ls of the forest Americans were those of
audacious, visionary beings loosely hound together by a comradeship
in peril. Courage, cautiousness, swiftness, endurance, faithfulness,
secrecy,--these were the forest virtues. Dreaming, companionship,
humor,--these were the forest luxuries.

From the first, all sorts and conditions were ensnared by that silent
land, where the trails they followed, their rifles in their hands, had
been trodden hard generation after generation by the feet of the Indian
warriors. The best and the worst of England went into that illimitable
resolvent, lost themselves, found themselves, and issued from its
shadows, or their children did, changed both for good and ill,
Americans. Meanwhile the great forest, during two hundred years, was
slowly vanishing. This parent of a new people gave its life to its
offspring and passed away. In the early nineteenth century it had
withered backward far from the coast; had lost its identity all along
the north end of the eastern mountains; had frayed out toward the sunset
into lingering tentacles, into broken minor forests, into shreds and
patches.

Curiously, by a queer sort of natural selection, its people had
congregated into life communities not all of one pattern. There were
places as early as the beginning of the century where distinction
had appeared. At other places life was as rude and rough as could be
imagined. There were innumerable farms that were still mere "clearings,"
walled by the forest. But there were other regions where for many a mile
the timber had been hewn away, had given place to a ragged continuity
of farmland. In such regions especially if the poorer elements of
the forest, spiritually speaking, had drifted thither--the straggling
villages which had appeared were but groups of log cabins huddled along
a few neglected lanes. In central Kentucky, a poor new village was
Elizabethtown, unkempt, chokingly dusty in the dry weather, with muddy
streams instead of streets during the rains, a stench of pig-sties at
the back of its cabins, but everywhere looking outward glimpses of a
lovely meadow land.

At Elizabethtown in 1806 lived Joseph Hanks, a carpenter, also his niece
Nancy Hanks. Poor people they were, of the sort that had been sucked
into the forest in their weakness, or had been pushed into it by a
social pressure they could not resist; not the sort that had grimly
adventured its perils or gaily courted its lure. Their source was
Virg