the common playground where horses and men
ran their rounds and won their prizes. To drink deeply of the strong
"corn" or "rye" was as common as is the drinking of wine in France; and
races, corn-huskings, or weddings were seldom closed without
drunkenness, and oftentimes fisticuffs or the more fatal duel with knife
or pistol. Jackson had "killed his man," and Benton had been knocked
through a trapdoor into the basement of a Nashville bar-room; Clay and
Poindexter, the Mississippi Governor and Senator, had had more than one
encounter in which life was set against life.

If men held human life cheap, they held woman's honor more than dear,
and to give currency to a tale of slander was tantamount to half a dozen
challenges. Women were in the minority in the West, and although they
did not vote, they were still of utmost importance in homes where
clothing was handmade and the needs of numerous children increased
daily. Henry Clay was one of thirteen or fourteen brothers and sisters,
while Thomas Marshall, the father of the Chief Justice, carried ten or
twelve children with him to his Western home about the year 1781. But
the sorrows of the pioneer women and the waste of human material were
extraordinary. In those days of hardship and ignorance of the most
rudimentary rules of sanitation, few knew how to save their children
from death due to the simplest diseases, and the student to-day reads
the sad story in the many tiny tombstones of the old family cemeteries,
knowing well that the great majority rest in unmarked graves. Many were
born and many died without a fair chance at normal existence.

Western men were seldom members of organized churches, though the fear
of the Deity, natural to those who witnessed the great "freshets" and
the storms and cyclones which swept over the plains, carrying entire
villages with them or cutting wide swaths through the primeval forests,
was a powerful influence upon everyday conduct. Presbyterians, Baptists,
and Methodists, with their strict and hard Calvinism, penetrated first
the wilderness beyond the mountains and built their rude log churches,
in which stern preachers, like Samuel Doak, of Tennessee, or Jonathan
Going, of Ohio, warned men against the wrath to come and the fiery
furnace below, whose surging flames were ever ready to swallow up and
consume stiff-necked, yet never-dying sinners. The simple and
superstitious minds of the neglected West flocked to these little
churches or