the province more or less thickly, from Hillsboro and
Fayetteville to the mountains.[106:2] Bassett remarks that the
Presbyterians received their first ministers from the synod of New York
and Pennsylvania, and later on sent their ministerial students to
Princeton College. "Indeed it is likely that the inhabitants of this
region knew more about Philadelphia at that time than about Newbern or
Edenton."[106:3]

We are now in a position to note briefly, in conclusion, some of the
results of the occupation of this new frontier during the first half of
the eighteenth century--some of the consequences of this formation of
the Old West.

I. A fighting frontier had been created all along the line from New
England to Georgia, which bore the brunt of French and Indian attacks
and gave indispensable service during the Revolution. The significance
of this fact could only be developed by an extended survey of the
scattered border warfare of this era. We should have to see Rogers
leading his New England Rangers, and Washington defending interior
Virginia with his frontiersmen in their hunting shirts, in the French
and Indian War. When all of the campaigns about the region of Canada,
Lake Champlain, and the Hudson, central New York (Oriskany, Cherry
Valley, Sullivan's expedition against the Iroquois), Wyoming Valley,
western Pennsylvania, the Virginia Valley, and the back country of the
South are considered as a whole from this point of view, the meaning of
the Old West will become more apparent.

II. A new society had been established, differing in essentials from the
colonial society of the coast. It was a democratic self-sufficing,
primitive agricultural society, in which individualism was more
pronounced than the community life of the lowlands. The indented servant
and the slave were not a normal part of its labor system. It was engaged
in grain and cattle raising, not in producing staples, and it found a
partial means of supplying its scarcity of specie by the peltries which
it shipped to the coast. But the hunter folk were already pushing
farther on; the cow-pens and the range were giving place to the small
farm, as in our own day they have done in the cattle country. It was a
region of hard work and poverty, not of wealth and leisure. Schools and
churches were secured under serious difficulty,[107:1] if at all; but in
spite of the natural tendencies of a frontier life, a large portion of
the interior showed a distinctly reli