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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 1867, Sandford C. Cox published a book ot verses containing the couplet, ? If Sam is right, I would suggest A native Hoosier as the best, ? the word was widely known, and thereafter it frequently occurs in all printed records touching the State. It is reported from Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina by independent observers, who say that the idea of a rough countryman is always associated with it. In Missouri it is sometimes used thus abstractly, but a native Indianian is usually meant, without reference to his manners or literacy. No reader of Hoosier chronicles can fail to be impressed by the relation of the great forests to the people who came to possess and tame them. Before they reached the Indiana wilderness in their advance before civilization, the stalwart pioneers had swung their axes in Pennsylvania or Kentucky, and had felt the influence of the great, gloomy woodlands in their lives; but in Indiana this influence was greatly intensified. They experienced an isolation that is not possible to-day in any part of the country, and the loss of nearly every civilizing agency that men value. These frontiersmen could hardly have believed themselves the founders of a permanent society, for the exact topography of much of their inheritance was unknown to them; large areas were submerged for long periods, and the density of the woods increased the difficulty of building roads and knitting the scattered clearings and villages into a compact and sensitive commonwealth. Once cleared, the land yielded a precarious living to the pioneers in return for their labors and sacrifices; after the first dangers from beasts of prey, the pestiferous small animals anticipated the harvest and ate the corn. One ear in four acres remained after the gray squirrels had taken their ple...