interior. But the settlement of central and western New York, like the
settlement of Vermont, is a story that belongs to the era in which the
trans-Alleghany West was occupied.

We can best consider the settlement of the share of the Old West which
is located in Pennsylvania as a part of the migration which occupied the
Southern Uplands, and before entering upon this it will be advantageous
to survey that part of the movement toward the interior which proceeded
westward from the coast. First let us observe the conditions at the
eastern edge of these uplands, along the fall line in Virginia, in the
latter part of the seventeenth century, in order that the process and
the significance of the movement may be better understood.

About the time of Bacon's Rebellion, in Virginia, strenuous efforts
were made to protect the frontier line which ran along the falls of the
river, against the attacks of Indians. This "fall line," as the
geographers call it, marking the head of navigation, and thus the
boundary of the maritime or lowland South, runs from the site of
Washington, through Richmond, and on to Raleigh, North Carolina, and
Columbia, South Carolina. Virginia having earliest advanced thus far to
the interior, found it necessary in the closing years of the seventeenth
century to draw a military frontier along this line. As early as 1675 a
statute was enacted,[84:1] providing that paid troops of five hundred
men should be drawn from the midland and most secure parts of the
country and placed on the "heads of the rivers" and other places
fronting upon the Indians. What was meant by the "heads of the rivers,"
is shown by the fact that several of these forts were located either at
the falls of the rivers or just above tidewater, as follows: one on the
lower Potomac in Stafford County; one near the falls of the
Rappahannock; one on the Mattapony; one on the Pamunky; one at the falls
of the James (near the site of Richmond); one near the falls of the
Appomattox, and others on the Blackwater, the Nansemond, and the Accomac
peninsula, all in the eastern part of Virginia.

Again, in 1679, similar provision was made,[84:2] and an especially
interesting act was passed, making _quasi_ manorial grants to Major
Lawrence Smith and Captain William Byrd, "to seate certain lands at the
head [falls] of Rappahannock and James river" respectively. This scheme
failed for lack of approval by the authorities in England.[84:3] But
Byrd at the fall