school-teacher, the two beings who had
done so much for colonial civilization on the seaboard, were already
becoming important factors in the life of the frontier communities.
Austere Presbyterian ministers were people of mark in many of the towns.
The Baptist preachers lived and worked exactly as did their flocks;
their dwellings were little cabins with dirt floors and, instead of
bedsteads, skin-covered pole-bunks; they cleared the ground, split
rails, planted corn, and raised hogs on equal terms with their
parishioners. [Footnote: "History of Kentucky Baptists," by J. H.
Spencer.] After Methodism cut loose from its British connections in
1785, the time of its great advance began, and the circuit-riders were
speedily eating bear meat and buffalo tongues on the frontier.
[Footnote: "History of Methodism in Kentucky," by John B. McFerrier.]

Rough log schools were springing up everywhere, beside the rough log
meeting-houses, the same building often serving for both purposes. The
school-teacher might be a young surveyor out of work for the moment, a
New Englander fresh from some academy in the northeast, an Irishman with
a smattering of learning, or perhaps an English immigrant of the upper
class, unfit for and broken down by the work of a new country.
[Footnote: Durrett MSS. "Autobiography of Robert McAfee."] The boys and
girls were taught together, and at recess played together--tag, pawns,
and various kissing games. The rod was used unsparingly, for the elder
boys proved boisterous pupils. A favorite mutinous frolic was to "bar
out" the teacher, taking possession of the school-house and holding it
against the master with sticks and stones until he had either forced an
entrance or agreed to the terms of the defenders. Sometimes this barring
out represented a revolt against tyranny; often it was a conventional,
and half-acquiesced-in, method of showing exuberance of spirit, just
before the Christmas holidays. In most of the schools the teaching was
necessarily of the simplest, for the only books might be a Testament, a
primer, a spelling book, and a small arithmetic.

Frontier Society.

In such a society, simple, strong, and rude, both the good features and
the bad were nakedly prominent; and the views of observers in reference
thereto varied accordingly as they were struck by one set of
characteristics or another. One traveller would paint the frontiersmen
as little better than the Indians against whom they warr