" [Footnote: Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," 1:41.]
They were under ordinary circumstances good-humored, kindly men, "always
polite" [Footnote: "Winning of the West," 1:45.]--in "agreeable contrast"
to most frontiersmen--religious, yet fond of merrymaking, of music and
dancing; and while, as time went on, they came to borrow traits of their
red neighbors and even to forget the years and months (reckoning time, as
the Indians did, from the flood of the river or the ripening of
strawberries), still they kept many valuable and amiable qualities, to be
merged eventually in the new life that soon swept over their beautiful
little villages. Of the coming of a strange, new, strenuous life, a stray
English or American fur trader gave them occasional presentment, as it
were, the spray of the swelling, restless sea of human spirits, beating
against the mountain barriers and flung far inland.
In the early part of the eighteenth century an English governor of the
colony of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, had led a band of horsemen known
afterward as his "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe," with great hilarity,
"stimulated by abundance of wine, champagne, rum," and other liquors, over
the Blue Ridge Mountains, a part of the Alleghany Range, to the
Shenandoah.
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