These trails, the path of buffalo and deer and the lines of
communication between the tribes, finally marked the course of explorer,
hunter, and settler. As each in turn made his way to the wilderness he
was glad indeed to find paths awaiting his footsteps. The scene was set
for a rugged race. They came and stayed.

THE PEOPLE

The men and women who came to settle this region were a stalwart race,
the men usually six feet in height, the women gaunt and prolific. They
were descendants of English, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish who landed along
the Atlantic coast at the close of the sixteenth century--around 1635,
when the oppression of rulers drove them from England, Scotland, and
Ireland. Some were impelled by love of religious freedom, while others
sought political liberty in the new world. Their migration to America
really started with a project, a project that had its beginning in
Ireland as far back as 1610. It was called the English invasion of
Ireland. King after king in England had sent colonists to the Emerald
Isle and naturally the native sons resented their coming. Good Queen
Bess in turn continued with the project and tried to keep peace between
the invaders and the invaded by donating lands there to court favorites.
But the bickerings went on. It was not until after Elizabeth's death
that King James I of England worked out a better project--temporarily at
least. He sent sturdy, stubborn, tenacious Scots to Ulster; their
natures made of them better fighters than the Irish upon whose lands
they had been transplanted. But even though it was English rulers who
had "planted" them there the Scots were soon put to all sorts of trials
and persecution. They resented heartily the King's levy of tax upon the
poteen which they had learned to make from their adopted Irish brothers.
Resentment grew to hatred of excise laws, hatred of authority that would
enforce any such laws. These burned deep in the breast of the
Scotch-Irish, so deep that they live to this day in the hearts of their
descendants in the southern mountains.

So political strife, resentment toward governmental authority, hatred
toward individuals acting for the rulers developed into feuds. In some
such way the making of poteen and feuds were linked hand-in-hand long
before the Anglo-Celtic and Anglo-Saxon set foot in the wilderness of
America.

They were pawns of the Crown, used to suppress the uprisings of the
Irish Catho