his figure has the forest
hunter's natural slant forward and the droop of the neck of one who
must watch his path sometimes in order to tread silently. It is Squire
Boone's blood which shows in his ruddy face--which would be fair but for
its tan--and in the English cut of feature, the straw-colored eyebrows,
and the blue eyes. But his Welsh mother's legacy is seen in the black
hair that hangs long and loose in the hunter's fashion to his shoulders.
We can think of Daniel Boone only as exhilarated by this plunge into the
Wild. He sees ahead--the days of his great explorations and warfare, the
discovery of Kentucky? Not at all. This is a boy of sixteen in love with
his rifle. He looks ahead to vistas of forest filled with deer and
to skies clouded with flocks of wild turkeys. In that dream there is
happiness enough for Daniel Boone. Indeed, for himself, even in later
life, he asked little, if any, more. He trudges on blithely, whistling.

Chapter II. Folkways

These migrations into the inland valleys of the Old South mark the first
great westward thrust of the American frontier. Thus the beginnings of
the westward movement disclose to us a feature characteristic also of
the later migrations which flung the frontier over the Appalachians,
across the Mississippi, and finally to the shores of the Pacific. The
pioneers, instead of moving westward by slow degrees, subduing the
wilderness as they went, overleaped great spaces and planted themselves
beyond, out of contact with the life they had left behind. Thus
separated by hundreds of miles of intervening wilderness from the more
civilized communities, the conquerors of the first American "West,"
prototypes of the conquerors of succeeding "Wests," inevitably struck
out their own ways of life and developed their own customs. It would
be difficult, indeed, to find anywhere a more remarkable contrast in
contemporary folkways than that presented by the two great community
groups of the South--the inland or piedmont settlements, called the Back
Country, and the lowland towns and plantations along the seaboard.

The older society of the seaboard towns, as events were soon to prove,
was not less independent in its ideals than the frontier society of the
Back Country; but it was aristocratic in tone and feeling. Its leaders
were the landed gentry--men of elegance, and not far behind their
European contemporaries in the culture of the day. They were rich,
without effort, both fr