d a "redemptioner" for its first
American ancestor.

* * *

Looking to the western frontier just after the Revolution, and in
particular the forks of the Ohio, we see a population very different in
character from that of the older settlements. The peace-loving Quaker
clung to the eastern counties, where life and property were secured from
raid and reprisal, and formed his ideas of the Indian character and
deserts from the red men, who, either Christianized or demoralized,
preferred the grudging charity of civilization to the rude and frugal
spoils of the chase, or the blood-stained rapine of war. This specimen of
Indian was usually so harmless, in some instances perhaps so deserving,
that the well-meaning Quaker learned to receive with discredit the
stories of horror from the frontier, and discouraged with his voice and
influence every step toward the subjection of the hostile Indian and his
European allies. Emigrants were forbidden, under stern penalties, to
encroach on the Indian domain, and petitions from invaded settlements for
arms and assistance, were met with cold indifference or positive refusal.
The men and women who, in face of such discouragement, cast their lot
beyond the mountains, must have been a hardy set indeed, and made of
stuff not likely to yield in a wrestle with wild nature and wilder
humanity.

The early inhabitants of that frontier region were of sturdy Scotch and
Irish stock. The troublous political times in their native countries
doubtless had much to do with their emigration hither. The star of the
Stuart line had set never to rise again, and its bright and hopeless
flicker, in the days of '45, was extinguished in the blood of Scotland's
noblest sons. But while order reigned, content was far from prevailing,
and many a brave heart sought, on the distant shore of America, to forget
the anguish of the past in the building of a prosperous future. With a
final sigh for "Lochaber No More," the Highlander turned his gaze from
the lochs and glens of his fathers, and crossed the ocean to that new
land of promise where every man might be a laird, and a farm might be had
for the asking, where no Culloden would remind him of the fate of his
kindred, and his children could grow up far from the barbarous laws that
crushed out the spirit of the ancient clans. Along the banks of the
Monongahela those Scotch and Irish settlers built their rude cabins under
the guns