That was the day of the founding of the American aristocracy, of the birth of the American type, of the beginning of the American character. If we would study an actual American history, we can not leave out the American pioneer; and before, in our humble effort to approach the real genius of our America, we follow the strong sweep of the west-bound beyond the mighty Mississippi and toward the western sea, we shall do best to pause for a space and to make some inquiry into the origin and character of these early apostles of the creed of adventure. If we ask chapter and verse in the study of the origin of this American frontiersman, this pioneer whose ambition was an indisputable personal independence, we shall not find the details of his ancestry among the records of wealthy and aristocratic dwellers of the seaboard region. The bone and brawn of the early frontier did not come from the Cavaliers, properly so-called; though it were doing the Cavaliers, the aristocrats, an injustice to say that they were deaf to the summons of adventure. The man that dared life and fortune in moving to America would dare life and fortune west of the Alleghanies; and the history of many a colony and land grant in the early West is proof enough of this. The Cavalier or aristocrat, however, was not our typical axman or rifleman. The man of accomplished fortune, of stable social connections, dwelt farther back in that East that offered the most settled society of the American continent. The man in linsey-woolsey, the woodsman, the rifleman, was the man at the front, and it is in regard to his origin that we may profitably be somewhat curious. We shall, therefore, for a time be more concerned with the mountains of Pennsylvania than with the shores of Chesapeake Bay or the rich valleys of Maryland and the Old Dominion. A student of the history of the early settlement of Pennsylvania[6] furnishes data regarding the two great stems of the pioneer stock, the Quaker and the Scotch-Irish, which were most prominent among the many nationalities that flocked to the kindly kingdom of William Penn, where each man was treated as a man, and where independence in thought and action was the portion each claimed as his own. “In the first half of the eighteenth century,” says this writer, “many thousands of Scotch-Irish, Germans and Welsh landed at Philadelphia and New Castle, and a large majority of them found homes in Pennsylvania. A number of the former turned to the westward from New Castle and established themselves in Maryland and Virginia. Among them were the ancestors of Meriwether Lewis, whose grandfather was born in Ulster, Ireland; and a number of other noted pathfinders of the West.