Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 1 (wikilinked).djvu/65

54 I again demanded how a stranger was to distinguish a good from a vicious house of entertainment. 'By pre­vious inquiry, or, if that was impracticable, a tolerable judgment could be formed from observing in the landlord a possession or an absence of ears.'"

The temper of the writer was at least as remark­able in this description as the scene he pretended to describe, for Ashe's Travels were believed to have been chiefly imaginary; but no one denied the rough­ness of the lower classes in the South and Southwest, nor was roughness wholly confined to them. No prominent man in Western society bore himself with more courtesy and dignity than Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, who in 1800 was candidate for the post of major-general of State militia, and had previously served as Judge on the Supreme Bench of his State; yet the fights in which he had been engaged exceeded belief.

Border society was not refined, but among its vices, as its virtues, few were permanent, and little idea could be drawn of the character that would at last emerge. The Mississippi boatman and the squatter on Indian lands were perhaps the most distinctly American type then existing, as far removed from the Old World as though Europe were a dream. Their language and imagination showed contact with In­dians. A traveller on the levee at Natchez, in 1808, overheard a quarrel in a flatboat near by:—


 * "I am a man; I am a horse; I am a team," cried one voice; "I can whip any man in all Kentucky, by