PART IV THE MAKING OF THE SECOND WEST

The West is the most American part of America. . . . What Europe is to Asia, what England is to the rest of Europe, what America is to England, that the western States and Territories are to the eastern States. · JAMES BRYCE.

CHAPTER XII

THE SOUTHWEST: SELF-DEVELOPED

THE land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi had passed from France to England in 1763 (page 137). Some six thousand French settlers remained in the The West district, in three nearly equal groups: (1) about from 1763 Detroit; (2) near Vincennes; (3) at the "Missis- to 1774 sippi towns," Kaskaskia and Cahokia. For several years more these were the only White settlers. The whole district had been included in old grants to the seaboard colonies. But as soon as England got control, a Royal Proclamation forbade English speaking colonists to settle west of the mountains, and instructed colonial governors to make no land-grants there; and in 1774 parliament annexed the territory, as far south as the Ohio, to the old French province of Quebec (page 201, note). The government dreaded Indian wars sure to follow the advance of the frontiersman and it was influenced by commercial companies that wished to keep the vast Mississippi valley as a fur trade preserve.

But even had England remained in control, the attempt to shut out English-speaking settlers was doomed to certain failure. How the Scotch-Irish and Germans had made a first "West" in the long valleys of the Appalachians soon after 1700 has been told. A half century or so later their Americanized sons and grandsons were ready to make a greater and truer West in the eastern half of the valley of the

Mississippi. Those restless border farmers had begun to feel crowded in their narrow homes. For some years, stray hunters, who had ventured as far west as the great river, stirred the Appalachian frontier with romantic stories of the wonders and riches of the vast central basin, and just before the Revolution a few hardy families pushed the line of American settlement across the mountains.

Settlement

of the Southwest during the Revolution

This movement into the second "West" (the Southwest) grew all through the Revolution. It is natural for us to think of the years 1775–1783 as given wholly to patriotic war for political independence. But during just those years thousands of earnest Americans turned away from that contest to win industrial independence for themselves and their children beyond the mountains. While the old Atlantic sections were fighting England, a new section sprang into being, fighting Indians and the wilderness.

The "dark

Until the peace of 1783, settlement penetrated only into the "dark and bloody ground" between the Ohio and its southern branches. This district had long been and bloody a famous hunting ground, where Indians of the north and of the south slew the bison and one another. Frequent war parties flitted along its trails, but no tribe claimed it for actual occupation. So here lay the line of least resistance to the on-pushing wave of settlement.

ground"

The
Watauga

1769

In 1769 a few Virginia frontiersmen moved their families into the valley of the Watauga, one of the headwaters of the Tennessee. They thought themselves still in Virginia, and in the spring of 1771 they were settlement, joined by fugitive Regulators from North Carolina. The same summer, however, a surveyor ran out the southern boundary of Virginia and found that Watauga lay in territory claimed by North Carolina. That colony was in no condition to care for so inaccessible a section, nor would the Watauga settlers submit to her rule. Instead they set up for themselves. Communication with Virginia was possible, because the long valleys trending to the northeast ran near together as they entered that State. But a hundred

WATAUGA, 1769-1772

239

miles of forest-clad mountains, without a trail fit even for a pack horse, divided Watauga from the nearest settlements in North Carolina. Watauga itself lay with mountains to the west, as well as to the east; but its water communication

with the Mississippi justifies us in regarding it as part of the land "west of the mountains.'

James

Sevier

Two leaders stand forth in this westward movement into Tennessee, James Robertson and John Sevier. Robertson was a mighty hunter who had spied out the land to find a better home for his family. A backwoods- Robertson man born, a natural leader with splendid qualities and John of heart and head, he had learned "letters and to spell" after marriage, from his wife. Sevier was a "gentleman" of old Huguenot family and of some culture. He was the most dashing figure of the early frontier, — a daring Indian fighter and an idolized statesman among his rough companions, well portrayed in Churchill's The Crossing.

The essential thing about Watauga, however, was not its leaders, but the individuality and democracy of the whole population. Immigrants came in little groups of families, those from Carolina by a long detour through Virginia. No