The Frontier in American History Part 5

We your pettionours humbly sheweth that we your Honours Loly and Dutifull Subganckes hath ventred our Lives & all that we have In settling ye back parts of Virginia which was a veri Great Ha.s.sirt & Dengrous, for it is the Hathins [heathens] Road to ware, which has proved hortfull to severil of ous that were ye first settlers of these back woods & wee your Honibill pettionors some time a goo pet.i.tioned your Honnour for to have Commisioned men amungst ous which we your Honnours most Duttifull subjects thought properist men & men that had Hart and Curidg to hed us yn time of [war] & to defend your Contray & your poor Sogbacks Intrist from ye voilince of ye Haithen--But yet agine we Humbly persume to poot your Honnour yn mind of our Great want of them in hopes that your Honner will Grant a Captins' Commission to John McDowell, with follring ofishers, and your Honnours' Complyence in this will be Great settisfiction to your most Duttifull and Humbil pettioners--and we as in Duty bond shall Ever pray ... (Calendar of Virginia State Papers, i, p. 235).

[51:1] But there is a note of deference in Southern frontier pet.i.tions to the Continental Congress--to be discounted, however, by the remoteness of that body. See F. J. Turner, "Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era" (_American Historical Review_, i, pp. 70, 251). The demand for remission of taxes is a common feature of the pet.i.tions there quoted.

[51:2] Proceedings Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society, xliii, pp. 506 ff.

[51:3] _Ibid._, xliii, p. 518.

[52:1] Connecticut Colonial Records, iv, p. 67.

[52:2] In a pet.i.tion of February 22, 1693-4, Deerfield calls itself the "most Utmost Frontere Town in the County of West Hamps.h.i.+re"

(Ma.s.sachusetts Archives, cxiii, p. 57 a).

[52:3] Judd, "Hadley," p. 249.

[52:4] W. D. Schuyler-Lighthall, "Glorious Enterprise," p. 16.

[53:1] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 405.

[54:1] "I want to have your warriours come and see me," wrote Allen to the Indians of Canada in 1775, "and help me fight the King's Regular Troops. You know they stand all close together, rank and file, and my men fight so as Indians do, and I want your warriours to join with me and my warriours, like brothers, and ambush the Regulars: if you will, I will give you money, blankets, tomahawks, knives, paint, and any thing that there is in the army, just like brothers; and I will go with you into the woods to scout; and my men and your men will sleep together, and eat and drink together, and fight Regulars, because they first killed our brothers" (American Archives, 4th Series, ii, p. 714).

[54:2] Compare A. McF. Davis, "The Shays Rebellion a Political Aftermath" (Proceedings American Antiquarian Society, xxi, pp. 58, 62, 75-79).

[55:1] "Land System of the New England Colonies," p. 30.

[55:2] Ma.s.sachusetts Colony Records, i, p. 167.

[56:1] Compare Weeden, "Economic and Social History of New England," i, pp. 270-271; Gookin, "Daniel Gookin," pp. 106-161; and the histories of Worcester for ill.u.s.trations of how the various factors noted could be combined in a single town.

[56:2] F. Merrill, "Amesbury," pp. 5, 50.

[56:3] B. L. Mirick, "Haverhill," pp. 9, 10.

[57:1] Green, "Early Records of Groton," pp. 49, 70, 90.

[57:2] _Ibid._

[57:3] Worcester County History, i, pp. 2, 3.

[57:4] J. G. Metcalf, "Annals of Mendon," p. 85.

[58:1] P. 96. Compare the Kentucky pet.i.tion of 1780 given in Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," ii, p. 398, and the letter from that frontier cited in Turner, "Western State-Making" (_American Historical Review_, i, p. 262), attacking the Virginia "Nabobs," who hold absentee land t.i.tles. "Let the _great men_," say they, "whom the land belongs to come and defend it."

[59:1] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, pp. 188-189.

[59:2] These facts are stated on the authority of E. Washburn, "Leicester," pp. 5-15: compare Major Stephen Sewall to Jeremiah Dummer, 1717, quoted in Weeden, "Economic and Social History of New England,"

ii, p. 505, note 4.

[60:1] Compare the Virginia system, Bruce, "Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century," ii, pp. 42, 43.

[60:2] For this item I am indebted to our a.s.sociate, Mr. Andrew McF.

Davis: see his "Colonial Currency Reprints," i, pp. 335-349.

[60:3] Hutchinson, "History of Ma.s.sachusetts" (1768), ii, pp. 331, 332, has an instructive comment. A. C. Ford, "Colonial Precedents of Our National Land System," p. 84; L. K. Mathews, "Expansion of New England,"

pp. 82 ff.

[60:4] J. G. Holland, "Western Ma.s.sachusetts," p. 197.

[61:1] Jos. Schafer, "Origin of the System of Land Grants for Education," pp. 25-33.

[62:1] H. D. Hurd (ed.), "History of Worcester County," i, p. 6. The italics are mine.

[63:1] Egleston, "Land System of the New England Colonies," pp. 39-41.

[63:2] _Ibid._, p. 41.

[63:3] T. Dwight, "Travels" (1821), ii, pp. 459-463.

[66:1] [See F. J. Turner, "Greater New England in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century," in American Antiquarian Society "Proceedings,"

1920.]

