two neighbors with their families, who thus made up a typical
eighteenth-century emigrant group. Arrived at Charleston, the
travelers fitted themselves out for an overland journey, awaited a
stretch of favorable weather, and set off for the Waxhaw settlement,
one hundred and eighty miles to the northwest, where numbers of their
kinsmen and countrymen were already established. There the Jacksons
were received with open arms by the family of a second brother-in-law,
who had migrated a few years earlier and who now had a comfortable log
house and a good-sized clearing.

The settlement lay on the banks of the upper Catawba, near the
junction of that stream with Waxhaw Creek; and as it occupied a
fertile oasis in a vast waste of pine woods, it was for decades
largely cut off from touch with the outside world. The settlement was
situated, too, partly in North Carolina and partly in South Carolina,
so that in the pre-Revolutionary days many of the inhabitants hardly
knew, or cared to know, in which of the two provinces they dwelt.

Upon their arrival Jackson's friends bought land on the creek and
within the bounds of the settlement. Jackson himself was too poor,
however, to do this, and accordingly took up a claim six miles distant
on another little stream known as Twelve-mile Creek. Here, in the fall
of 1765, he built a small cabin, and during the winter he cleared five
or six acres of ground. The next year he was able to raise enough
corn, vegetables, and pork to keep his little household from want. The
tract thus occupied cannot be positively identified, but it lay in
what is now Union County, North Carolina, a few miles from Monroe, the
county seat.

Then came tragedy of a sort in which frontier history abounds. In the