The families of mountain men are usually large in number, and the estate of Old Coonrod has passed through a long division. He had eight children, and his son Elijah Pile, the branch of the family to which Sergeant York belongs, had eleven children. That portion of the estate which Elijah inherited passed into good hands. He conserved his part, handled well the talents left with him; but the second division by eleven, together with the ravages of the Civil War and the years that followed, left only seventy-five acres, and far from the best of it, to Mary York, the truly wonderful little mountain mother who gave to Alvin York those qualities of mind and heart which stood him in good stead in the Forest of Argonne, who taught him to so live that he feared no man, and to do thoroughly and always in the right way that which he had to do. "Else," as she so frequently said to him, "you'll have to 'do hit over, or hit'll cause you trouble." III The People of the Mountains The log cabin of the pioneer influenced architecture and gave to us the house of Colonial design, the first distinctively American type, for the Colonial home grew around the pioneer's two rooms of logs separated by an open passageway. The muzzle-loading rifle--and it was the pioneer's gun--with its long barrel and its fine sights, gave confidence to the American soldier who carried it, for he trusted the weapon in his hands. Progressive inventions finally displaced this rifle in military use, but for the accuracy of the shot it has never been surpassed, and it is to-day a loved relic and a valued hunting-piece. Men trained to shoot with it, used to the slender line of its silver foresight and to the delicate response of its hair-trigger, have made rare records in marksmanship. The very difficulty of loading--the time it took--taught its users to be accurate and not spend the shot. This rifle stopped the British at Bunker Hill and Kings Mountain, and over its long barrel Alvin York and some of the best shots of the American army learned to bring their sights upward to the mark and tip the hair-trigger when the bead first reached its object. It was training acquired in the forest, the same manner of marksmanship, the same self-reliance and individual resourcefulness as a soldier that gave to Sergeant York the power to come back over the hill in Argonne Forest, bringing one hundred and thirty-two prisoners, and to the army under Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, more than a hundred years before, the fighting resource to achieve victory with a loss of eight killed and thirteen wounded, while England's records show that "about three thousand of the British were struck with rifle bullets." [Footnote: From "The True Andrew Jackson," by Cyrus Townsend Brady, Chap. IV, p. 88; published by J. B. Lippincott Co., 1906. ]