All the struggling colonies used their wild land as a sort of military chest; it was often the only security of value in their possession.
The same year that the land office was opened, it was enacted that the bridle path across the mountains should be chopped out and made into a rough wagon road.

[Footnote: However this was not actually done until some years later.] The following spring the successful expedition against the Chicamaugas temporarily put a stop to Indian troubles.

The growing security, the opening of the land office, and the increase of knowledge concerning the country, produced a great inflow of settlers in 1779, and from that time onward the volume of immigration steadily increased.
Character and Life of the Settlers.
Many of these new-comers were "poor whites," or crackers; lank, sallow, ragged creatures, living in poverty, ignorance, and dirt, who regarded all strangers with suspicion as "outlandish folks." [Footnote: Smythe's Tours, I., 103, describes the up-country crackers of North Carolina and Virginia.] With every chance to rise, these people remained mere squalid cumberers of the earth's surface, a rank, up-country growth, containing within itself the seeds of vicious, idle pauperism, and semi-criminality.

They clustered in little groups, scattered throughout the backwoods settlements, in strong contrast to the vigorous and manly people around them.
By far the largest number of the new-comers were of the true, hardy backwoods stock, fitted to grapple with the wilderness and to hew out of it a prosperous commonwealth.

The leading settlers began, by thrift and industry, to acquire what in the backwoods passed for wealth.