III

THE OLD WEST[67:1]

It is not the oldest West with which this chapter deals. The oldest West was the Atlantic coast. Roughly speaking, it took a century of Indian fighting and forest felling for the colonial settlements to expand into the interior to a distance of about a hundred miles from the coast.

Indeed, some stretches were hardly touched in that period. This conquest of the nearest wilderness in the course of the seventeenth century and in the early years of the eighteenth, gave control of the maritime section of the nation and made way for the new movement of westward expansion which I propose to discuss.

In his "Winning of the West," Roosevelt dealt chiefly with the region beyond the Alleghanies, and with the period of the later eighteenth century, although he prefaced his account with an excellent chapter describing the backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies and their social conditions from 1769 to 1774. It is important to notice, however, that he is concerned with a backwoods society already formed; that he ignores the New England frontier and its part in the winning of the West, and does not recognize that there was a West to be won between New England and the Great Lakes. In short, he is interested in the winning of the West beyond the Alleghanies by the southern half of the frontier folk.

There is, then, a western area intermediate between the coastal colonial settlements of the seventeenth century and the trans-Alleghany settlements of the latter portion of the eighteenth century. This section I propose to isolate and discuss under the name of the Old West, and in the period from about 1676 to 1763. It includes the back country of New England, the Mohawk Valley, the Great Valley of Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Piedmont--that is, the interior or upland portion of the South, lying between the Alleghanies and the head of navigation of the Atlantic rivers marked by the "fall line."[68:1]

In this region, and in these years, are to be found the beginnings of much that is characteristic in Western society, for the Atlantic coast was in such close touch with Europe that its frontier experience was soon counteracted, and it developed along other lines. It is unfortunate that the colonial back country appealed so long to historians solely in connection with the colonial wars, for the development of its society, its inst.i.tutions and mental att.i.tude all need study. Its history has been dealt with in separate fragments, by states, or towns, or in discussions of special phases, such as German and Scotch-Irish immigration. The Old West as a whole can be appreciated only by obliterating the state boundaries which conceal its unity, by correlating the special and fragmentary studies, and by filling the gaps in the material for understanding the formation of its society. The present paper is rather a reconnaissance than a conquest of the field, a program for study of the Old West rather than an exposition of it.

The end of the period proposed may be placed about 1763, and the beginning between 1676 and 1700. The termination of the period is marked by the Peace of Paris in 1763, and the royal proclamation of that year forbidding settlement beyond the Alleghanies. By this time the settlement of the Old West was fairly accomplished, and new advances were soon made into the "Western Waters" beyond the mountains and into the interior of Vermont and New Hamps.h.i.+re. The isolation of the transmontane settlements, and the special conditions and doctrines of the Revolutionary era during which they were formed, make a natural distinction between the period of which I am to speak and the later extension of the West.

The beginning of the period is necessarily an indeterminate date, owing to the different times of colonizing the coastal areas which served as bases of operations in the westward advance. The most active movements into the Old West occurred after 1730. But in 1676 New England, having closed the exhausting struggle with the Indians, known as King Philip's War, could regard her established settlements as secure, and go on to complete her possession of the interior. This she did in the midst of conflicts with the exterior Indian tribes which invaded her frontiers from New York and Canada during the French and Indian wars from 1690 to 1760, and under frontier conditions different from the conditions of the earlier Puritan colonization. In 1676, Virginia was pa.s.sing through Indian fighting--keenest along the fall line, where the frontier lay--and also experiencing a social revolt which resulted in the defeat of the democratic forces that sought to stay the progress of aristocratic control in the colony.[70:1] The date marks the end of the period when the Virginia tidewater could itself be regarded as a frontier region, and consequently the beginning of a more special interest in the interior.

Let us first examine the northern part of the movement into the back country. The expansion of New England into the vacant s.p.a.ces of its own section, in the period we have chosen for discussion, resulted in the formation of an interior society which contrasted in many ways with that of the coast, and which has a special significance in Western history, in that it was this interior New England people who settled the Greater New England in central and western New York, the Wyoming Valley, the Connecticut Reserve of Ohio, and much of the prairie areas of the Old Northwest. It is important to realize that the Old West included interior New England.

The situation in New England at the close of the seventeenth century is indicated by the Ma.s.sachusetts act of 1694 enumerating eleven towns, then on the frontier and exposed to raids, none of which might be voluntarily deserted without leave of the governor and council, on penalty of loss of their freeholds by the landowners, or fine of other inhabitants.[70:2]

Thus these frontier settlers were made substantially garrisons, or "mark colonies." Crowded into the palisades of the town, and obliged in spite of their poverty to bear the brunt of Indian attack, their hards.h.i.+ps are ill.u.s.trated in the manly but pathetic letters of Deerfield's minister, Mr. Williams,[70:3] in 1704. Parkman succinctly describes the general conditions in these words:[70:4]

The exposed frontier of New England was between two and three hundred miles long, and consisted of farms and hamlets loosely scattered through an almost impervious forest... . Even in so-called villages the houses were far apart, because, except on the seash.o.r.e, the people lived by farming. Such as were able to do so fenced their dwellings with palisades, or built them of solid timber, with loopholes, a projecting upper story like a block house, and sometimes a flanker at one or more of the corners. In the more considerable settlements the largest of these fortified houses was occupied in time of danger by armed men and served as a place of refuge for the neighbors.