Chapter 6

One while the Enclosing of _Commons_ hath made Neighbours, that should have been like Sheep, to _Bite and devour one another_. . . . Again, Do our _Old_ People, any of them _Go Out_ from the Institutions of God, Swarming into New Settlements, where they and their Untaught Families are like to _Perish for Lack of Vision_? They that have done so, heretofore, have to their Cost found, that they were got unto the _Wrong side of the Hedge_, in their doing so. Think, here _Should this be done any more?_ We read of Balaam, in Num. 22, 23. He was to his Damage, _driven to the_ Wall, when he would needs make an unlawful Salley forth after the _Gain_ of this World. . . . Why, when men, for the Sake of Earthly Gain, would be _going out_ into the _Warm_ Sun, they drive _Through the Wall_, and the _Angel of the Lord_ becomes their Enemy.

In his essay on "Frontiers Well-Defended" (1707) Mather assures the pioneers that they "dwell in a Hatsarmaneth," a place of "tawney serpents," are "inhabitants of the Valley of Achor," and are "the Poor of this World." There may be significance in his assertion: "It is remarkable to see that when the Unchurched Villages, have been so many of them, _utterly broken up_, in the _War_, that has been upon us, those that have had _Churches_ regularly formed in them, have generally been under a more _sensible Protection_ of Heaven." "Sirs," he says, "a _Church-State_ well form'd may fortify you wonderfully!" He recommends abstention from profane swearing, furious cursing, Sabbath breaking, unchastity, dishonesty, robbing of God by defrauding the ministers of their dues, drunkenness, and revels and he reminds them that even the Indians have family prayers! Like his successors who solicited missionary contributions for the salvation of the frontier in the Mississippi Valley during the forties of the nineteenth century, this early spokesman for New England laid stress upon teaching anti-popery, particularly in view of the captivity that might await them.

In summing up, we find many of the traits of later frontiers in this early prototype, the Massachusetts frontier. It lies at the edge of the Indian country and tends to advance. It calls out militant qualities and reveals the imprint of wilderness conditions upon the psychology and morals as well as upon the institutions of the people. It demands common defense and thus becomes a factor for consolidation. It is built on the basis of a preliminary fur trade, and is settled by the combined and sometimes antagonistic forces of eastern men of property (the absentee proprietors) and the democratic pioneers. The East attempted to regulate and control it. Individualistic and democratic tendencies were emphasized both by the wilderness conditions and, probably, by the prior contentions between the proprietors and non-proprietors of the towns from which settlers moved to the frontier. Removal away from the control of the customary usages of the older communities and from the conservative influence of the body of the clergy, increased the innovating tendency. Finally the towns were regarded by at least one prominent representative of the established order in the East, as an undesirable place for the re-location of the pillars of society. The temptation to look upon the frontier as a field for investment was viewed by the clergy as a danger to the "institutions of God." The frontier was "the Wrong side of the Hedge."

But to this "wrong side of the hedge" New England men continued to migrate. The frontier towns of 1695 were hardly more than suburbs of Boston. The frontier of a century later included New England's colonies in Vermont, Western New York, the Wyoming Valley, the Connecticut Reserve, and the Ohio Company's settlement in the Old Northwest Territory. By the time of the Civil War the frontier towns of New England had occupied the great prairie zone of the Middle West and were even planted in Mormon Utah and in parts of the Pacific Coast. New England's sons had become the organizers of a Greater New England in the West, captains of industry, political leaders, founders of educational systems, and prophets of religion, in a section that was to influence the ideals and shape the destiny of the nation in ways to which the eyes of men like Cotton Mather were sealed.[66:1]

FOOTNOTES:

[39:1] Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, April, 1914, xvii, 250-271. Reprinted with permission of the Society.

[39:2] Massachusetts Archives, xxxvi, p. 150.

[40:1] Massachusetts Colony Records, ii, p. 122.

