When Fanning first to Orange came, He looked both pale and wan; An old patched coat was on his back, An old mare he rode on. Both man and mare wan't worth five pounds, As I've been often told; But by his civil robberies, He's laced his coat with gold. [109] The germs of the great westward migration in the coming decade were thus working among the people of the back country. If the tense nervous energy of the American people is the transmitted characteristic of the border settlers, who often slept with loaded rifle in hand in grim expectation of being awakened by the hideous yells, the deadly tomahawk, and the lurid firebrand of the savage, the very buoyancy of the national character is in equal measure "traceable to the free democracy founded on a freehold inheritance of land." The desire for free land was the fundamental factor in the development of the American democracy. No colony exhibited this tendency more signally than did North Carolina in the turbulent days of the Regulation. The North Carolina frontiersmen resented the obligation to pay quit-rents and firmly believed that the first occupant of the soil had an indefeasible right to the land which he had won with his rifle and rendered productive by the implements of toil. Preferring the dangers of the free wilderness to the paying of tribute to absentee landlords and officials of an intolerant colonial government, the frontiersman found title in his trusty rifle rather than in a piece of parchment, and was prone to pay his obligations to the owner of the soil in lead rather than in gold. CHAPTER XII. Watauga--Haven of Liberty The Regulators despaired of seeing better times and therefore quitted the Province. It is said 1,500 departed since the Battle of Alamance and to my knowledge a great many more are only waiting to dispose of their plantations in order to follow them. --Reverend Morgan Edwards, 1772.