rapped round loosely and tied
with garters, or laced upon the outside, and always come better
than half-way up the thigh.

On their feet they sometimes wear pumps of their own manufacture,
but generally Indian moccossons, of their own construction also,
which are made of strong elk's, or buck's skin, dressed soft as
for gloves or breeches, drawn together in regular plaits over the
toe, and lacing from thence round to the fore part of the middle
of the ancle, without a seam in them, yet fitting close to the
feet, and are indeed perfectly easy and pliant.

Their hunting, or rifle shirts, they have also died in a variety
of colours, some yellow, others red, some brown, and many wear
them quite white."

No less unique and bizarre, though less picturesque, was the
dress of the women of the region--in particular of Surry County,
North Carolina, as described by General William Lenoir:

"The women wore linses [flax] petticoats and 'bedgowns' [like a
dressing-sack], and often went without shoes in the summer. Some
had bonnets and bedgowns made of calico, but generally of linsey;
and some of them wore men's hats. Their hair was commonly
clubbed. Once, at a large meeting, I noticed there but two women
that had on long gowns. One of these was laced genteelly, and the
body of the other was open, and the tail thereof drawn up and
tucked in her apron or coat-string."

While Daniel Boone was quietly engaged in the pleasant pursuits
of the chase, a vast world-struggle of which he little dreamed
was rapidly approaching a crisis. For three quarters of a century
this titanic contest between France and England for the interior
of the continent had been waged with slowly accumulating force.
The irrepressible conflict had been formally inaugurated at Sault
Ste. Marie in 1671, when Daumont de Saint Lusson, swinging aloft
his sword, proclaimed the sovereignty of France over "all
countries, rivers, lakes, and streams ... both those which have
been discovered and those which may be discovered hereafter, in
all their length and breadth, bounded on the one side by the seas
of the North and of the West, and on the other by the South Sea."
Just three months later, three hardy pioneers of Virginia,
despatched upon their arduous mission by Colonel Abraham Wood in
behalf of the English crown, had crossed the Appalachian divide;
and upon the banks of a stream whose waters slipped into the Ohio
to join the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, had c