[40:2] _Ibid._, vol. iv, pt. ii, p. 439; Massachusetts Archives, cvii, pp. 160-161.

[40:3] See, for example, Massachusetts Colony Records, v, 79; Green, "Groton During the Indian Wars," p. 39; L. K. Mathews, "Expansion of New England," p. 58.

[40:4] Massachusetts Archives, lxviii, pp. 174-176.

[40:5] Osgood, "American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century," i, p. 501, and citations: cf. Publications of this Society, xii, pp. 38-39.

[41:1] Hening, "Statutes at Large," iii, p. 204: cf. 1 Massachusetts Historical Collections, v, p. 129, for influence of the example of the New England town. On Virginia frontier conditions see Alvord and Bidgood, "First Explorations of the Trans-Allegheny Region," pp. 23-34, 93-95. P. A. Bruce, "Institutional History of Virginia," ii, p. 97, discusses frontier defense in the seventeenth century. [See chapter iii, _post_.]

[42:1] Massachusetts Archives, lxx, 240; Massachusetts Province Laws, i, pp. 194, 293.

[42:2] In a petition (read March 3, 1692-3) of settlers "in Sundry Farms granted in those Remote Lands Scituate and Lyeing between Sudbury, Concord, Marlbury, Natick and Sherburne & Westerly is the Wilderness," the petitioners ask easement of taxes and extension into the Natick region in order to have means to provide for the worship of God, and say:

"Wee are not Ignorant that by reason of the present Distressed Condition of those that dwell in these Frontier Towns, divers are meditating to remove themselves into such places where they have not hitherto been conserned in the present Warr and desolation thereby made, as also that thereby they may be freed from that great burthen of public taxes necessarily accruing thereby, Some haveing already removed themselves. Butt knowing for our parts that wee cannot run from the hand of a Jealous God, doe account it our duty to take such Measures as may inable us to the performance of that duty wee owe to God, the King, & our Familyes" (Massachusetts Archives, cxiii, p. 1).

[42:3] In a petition of 1658 Andover speaks of itself as "a remote upland plantation" (Massachusetts Archives, cxii, p. 99).

[42:4] Massachusetts Province Laws, i, p. 402.

[43:1] Convenient maps of settlement, 1660-1700, are in E. Channing, "History of the United States," i, pp. 510-511, ii, end; Avery, "History of the United States and its People," ii, p. 398. A useful contemporaneous map for conditions at the close of King Philip's War is Hubbard's map of New England in his "Narrative" published in Boston, 1677. See also L. K. Mathews, "Expansion of New England," pp. 56-57, 70.

[44:1] Weeden, "Economic and Social History of New England," pp. 90, 95, 129-132; F. J. Turner, "Indian Trade in Wisconsin," p. 13; McIlwain, "Wraxall's Abridgement," introduction; the town histories abound in evidence of the significance of the early Indian traders' posts, transition to Indian land cessions, and then to town grants.

[44:2] Weeden, _loc. cit._, pp. 64-67; M. Egleston, "New England Land System," pp. 31-32; Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, pp. 37, 206, 267-268; Connecticut Colonial Records, vii, p. 111, illustrations of cattle brands in 1727.

[44:3] Hutchinson, "History" (1795), ii, p. 129, note, relates such a case of a Groton man; see also Parkman, "Half-Century," vol. i, ch. iv, citing Maurault, "Histoire des Abenakis," p. 377.

[45:1] Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, pp. 4, 84, 85, 87, 88.

[45:2] Hoosatonic.

[45:3] Connecticut Records, iv, pp. 463, 464.

[45:4] Massachusetts Colony Records, v, p. 72; Massachusetts Province Laws, i, pp. 176, 211, 292, 558, 594, 600; Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, pp. 7, 89, 102. Cf. Publications of this Society, vii, 275-278.

[45:5] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 290.

[46:1] Judd, "Hadley," p. 272; 4 Massachusetts Historical Collections, ii, p. 235.

