settlements the Reverend James Campbell for thirty years traveled about,
preaching each Sunday at some gathering point a sermon in both English
and Gaelic. A little later, in the Yadkin Valley, after Craighead's
day there arose a small school of Presbyterian ministers whose zeal
and fearlessness in the cause of religion and of just government had an
influence on the frontiersmen that can hardly be overestimated.

But, in the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery of border
life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidance from other
mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the primal threefold
need family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the day's work was done. We
who look back with thoughtful eyes upon the frontiersman--all links of
contact with his racial past severed, at grips with destruction in the
contenting of his needs--see something more, something larger, than he
saw in the log cabin raised by his hands, its structure held together
solely by his close grooving and fitting of its own strength. Though
the walls he built for himself have gone with his own dust back to the
earth, the symbol he erected for us stands.

Chapter III. The Trader

The trader was the first pathfinder. His caravans began the change
of purpose that was to come to the Indian warrior's route, turning
it slowly into the beaten track of communication and commerce. The
settlers, the rangers, the surveyors, went westward over the trails
which he had blazed for them years before. Their enduring works are
commemorated in the cities and farms which today lie along every ancient
border line; but of their forerunner's hazardous Indian trade nothing
remains. Let us therefore pay a moment's homage here to the trader, who
first--to borrow a phrase from Indian speech--made white for peace the
red trails of war.

He was the first cattleman of the Old Southwest. Fifty years before
John Findlay, * one of this class of pioneers, led Daniel Boone through
Cumberland Gap, the trader's bands of horses roamed the western slopes
of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattle grazed among the deer on the
green banks of the old Cherokee (Tennessee) River. He was the pioneer
settler beyond the high hills; for he built, in the center of the Indian
towns, the first white man's cabin--with its larger annex, the trading
house--and dwelt there during the greater part of the year. He was
America's first magnate of international commerce. Hi