But useful as were the green timber fires that rolled their smoke on the wind to save the stock, they were at the same time a menace to the pioneer, for they proclaimed to roving bands of Cherokees that a further encroachment on their territory had been made by their most hated enemies--the men who felled the hunter's forest.

Many an outpost pioneer who had made the long hard journey by sea and land from the old world of persecution to this new country of freedom, dropped from the red man's shot ere he had hewn the threshold of his home, leaving his wife and children to the unrecorded mercy of his slayer.
Those more fortunate pioneers who settled in groups won the first heat in the battle with the wilderness through massed effort under wariness.
They made their clearings in the forest, built their cabins and stockades, and planted their cornfields, while lookouts kept watch and rifles were stacked within easy reach.

Every special task, such as a "raising," as cabin building was called, was undertaken by the community chiefly because the Indian danger necessitated swift building and made group action imperative.

But the stanch heart is ever the glad heart.
Nothing in this frontier history impresses us more than the joy of the pioneer at his labors.

His determined optimism turned danger's dictation into an occasion for jollity.