ts, and of the grandchildren of his contemporaries.

19. The importance of maize to the western settler is shown by the fact
that in our tongue it has now monopolized the title of corn.

20. Putnam, p. 24, says it was after the battle of the Great Alamance,
which took place May 16, 1771. An untrustworthy tradition says March.

21. In examining numerous original drafts of petitions and the like,
signed by hundreds of the original settlers of Tennessee and Kentucky, I
have been struck by the small proportion--not much over three or four
per cent. at the outside--of men who made their mark instead of
signing.

22. See, in the collection of the Tenn. Hist. Soc., at Nashville, the
MS. notes containing an account of Sevier, given by one of the old
settlers named Hillsman. Hillsman especially dwells on the skill with
which Sevier could persuade the backwoodsmen to come round to his own
way of thinking, while at the same time making them believe that they
were acting on their own ideas, and adds--"whatever he had was at the
service of his friends and for the promotion of the Sevier party, which
sometimes embraced nearly all the population."

23. Mr. James Gilmore (Edmund Kirke), in his "John Sevier," makes some
assertions, totally unbacked by proof, about his hero's alleged feats,
when only a boy, in the wars between the Virginians and the Indians. He
gives no dates, but can only refer to Pontiac's war. Sevier was then
eighteen years old, but nevertheless is portrayed, among other things,
as leading "a hundred hardy borderers" into the Indian country, burning
their villages and "often defeating bodies of five times his own
numbers." These statements are supported by no better authority than
traditions gathered a century and a quarter after the event and must be
dismissed as mere fable. They show a total and rather amusing ignorance
not only of the conditions of Indian warfare, but also of the history of
the particular contest referred to. Mr. Gilmore forgets that we have
numerous histories of the war in which Sevier is supposed to have
distinguished himself, and that in not one of them is there a syllable
hinting at what he says. Neither Sevier nor any one else ever with a
hundred men defeated "five times his number" of northwestern Indians in
the woods, and during Sevier's life in Virginia, the only defeat ever
suffered by such a body of Indians was at Bushy Run, when Bouquet gained
a hard-fought victory. After the end of