The first step of this star of empire, that concluded in 1800, barely removed it from its initial point on the Chesapeake. The direction was toward the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania. The government at Washington, young as it was, knew that the Ohio River, reached from the North by a dozen trails from the Great Lakes, and running out into that West which even then was coveted by three nations, was of itself a priceless possession. The restless tide of humanity spread from that point according to principles as old as the world. Having a world before them from which to choose their homes, the men of that time sought out those homes along the easiest lines.
The first thrust of the out-bound population was not along the parallels of latitude westward, as is supposed to be the rule, but to the south and southeast, into the valleys of the Appalachians, where the hills would raise corn, and the streams would carry it. The early emigrants learned that a raft would eat nothing, that a boat runs well down-stream. Men still clung to the seaboard region, though even then they exemplified the great law of population that designates the river valleys to be the earliest and most permanent centers of population. The first trails of the Appalachians were the waterways.
Dear old New England, the land sought out as the home of religious freedom, and really perhaps the most intolerant land the earth ever knew, sometimes flatters herself that she is the mother of the West. Not so. New England holds mortgages only on the future of the West, not on its past. The first outshoots of the seaboard civilization to run forth into the West did not trace back to the stern and rock-bound shore where the tolerants were punishing those who did not agree with them.
New York, then, was perhaps the parent of the West? By no means, however blandly pleasant that belief might be to many for whom New York must be ever the first cause and center of the American civilization, not the reflection-point of that civilization. The rabid Westerner may enjoy the thought that neither New England nor New York was the actual ancestor. Perhaps he may say that the West had no parent, but was born Minerva-like. In this he would be wrong. The real mother of the West was the South. It was she who bore this child, and it has been much at her expense that it has grown so large and matured so swiftly. If you sing “arms and the man” for the West, you must sing Southerner and not Puritan, knight-errant and not psalmodist. The path of empire had its head on the Chesapeake. There was the American Ararat.
“The great American journeyings were far under way before New England appeared to realize that there was a greater America toward the West. The musket bearers of the New England states, the fighting men of the South, and the riflemen of what might already have been called the West, had finished the Revolutionary War long before New England had turned her eyes westward. The pilgrimage over the Appalachians was made, the new provinces of Kentucky and Tennessee were fighting for a commerce and a commercial highway of their own, while yet the most that New England, huddled along her stern and rock-bound shore, could do was to talk of shutting off these Westerners from their highway of the Mississippi, and compelling them to trade back with the tidewater provinces of what was not yet an America.
“Canny and cautious, New York and New England were ready to fear this new country in which they refused to believe; were ready to cripple it, although they declined to credit its future. The pioneers of the South fought their way into the West. New England bought her way, and that after all the serious problems of pioneering had been solved. The ‘Ohio Land Company’ of Rufus Putnam, Benjamin Tucker and their none too honest associate, the New Bedford preacher, Manasseh Cutler, were engaged in the first great land steal ever known in the West. They did not fight the Indians for their holdings, but went to Congress, and with practical methods secured five million acres of land at a price of about eight or nine cents an acre; the first offer to Congress being a million dollars for a million and a half acres of what is now the state of Ohio, the payment to be in soldiers’ scrip, worth twelve cents on the dollar.
“The Ohio company took its settlers out to its new land as a railway does its colonists to-day. Reaching the Ohio River, they descended it in a bullet-proof barge, called ‘with strange irony’ the ‘Mayflower.’ They entered the mouth of the Muskingum and anchored under the guns of a United States fort.”[[4]]
This is how New England got into the West. There is no hero story there. The men of the South, men of North Carolina and Virginia, most of whom had come from Pennsylvania and dropped down along the east slope of the Appalachians, as it were sparring these mountain ranges for an opening until at length they had found the ways of the game trails and Indian trails from headwater to headwater, and so had reached the west-bound streams—these actual adventurers had built Harrodsburg and Boonesborough seventeen years before the Ohio company entered the Muskingum. Already there was a West; even a West far beyond Boonesborough and its adjacent corn grounds.
This actual record of the upper states in the exploration of the West is to-day not generally remembered nor understood. Sometimes an ardent New Englander will explain that the Puritans would have earlier pressed out westward had it not been for the barrier of the Iroquois on their western borders. They read their history but ill who do not know that the Iroquois trafficked always with the English as against the French; whereas Kentucky, the land opened by the Southern pioneers, was occupied by a more dangerous red population, made up of many tribes, having no policy but that of war, and no friends outside of each separate motley hunting party, sure to be at knife’s point with either white or red strangers. The most difficult and most dangerous frontier was that of the South; yet it was the South that won through.