[46:2] Farmer and Moore, "Collections," iii, p. 64. The frontier woman of the farther west found no more extreme representative than Hannah Dustan of Haverhill, with her trophy of ten scalps, for which she received a bounty of £50 (Parkman, "Frontenac," 1898, p. 407, note).

[46:3] For illustrations of resentment against those who protected the Christian Indians, see F. W. Gookin, "Daniel Gookin," pp. 145-155.

[47:1] For example, Massachusetts Archives, lxx, p. 261; Bailey, "Andover," p. 179; Metcalf, "Annals of Mendon," p. 63; Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, xliii, pp. 504-519. Parkman, "Frontenac" (Boston, 1898), p. 390, and "Half-Century of Conflict" (Boston, 1898), i, p. 55, sketches the frontier defense.

[48:1] Massachusetts Archives, cvii, p. 155.

[48:2] _Ibid._, cvii, p. 230; cf. 230 a.

[48:3] Massachusetts Archives, lxviii, p. 156.

[48:4] Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 189.

[48:5] Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, 46-48, 131, 134, 135 _et passim_.

[50:1] Massachusetts Archives, lxxi, p. 107: cf. Metcalf, "Mendon," p. 130; Sheldon, "Deerfield," i, p. 288. The frontier of Virginia in 1755 and 1774 showed similar conditions: see, for example, the citations to Washington's Writings in Thwaites, "France in America," pp. 193-195; and frontier letters in Thwaites and Kellogg, "Dunmore's War," pp. 227, 228 _et passim_. The following petition to Governor Gooch of Virginia, dated July 30, 1742, affords a basis for comparison with a Scotch-Irish frontier:

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 Hassirt & 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 petitioned 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 petitions 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 petitions there quoted.

[51:2] Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, xliii, pp. 506 ff.

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

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

[52:2] In a petition of February 22, 1693-4, Deerfield calls itself the "most Utmost Frontere Town in the County of West Hampshire" (Massachusetts 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] Massachusetts 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 illustrations 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 petition 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 titles. "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 associate, Mr. Andrew McF. Davis: see his "Colonial Currency Reprints," i, pp. 335-349.

[60:3] Hutchinson, "History of Massachusetts" (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 Massachusetts," 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 institutions and mental attitude 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 Hampshire. 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 passing 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 spaces 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 Massachusetts 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 hardships are illustrated 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 seashore, 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.

Into these places, in days of alarm, were crowded the outlying settlers, just as was the case in later times in the Kentucky "stations."

In spite of such frontier conditions, the outlying towns continued to multiply. Between 1720 and the middle of the century, settlement crept up the Housatonic and its lateral valley into the Berkshires. About 1720 Litchfield was established; in 1725, Sheffield; in 1730, Great Barrington; and in 1735 a road was cut and towns soon established between Westfield and these Housatonic settlements, thus uniting them with the older extensions along the Connecticut and its tributaries.

In this period, scattered and sometimes unwelcome Scotch-Irish settlements were established, such as that at Londonderry, New Hampshire, and in the Berkshires, as well as in the region won in King Philip's War from the Nipmucks, whither there came also Huguenots.[72:1]

In King George's War, the Connecticut River settlers found their frontier protection in such rude stockades as those at the sites of Keene, of Charlestown, New Hampshire (Number Four), Fort Shirley at the head of Deerfield River (Heath), and Fort Pelham (Rowe); while Fort Massachusetts (Adams) guarded the Hoosac gateway to the Hoosatonic Valley. These frontier garrisons and the self-defense of the backwoodsmen of New England are well portrayed in the pages of Parkman.[72:2] At the close of the war, settlement again expanded into the Berkshires, where Lennox, West Hoosac (Williamstown), and Pittsfield were established in the middle of the century. Checked by the fighting in the last French and Indian War, the frontier went forward after the Peace of Paris (1763) at an exceptional rate, especially into Vermont and interior New Hampshire. An anonymous writer gives a contemporary view of the situation on the eve of the Revolution:[72:3]