Brick to be made, a sturgion house...

a Block house to be raised on the North side of our back river to prevent the Indians from killing our cattle, a house to be set up to lodge our cattle in the winter, and hay to be appointed in his due time to be made, a smith's forge to be perfected, caske for our Sturgions to be made, and besides private gardens for each man common gardens for hemp and flax and such other seeds, and lastly a bridge to land our goods dry and safe upon, for most of which I take present order." Dale would have agreed with Dr.Watts that Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do! If we of the United States today will call to mind certain Western small towns of some decades ago--if we will review them as they are pictured in poem and novel and play--we may receive, as it were out of the tail of the eye, an impression of some aspects of these western plantings of the seventeenth century.

The dare-devil, the bully, the tenderfoot, the gambler, the gentleman-desperado had their counterparts in Virginia.

So had the cool, indomitable sheriff and his dependable posse, the friends generally of law and order.

Dale may be viewed as the picturesque sheriff of this earlier age.
But it must be remembered that this Virginia was of the seventeenth, not of the nineteenth century.