Another day would see the same group out again. The children
would keep closer to their mothers, no doubt; and the laughter of
the young girls would be more subdued, even if their coquetry
lacked nothing of its former effectiveness. Early marriages were
the rule in the Back Country and betrothals were frequently
plighted at these berry pickings.
As we consider the descriptions of the frontiersman left for us
by travelers of his own day, we are not more interested in his
battles with wilderness and Indian than in the visible effects of
both wilderness and Indian upon him. His countenance and bearing
still show the European, but the European greatly altered by
savage contact. The red peril, indeed, influenced every side of
frontier life. The bands of women and children at the
harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings, were not
there merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter and
love-making. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins,
for, to the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon his
immemorial hunting grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater
evil was the white man's family, bespeaking the increase of the
dreaded palefaces. The Indian peril trained the pioneers to
alertness, shaped them as warriors and hunters, suggested the
fashion of their dress, knit their families into clans and the
clans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in the
protection of each and all and a unit of hate against their
common enemy.
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