distinct and even
antagonistic people who are appropriately called the Roundheads of the
South. These Roundheads had little or nothing to do with slavery,
detested the state church, loathed tithes, and distrusted all authority
save that of conspicuous merit and natural justice. The first
characteristic that these pioneers developed was an intense
individualism. The strong and even violent independence that made them
forsake all the comforts of civilization and prefer the wild freedom of
the border was fanned at times into turbulence and riot; but it blazed
forth at a happy time for this country when our liberties were
imperilled.

Daniel Boone first appears in history when, from his new home on the
Yadkin, he crossed the Blue Ridge and the Unakas into that part of
western Carolina which is now eastern Tennessee. He was exploring the
Watauga region as early as 1760. Both British and French Indian traders
and soldiers had been in this region before him, but had left few marks
of their wanderings. In 1761 a party of hunters from Pennsylvania and
contiguous counties of Virginia, piloted by Boone, began to use this
region as a hunting-ground, on account of the great abundance of game.
From them, and especially from Boone, the fame of its attractions spread
to the settlements on the eastern slope of the mountains, and in the
winter of 1768-69 the first permanent occupation of eastern Tennessee
was made by a few families from North Carolina.

About this time there broke out in Carolina a struggle between the
independent settlers of the piedmont and the rich trading and official
class of the coast. The former rose in bodies under the name of
Regulators and a battle followed in which they were defeated. To escape
from the persecutions of the aristocracy, many of the Regulators and
their friends crossed the Appalachian Mountains and built their cabins
in the Watauga region. Here, in 1772, there was established by these
"rebels" the first republic in America, based upon a written
constitution "the first ever adopted by a community of American-born
freemen." Of these pioneers in "The Winning of the West," Theodore
Roosevelt says: "As in western Virginia the first settlers came, for the
most part, from Pennsylvania, so, in turn, in what was then western
North Carolina, and is now eastern Tennessee, the first settlers came
mainly from Virginia, and indeed, in great part, from this same
Pennsylvania stock."

Boone first visited K