ld settle the Valley, the
long and attenuated line of French posts in the west, reaching from
Canada to Louisiana, was struck by the advancing column of the American
backwoodsmen in the center by the way of the Ohio. Parkman, in whose
golden pages is written the epic of the American wilderness, found his
hero in the wandering Frenchman. Perhaps because he was a New Englander
he missed a great opportunity and neglected to portray the formation and
advance of the backwood society which was finally to erase the traces of
French control in the interior of North America.

It is not without significance in a consideration of the national
aspects of the history of the Ohio Valley, that the messenger of English
civilization, who summoned the French to evacuate the Valley and its
approaches, and whose men near the forks of the Ohio fired the opening
gun of the world-historic conflict that wrought the doom of New France
in America, was George Washington, the first American to win a national
position in the United States. The father of his country was the prophet
of the Ohio Valley.

Into this dominion, in the next scene of this drama, came the
backwoodsmen, the men who began the formation of the society of the
Valley. I wish to consider the effects of the formation of this society
upon the nation. And first let us consider the stock itself.

The Ohio Valley was settled, for the most part (though with important
exceptions, especially in Ohio), by men of the Upland South, and this
determined a large part of its influence in the nation through a long
period. As the Ohio Valley, as a whole, was an extension of the Upland
South, so the Upland South was, broadly speaking, an extension from the
old Middle Region, chiefly from Pennsylvania. The society of pioneers,
English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, and other nationalities which formed in
the beginning of the eighteenth century in the Great Valley of
Pennsylvania and its lateral extensions was the nursery of the American
backwoodsmen. Between about 1730 and the Revolution, successive tides of
pioneers ascended the Shenandoah, occupied the Piedmont, or up-country
of Virginia and the Carolinas, and received recruits from similar
peoples who came by eastward advances from the coast toward this Old
West.

Thus by the middle of the eighteenth century a new section had been
created in America, a kind of peninsula thrust down from Pennsylvania
between the falls of the rivers of the South Atlan