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(often used with a singular verb) wooded or partially uncleared and unsettled districts.
any remote or isolated area.
of or relating to the backwoods.
unsophisticated; uncouth.
Historical Examples

I could not spin as could my mother, who had passed her childhood in backwood life.
Life on the Stage Clara Morris

Colony was divided from colony by many miles of forest and backwood.
A Historical Geography of the British Colonies Charles Prestwood Lucas

From year to year his influence grew, as grows a tree in the backwood age, that neither shuns nor defies the storm.
Perlycross R. D. Blackmore

I loved the hearing of them, in the various dialects of the protagonists, from a lordly lisp to a backwood burr.
Caught by the Turks Francis Yeats-Brown

For the two years I knew it the charm of that backwood life never palled.
Life on the Stage Clara Morris

Thus ended the wedding of Isaac Younker—a fair specimen, by the way, of a backwood’s wedding in the early settlement of the west.
Ella Barnwell Emerson Bennett

A stable and pig-sty completed the appurtenances of this backwood dwelling.
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 Various

Here, in the multiplicity of footprints, he knew his own would be indistinguishable to even the keenest of backwood eyes.
Jim Charles G. D. Roberts

But backwood hunters were bold fellows in those days, and Indians were by no means noted for reckless courage.
Silver Lake R.M. Ballantyne

For I do reckon we love as hard in the backwood country, as any people in the whole creation.
A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee. Davy Crockett

plural noun
(mainly US & Canadian) partially cleared, sparsely populated forests
any remote sparsely populated place
(modifier) of, from, or like the backwoods
(modifier) uncouth; rustic
n.

1709, American English, from back (adj.) + wood (n.) “forested tract.” Also backwoods. As an adjective, from 1784.

BACKWOODSMEN … This word is commonly used as a term of reproach (and that, only in a familiar style,) to designate those people, who, being at a distance from the sea and entirely agricultural, are considered as either hostile or indifferent to the interests of the commercial states. [John Pickering, “A Vocabulary, or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States of America,” Boston, 1816]