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Updated: September 11, 2025
The backwoodsmen were up, said the scout; half of the people beyond the mountains were under arms and on the march. A few days later they met him, thirteen hundred strong. Not a day, not an hour, was lost. Williams told them where their foes were encamped, and they resolved to march against them that very night and seek to take them by surprise.
It was at this hour that the wild backwoodsmen of the western border gathered to strike a blow for liberty. When Cornwallis invaded North Carolina he sent Ferguson into the western part of the State to crush out any of the patriot forces that might still be lingering among the foot-hills.
Benjamin Franklin, one of the wisest men in America, had told General Braddock that his greatest danger would be from unseen foes hidden among the underbrush and trees. "They may be dangerous to your backwoodsmen," said Braddock; "but to the trained soldiers of the king they can give no trouble at all." But scarcely had the army crossed the Monongahela when it was fired upon by unseen enemies.
He alone had military experience, and he alone had the daring, the genius and the personal magnetism of a real leader. The free State men, for the last year, had been passing through the furnace-fires of a vigorous discipline, and they would have fought as the Tennessee and Kentucky backwoodsmen of Andrew Jackson fought behind their cotton bales at the battle of New Orleans.
Their favorite arm was the light fowling-piece, for they were expert wing shots; unlike the American backwoodsmen, who knew nothing of shooting on the wing, and looked down on smooth-bores, caring only for the rifle, the true weapon of the freeman.
Odd, though, that it should be preserved in America by none but backwoodsmen whose ancestors for two centuries never saw the tides! In the vocabulary of the mountaineers I have detected only three words of directly foreign origin. Doney is one. There is something intrinsically, stubbornly English in the nature of the mountaineer: he will assimilate nothing foreign.
It was true that the Moravians held thousands of Delaware warriors neutral, and that our American officers knew their great power for good among the Indians; but the backwoodsmen hated them as bitterly as they hated the Wyandots.
Capotes were there loose, flowing, and picturesque; and broadcloth tail-coats were there, of the last century, tight-fitting, angular in a word, detestable; verifying the truth of the proverb that extremes meet, by showing that the cut which all the wisdom of tailors and scientific fops, after centuries of study, had laboriously wrought out and foisted upon the poor civilised world as perfectly sublime, appeared in the eyes of backwoodsmen and Indians utterly ridiculous.
By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all backwoodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as Poor Whites or Low-downers.
The custom-house officers that look after it carry clubs, and it's hard to smuggle in even a bib-and-tucker swindle to work Brooklyn with unless you can pay the toll. But now, me and Buck, having capital, descends upon New York to try and trade the metropolitan backwoodsmen a few glass beads for real estate just as the Vans did a hundred or two years ago.
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