Alleghenies Was the Frontier

In the hard life of the frontier, they lost much of their religion, and they had but scant opportunity to give their children the schooling in which they believed.

Continuing Frontiersmen Before the American Revolution,
our selection from The Winning of the West by Theodore Roosevelt published in 1889. The selection is presented in nine easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Frontiersmen Before the American Revolution.

Time: 1769-1774
Place: Western Pennsylvania

They did not begin to come to America in any numbers till after the opening of the eighteenth century; by 1730 they were fairly swarming across the ocean, for the most part in two streams, the larger going to the port of Philadelphia, the smaller to the port of Charleston.[1] Pushing through the long-settled lowlands of the seacoast, they at once made their abode at the foot of the mountains and became the outposts of civilization. From Pennsylvania, whither the great majority had come, they drifted south along the foothills, and down the long valleys, till they met their brethren from Charleston who had pushed up into the Carolina back-country. In this land of hills, covered by unbroken forest, they took root and flourished, stretching in a broad belt from north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of the seaboard and the red warriors of the wilderness. All through this region they were alike; they had as little kinship with the Cavalier as with the Quaker; the west was won by those who have been rightly called the Roundheads of the south, the same men who, before any others, declared for American independence.[2]

[1:  Foote, 78.]

[2:  Witness the Mecklenburg Declaration.]

The two facts of most importance to remember in dealing with our pioneer history are, first, that the western portions of Virginia and the Carolinas were peopled by an entirely different stock from that which had long existed in the tide-water regions of those colonies; and, secondly, that, except for those in the Carolinas who came from Charleston, the immigrants of this stock were mostly from the north, from their great breeding-ground and nursery in western Pennsylvania.

[McAfee MSS. “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers” (John P. Hale), 17. Foote, 188. See also Columbian Magazine, I., 122, and Schopf, 406. Boon, Crockett, Houston, Campbell, Lewis, were among the southwestern pioneers whose families originally came from Pennsylvania. See “Annals of Augusta County, Va.,” by Joseph A. Waddell, Richmond, 1888 (an excellent book), pp. 4, 276, 279, for a clear showing of the Presbyterian Irish origin of the West Virginians, and of the large German admixture.]

That these Irish Presbyterians were a bold and hardy race is proved by them at once pushing past the settled regions and plunging into the wilderness as the leaders of the white advance. They were the first and last set of immigrants to do this; all others have merely followed in the wake of their predecessors. But, indeed, they were fitted to be Americans from the very start; they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters; they deemed it a religious duty to interpret their own Bible and held for a divine right the election of their own clergy. For generations their whole ecclesiastic and scholastic systems had been fundamentally democratic. In the hard life of the frontier, they lost much of their religion, and they had but scant opportunity to give their children the schooling in which they believed; but what few meeting houses and schoolhouses there were on the border were theirs.[3] The numerous families of colonial English who came among them adopted their religion if they adopted any. The creed of the backwoodsman who had a creed at all was Presbyterianism; for the Episcopacy of the tide-water lands obtained no foothold in the mountains, and the Methodists and Baptists had but just begun to appear in the west when the Revolution broke out.[4]

[3:  The Irish schoolmaster was everywhere a feature of early western society.]

[4:  McAfee MSS. MS. Autobiography of Rev. Wm. Hickman, born in Virginia in 1747 (in Col. R. T. Durrett’s library). “Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” 147. “History of Kentucky Baptists,” J. H. Spencer (Cincinnati, 1885)]

These Presbyterian Irish were, however, far from being the only settlers on the border, although more than any others they impressed the stamp of their peculiar character on the pioneer civilization of the west and southwest. Great numbers of immigrants of English descent came among them from the settled districts on the east; and though these later arrivals soon became indistinguishable from the people among whom they settled, yet they certainly sometimes added a tone of their own to backwoods society, giving it here and there a slight dash of what we are accustomed to consider the distinctively southern or cavalier spirit.[5] There was likewise a large German admixture, not only from the Germans of Pennsylvania, but also from those of the Carolinas.[6] A good many Huguenots likewise came,[7] and a few Hollanders[8] and even Swedes,[9] from the banks of the Delaware, or perhaps from farther off still.

[5:  Boon, though of English descent, had no Virginia blood in his veins; he was an exact type of the regular backwoodsman; but in Clark, and still more in Blount, we see strong traces of the “cavalier spirit.” Of course, the Cavaliers no more formed the bulk of the Virginia people than they did of Rupert’s armies; but the squires and yeomen who went to make up the mass took their tone from their leaders.]

[6:  Many of the most noted hunters and Indian fighters were of German origin, (see “Early Times in Middle Tennessee,” John Carr, Nashville, 1859, pp. 54 and 56, for Steiner and Mansker—or Stoner and Mansco.) Such were the Wetzels, famous in border annals, who lived near Wheeling; Michael Steiner, the Steiners being the forefathers of many of the numerous Kentucky Stoners of to-day; and Kasper Mansker, the “Mr. Mansco” of Tennessee writers. Every old western narrative contains many allusions to “Dutchmen,” as Americans very properly call the Germans. Their names abound on the muster-rolls, pay-rolls, lists of settlers, etc., of the day (Blount MSS., State Department MSS., McAfee MSS., Am. State Papers, etc.); but it must be remembered that they are often Anglicized, when nothing remains to show the origin of the owners. We could not recognize in Custer and Herkomer, Kuster and Herckheimer, were not the ancestral history of the two generals already known; and in the backwoods, a man often loses sight of his ancestors in a couple of generations. In the Carolinas the Germans seem to have been almost as plentiful on the frontiers as the Irish (see Adair, 245, and Smyth’s “Tour,” I., 236). In Pennsylvania they lived nearer civilization (Schoolcraft, 3, 335, “Journey in the West in 1785,” by Lewis Brantz), although also mixed with the borderers, the more adventurous among them naturally seeking the frontier.]

[7:  Giving to the backwoods society such families as the Seviers and Lenoirs. The Huguenots, like the Germans, frequently had their names Anglicized. The best known and most often quoted example is that of the Blancpied family, part of whom have become Whitefoots, while the others, living on the coast, have suffered a marvellous sea-change, the name reappearing as “Blumpy.”]

[8:  To the western American, who was not given to nice ethnic distinctions, both German and Hollander were simply Dutchmen but occasionally we find names like Van Meter, Van Buskirk, Van Sweanngen, which carry their origin on their faces (De Haas, 317, 319. Doddridge, 307).]

[9:  The Scandinavian names in an unlettered community, soon become indistinguishable from those of the surrounding American’s -— Jansen, Petersen, etc., being readily Americanized. It is therefore rarely that they show their parentage. Still, we now and then come across one that is unmistakable, as Erickson, for instance (see p. 51 of Col. Reuben T. Durrett’s admirable “Life and Writings of John Filson,” Louisville and Cincinnati, 1884).]

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