ial 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 upl