He pronounced them a hardy
race, adventurers by profession, and ready to seize every opportunity
of profit or employment. They were described in a project for using
them presented at another time to the French Government as "hardy,
enterprising, good marksmen, lovers of liberty, and always armed."
The extent to which the western people were prepared to go in the
Confederation days was a matter of much dispute, and was aired fully
in the course of time by controversies in Kentucky politics. But their
hardihood and capacity for achievement have never been questioned.
They were qualified by nature to insist upon their rights even if such
insistence embarrassed the foreign negotiations of the home Government.
Bred in the rural districts of Virginia and the Carolinas, accustomed
to solitude and privations, depending upon their rifles for food and
largely for dress, they felt no ties binding them to home and the old
life when once they had crossed the mountains. They were self-dependent
in nearly every particular except arms and ammunition. Carrying the
organising instinct of their English forefathers, they set up local
government as rapidly as their numbers warranted.
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