There are two explanations of this incontrovertible historical fact. One lies perhaps in the general truth that early pioneers nearly always cling to the river valleys, perhaps not more for purposes of transportation by water than in obedience to a certain instinct that seems to hold the pathways of the streams as foreordained guidance. The man that is lost in the wilderness hails with delight the appearance of a stream. It will lead him somewhere; it will guide him back again. Near it will be game, near it, too, rich soil. The man that enters the wilderness deliberately does so along the waterways.
All the great initial explorations have been made in this way. The men of Kentucky and Tennessee having reached the headwaters of the Kentucky, the Tennessee, the Holston or kindred riverways, moved out into their promised land along paths, as it were, foreordained. The rivers of the North did not run out into the West, but pointed ever toward the sea. This is one explanation of the somewhat inglorious part of New England in the discovery of the West. It does not explain her narrowness of view in regard to that West after it had been discovered by others; neither does this geographical explanation, in the opinion of many, cover the main phenomena of her timid attitude in regard to Western exploration.
The true reason, in the belief of these students, is to be found in the character of the New England population, as compared to the bolder breed of men who overran the western sections of Pennsylvania and for two generations were in continuous touch with the wilderness and its savagery. This subject is taken up interestingly by Horace Kephart, a scholar of much acquaintance with early American history, in the course of an able paper. It is very much worth while for any one who wishes an actual picture of the march across the Appalachians to read his conclusions.
“In a vague way we think of all the East as old,” says this writer, “and all the West as new. We picture civilization as advancing westward from the Atlantic in a long, straight front, like a wave or a line of battle. But in point of fact it was not so. There was a permanent settlement of Europeans a thousand miles to the west of us before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Cahokia and Kaskaskia were thriving villages before Baltimore was founded; and our own city of St. Louis was building in the same year that New Jersey became a British possession. At a time when Daniel Boone was hunting beaver on the Osage and the Missouri, Fenimore Cooper was drawing the types for future ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ from his neighbors in a ‘wilderness’ only a hundred and fifty miles from New York City.
“American settlement advanced toward the Mississippi in the shape of a wedge, of which the entering edge was first Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, then the Shenandoah valley, then Louisville, and finally St. Louis. When the second census of the United States was taken, in 1800, nearly all the white inhabitants of our country lived in a triangle formed by a diagonal southwestward from Portland, Maine, to the mouth of the Tennessee River, here meeting another diagonal running northwestward from Savannah, with the Atlantic for a base. Central and western New York, northern Pennsylvania, and all the territory north of the Ohio River, save in its immediate vicinity, were almost uninhabited by whites, and so were Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Yet the state of Kentucky had half as many people as Massachusetts, and Tennessee had already been admitted into the Union.
“As a rule, geographical expansion proceeds along the lines of least resistance, following the natural highways afforded by navigable rivers and open plains. It is easily turned aside by mountain chains, dense forests, and hostile natives. Especially was this true in the days before railroads. But the development of our older West shows a striking exception to this rule; for the entering wedge was actually driven through one of the most rugged, difficult, and inhospitable regions to be found along the whole frontier of the British possessions.
“This fact is strange enough to fix our attention; but it is doubly strange when we consider that there was no climatic, political nor economic necessity for such defiance of nature’s laws. We can see why the Mississippi should have been explored from the north, rather than from its mouth, because Canada was settled before Louisiana, and it is easier to float downstream than to pole or cordelle against the current. But why was not the West entered and settled through the obviously easy course of the Mohawk Valley?
“Beyond this valley were gentle slopes, and many a route practicable for settlers into the rich country of Ohio. The central trail of the Iroquois, beaten smoother than a wagon-road, ran straight west from Albany, through the fairest portion of New York, to the present site of Buffalo, and thence followed the southern shore of Lake Erie into Ohio. Where it crossed the Genesee, the old war-trail of the Senecas branched off to the south, passing behind the farthermost ramparts of the Alleghanies, to the forks of the Ohio. Moccasined feet traveling over these trails for centuries had worn them from three to twelve inches into the ground, so that they were easy to follow on the darkest night. These were only two of several well-marked routes from ancient Albany to the new West. It was to this easy communication with the country beyond the Appalachians that the Iroquois owed their commanding position on the continent.
“These Iroquois were in the way, to be sure; but with them New York had every advantage over her sister provinces. Her policy toward these powerful Indians was conciliatory. She was allied with them against the French. The Six Nations ravaged the frontiers of all the other colonies, from Massachusetts to Carolina, and carried their conquests to the Mississippi, but they spared New York and even invited her to build forts on their border as outposts against the French. New York had the most influential Indian agent of his time in Sir William Johnson, who had married the sister of the Mohawk chief Brant, and by her had several sons who were war-chiefs of the Iroquois. In 1745 the Iroquois even ceded to New York a strip of land sixty miles wide, along the southern shores of lakes Ontario and Erie, extending to the modern Cleveland. It should have been easy for the Knickerbockers to secure passage for their emigrants into the western country had they chosen to ask it.
“On the other hand, the southern colonies had no easy access to the West. Nature herself had bidden these people to rest content in their tidewater regions, and frowned upon any westward expansion by interposing the mighty barriers of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, rising tier beyond tier in parallel chains from northern Pennsylvania to Alabama. Few trails crossed these mountains. From base to summit they were clad in dense forest, matted into jungle by luxuriant undergrowth. No one knew what lay beyond them, nor how far through this ‘forest, savage, harsh, impregnable,’ the traveler must bore until he reached land fit for settlement.