Public Domain
This narrative is founded largely on original sources--on the writings and journals of pioneers and contemporary observers, such as Doddridge and Adair, and on the public documents of the period as printed in the Colonial Records and in the American Archives. But the author is...
After King's Mountain, Sevier reached home just in time to fend off a Cherokee attack on Watauga. Again warning had come to the settlements that the Indians were about to descen...
12. Chapter 12One spring day in 1799, there might have been observed a great stir through the valley of the Kanawha. With the dawn, men were ahorse, and women, too. Wagons crowded with human...
9. Chapter 9Indian law, tradition, and even superstition had shaped the conditions which the pioneers faced when they crossed the mountains. This savage inheritance had decreed that Kentuck...
10. Chapter 10About the time when James Robertson went from Watauga to fling out the frontier line three hundred miles farther westward, the British took Savannah. In 1780 they took Charlesto...
2. Chapter 2The Ulster Presbyterians, or "Scotch-Irish," to whom history has ascribed the dominant rôle among the pioneer folk of the Old Southwest, began their migrations to America in the...
8. Chapter 8With the coming of spring Daniel Boone's desire, so long cherished and deferred, to make a way for his neighbors through the wilderness was to be fulfilled at last. But ere his...
7. Chapter 7When Boone returned home he found the Back Country of North Carolina in the throes of the Regulation Movement. This movement, which had arisen first from the colonists' need to...
4. Chapter 4The trader was the first pathfinder. His caravans began the change of purpose that was to come to the Indian warrior's route, turning it slowly into the beaten track of communic...
3. Chapter 3These migrations into the inland valleys of the Old South mark the first great westward thrust of the American frontier. Thus the beginnings of the westward movement disclose to...
5. Chapter 5The great pile of the Appalachian peaks was not the only barrier which held back the settler with his plough and his rifle from following the trader's tinkling caravans into the...
6. Chapter 6What thoughts filled Daniel Boone's mind as he was returning from Braddock's disastrous campaign in 1755 we may only conjecture. Perhaps he was planning a career of soldiering,...
1. Chapter 1This narrative is founded largely on original sources--on the writings and journals of pioneers and contemporary observers, such as Doddridge and Adair, and on the public docume...