THE MOUNTAINEERS CONQUER THE SOUTHWEST
Meanwhile the States of the lower Mississippi Valley were coming into existence at a rapid rate.
Alabama had no American settlement until after the Revolution, save for the sporadic appearance of adventurers or traders. But in 1798, when the Mississippi territory was formed, including the present State of Alabama, there was already a movement of settlers from the adjoining States on the east and north, and this continued rapidly until checked by the war with the Creek Indians in 1813 and 1814. This war advertised the territory. Its termination threw the land open to settlement, and more than 100,000 people located in Alabama within five years. The slight French and Spanish element in Mobile and two or three other places was soon reduced to insignificant proportions.
The State was settled either by those who came down some of the rivers of that region, particularly from Tennessee, or by those who came through Georgia, stopping long enough at the land office in Milledgeville (then the State capital) to make the necessary arrangements for acquiring title to real estate. An unimproved but passable trail ran thence through Montgomery to Natchez, and over this "Three Notch Road" (so-called from the blaze which marked it) a stream of settlers from the Atlantic seaboard States passed into the broad belt of rich blackland which quickly made Alabama and Mississippi the heart of the Cotton Kingdom. Alabama is, for the most part, the offspring of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, and therefore represents almost entirely Scotch and English blood. Its foreign-born population was negligible in 1860, amounting to little more than 12,000, almost half of whom were Irish, in a total of virtually a million.
Mississippi: As in most others of this group of States, the supposed influence of the earlier French and Spanish settlements is more sentimental than real. American settlers began to filter in after 1763, some coming even from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New England. A few Loyalists drifted down to the Mississippi country during the Revolution, joining the British who were attached to the district at that time in military or administrative capacities. One of the elements of this Loyalist immigration consisted of Scotch Highlanders from North Carolina.