhaps chairs were pushed back and young people danced the country dances of the homeland and the Virginia Reel, for these Virginian English were merry folk, and their religion did not frown upon the dance. In a cabin on the Shenandoah or the upper Yadkin the German tongue clicked away over the evening dish of kraut or sounded more sedately in a Lutheran hymn; while from some herder's but on the lower Yadkin the wild note of the bagpipes or of the ancient four-stringed harp mingled with the Gaelic speech.
Among the homes in the Shenandoah where old England's ways prevailed, none was gayer than the tavern kept by the man whom the good Moravian Brother called "Severe." There perhaps the feasting celebrated the nuptials of John Sevier, who was barely past his seventeenth birthday when he took to himself a wife. Or perhaps the dancing, in moccasined feet on the puncheon flooring, was a ceremonial to usher into Back Country life the new municipality John had just organized, for John at nineteen had taken his earliest step towards his larger career, which we shall follow later on, as the architect of the first little governments beyond the mountains.
In the Boone home on the Yadkin, we may guess that the talk was solely of the hunt, unless young Daniel had already become possessed of his first compass and was studying its ways. On such an evening, while the red afterglow lingered, he might be mending a passing trader's firearms by the fires of the primitive forge his father had set up near the trading path running from Hillsborough to the Catawba towns. It was said by the local nimrods that none could doctor a sick rifle better than young Daniel Boone, already the master huntsman of them all. And perhaps some trader's tale, told when the caravan halted for the night, kindled the youth's first desire to penetrate the mountain-guarded wilderness, for the tales of these Romanies of commerce were as the very badge of their free-masonry, and entry money at the doors of strangers.
Out on the border's edge, heedless of the shadow of the mountains looming between the newly built cabin and that western land where they and their kind were to write the fame of the Ulster Scot in a shining script that time cannot dull, there might sit a group of stern-faced men, all deep in discussion of some point of spiritual doctrine or of the temporal rights of men. Yet, in every cabin, whatever the national differences, the setting was the same The spirit of the frontier was modeling out of old clay a new Adam to answer the needs of a new earth.
It would be far less than just to leave the Back Country folk without further reference to the devoted labors of their clergy.
In the earliest days the settlers were cut off from their church systems; the pious had to maintain their piety unaided, except in the rare cases where a pastor accompanied a group of settlers of his denomination into the wilds. One of the first ministers who fared into the Back Country to remind the Ulster Presbyterians of their spiritual duties was the Reverend Hugh McAden of Philadelphia. He made long itineraries under the greatest hardships, in constant danger from Indians and wild beasts, carrying the counsel of godliness to the far scattered flock.
Among the Highland settlements the Reverend James Campbell for thirty years traveled about, preaching each Sunday at some gathering point a sermon in both English and Gaelic. A little later, in the Yadkin Valley, after Craighead's day there arose a small school of Presbyterian ministers whose zeal and fearlessness in the cause of religion and of just government had an influence on the frontiersmen that can hardly be overestimated.
But, in the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery of border life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidance from other mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the primal threefold need family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the day's work was done. We who look back with thoughtful eyes upon the frontiersman--all links of contact with his racial past severed, at grips with destruction in the contenting of his needs--see something more, something larger, than he saw in the log cabin raised by his hands, its structure held together solely by his close grooving and fitting of its own strength. Though the walls he built for himself have gone with his own dust back to the earth, the symbol he erected for us stands.
