er a primitive agricultural area, democratic in
principle, and with various sects increasingly indifferent to the fear
of "innovation" which the dominant classes of the old communities felt.
Already speculative land companies had begun New England settlements in
the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, as well as on the lower Mississippi;
and New England missions among the Indians, such as that at Stockbridge,
were beginning the noteworthy religious and educational expansion of the
section to the west.

That this movement of expansion had been chiefly from south to north,
along the river valleys, should not conceal from us the fact that it was
in essential characteristics a Western movement, especially in the
social traits that were developing. Even the men who lived in the long
line of settlements on the Maine coast, under frontier conditions, and
remote from the older centers of New England, developed traits and a
democratic spirit that relate them closely to the Westerners, in spite
of the fact that Maine is "down east" by preeminence.[79:1]

The frontier of the Middle region in this period of the formation of the
Old West, was divided into two parts, which happen to coincide with the
colonies of New York and Pennsylvania. In the latter colony the trend of
settlement was into the Great Valley, and so on to the Southern uplands;
while the advance of settlement in New York was like that of New
England, chiefly northward, following the line of Hudson River.

The Hudson and the Mohawk constituted the area of the Old West in this
part of the eighteenth century. With them were associated the Wallkill,
tributary to the Hudson, and Cherry Valley near the Mohawk, along the
sources of the Susquehanna. The Berkshires walled the Hudson in to the
east; the Adirondacks and the Catskills to the west. Where the Mohawk
Valley penetrated between the mountainous areas, the Iroquois Indians
were too formidable for advance on such a slender line. Nothing but
dense settlement along the narrow strip of the Hudson, if even that,
could have furnished the necessary momentum for overcoming the Indian
barrier; and this pressure was lacking, for the population was
comparatively sparse in contrast with the task to be performed. What
most needs discussion in the case of New York, therefore, is not the
history of expansion as in other sections, but the absence of expansive
power.

The fur-trade had led the way up the Hudson, and made beginnings of
s