dling neatly dressed considering the distance from where luxuries are
to be bought and the expense attending the purchase of them here"--for
though beef and flour were cheap, all imported goods sold for at least
five times as much as they cost in Philadelphia or New York. The
officers sometimes gave dances in the forts, the ladies and their
escorts coming in to spend the night; and they attended the great
barbecues to which the people rode from far and near, many of the men
carrying their wives or sweethearts behind them on the saddle. At such a
barbecue an ox or a sheep, a bear, an elk, or a deer, was split in two
and roasted over the coals; dinner was eaten under the trees; and there
was every kind of amusement from horse-racing to dancing.

Friction with the Backwoodsmen.

Though the relations of the officers of the regular troops with the
gentry were so pleasant there was always much friction between them and
the ordinary frontiersmen; a friction which continued to exist as long
as the frontier itself, and which survives to this day in the wilder
parts of the country. The regular army officer and the frontiersman are
trained in fashions so diametrically opposite that, though the two men
be brothers, they must yet necessarily in all their thoughts and
instincts and ways of looking at life, be as alien as if they belonged
to two different races of mankind. The borderer, rude, suspicious, and
impatient of discipline, looks with distrust and with a mixture of
sneering envy and of hostility upon the officer; while the latter, with
his rigid training and his fixed ideals, feels little sympathy for the
other's good points, and is contemptuously aware of his numerous
failings. The only link between the two is the scout, the man who,
though one of the frontiersmen, is accustomed to act and fight in
company with the soldiers. In Kentucky, at the close of the Revolution,
this link was generally lacking; and there was no tie of habitual, even
though half-hostile, intercourse to unite the two parties. In
consequence the ill-will often showed itself by acts of violence. The
backwoods bullies were prone to browbeat and insult the officers if they
found them alone, trying to provoke them to rough-and-tumble fighting;
and in such a combat, carried on with the revolting brutality
necessarily attendant upon a contest where gouging and biting were
considered legitimate, the officers, who were accustomed only to use
their fists, ge