The Winning of the West, Volume Three | Page 9

made the humbler people of the border seem churlish to
travellers. When Federal garrisons were established along the Ohio the
officers were largely dependent for their social pleasures on the
gentle-folks of the several rather curious glimpses of the life of the time.
[Footnote: Major Erkuries Beattie. In the _Magazine of Am. Hist._, I.,
p. 175.] He mentions being entertained by Clark at "a very elegant
dinner," [Footnote: 2 Aug. 25, 1786.] a number of gentlemen being
present. After dinner the guests adjourned to the dancing school,
"where there were twelve or fifteen young misses, some of whom had
made considerable improvement in that polite accomplishment, and
indeed were middling neatly dressed considering the distance from
where luxuries are to be bought and the expense attending the purchase
of them here"--for though beef and flour were cheap, all imported
goods sold for at least five times as much as they cost in Philadelphia
or New York. The officers sometimes gave dances in the forts, the
ladies and their escorts coming in to spend the night; and they attended
the great barbecues to which the people rode from far and near, many
of the men carrying their wives or sweethearts behind them on the
saddle. At such a barbecue an ox or a sheep, a bear, an elk, or a deer,
was split in two and roasted over the coals; dinner was eaten under the
trees; and there was every kind of amusement from horse-racing to
dancing.
Friction with the Backwoodsmen.

Though the relations of the officers of the regular troops with the
gentry were so pleasant there was always much friction between them
and the ordinary frontiersmen; a friction which continued to exist as
long as the frontier itself, and which survives to this day in the wilder
parts of the country. The regular army officer and the frontiersman are
trained in fashions so diametrically opposite that, though the two men
be brothers, they must yet necessarily in all their thoughts and instincts
and ways of looking at life, be as alien as if they belonged to two
different races of mankind. The borderer, rude, suspicious, and
impatient of discipline, looks with distrust and with a mixture of
sneering envy and of hostility upon the officer; while the latter, with his
rigid training and his fixed ideals, feels little sympathy for the other's
good points, and is contemptuously aware of his numerous failings.
The only link between the two is the scout, the man who, though one of
the frontiersmen, is accustomed to act and fight in company with the
soldiers. In Kentucky, at the close of the Revolution, this link was
generally lacking; and there was no tie of habitual, even though
half-hostile, intercourse to unite the two parties. In consequence the
ill-will often showed itself by acts of violence. The backwoods bullies
were prone to browbeat and insult the officers if they found them alone,
trying to provoke them to rough-and-tumble fighting; and in such a
combat, carried on with the revolting brutality necessarily attendant
upon a contest where gouging and biting were considered legitimate,
the officers, who were accustomed only to use their fists, generally had
the worst of it; so that at last they made a practice of carrying their
side-arms--which secured them from molestation.
Pursuits of the Settlers.
Besides raising more than enough flour and beef to keep themselves in
plenty, the settlers turned their attention to many other forms of
produce. Indian corn was still the leading crop; but melons, pumpkins,
and the like were grown, and there were many thriving orchards; while
tobacco cultivation was becoming of much importance. Great droves of
hogs and flocks of sheep flourished in every locality whence the bears
and wolves had been driven; the hogs running free in the woods with
the branded cattle and horses. Except in the most densely settled parts
much of the beef was still obtained from buffaloes, and much of the
bacon from bears. Venison was a staple commodity. The fur trade,

largely carried on by French trappers, was still of great importance in
Kentucky and Tennessee. North of the Ohio it was the attraction which
tempted white men into the wilderness. Its profitable nature was the
chief reason why the British persistently clung to the posts on the Lakes,
and stirred up the Indians to keep the American settlers out of all lands
that were tributary to the British fur merchants. From Kentucky and the
Cumberland country the peltries were sometimes sent east by packtrain,
and sometimes up the Ohio in bateaus or canoes.
Boone's Trading Ventures.
In addition to furs, quantities of ginseng were often carried to the
eastern settlements at this period when the commerce of the west was
in its first infancy, and was as yet only struggling for an