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Historical Background

America Crosses the Mountains

The year 1763 found the western line of settlement stretching along the eastern base of the Appalachian barrier. Anglo-American frontiersmen had already penetrated the mountains beyond this line, exploring the interior rivers and trading for furs. This irregular penetration showed the way for the gathering flood of settlers who would soon pour through the mountains.

The fur interests vigorously opposed the overrunning of western preserves by settlers, who would inevitably drive away the Indian market. Balancing this influence, the land companies pressed to open new territories in the West. These and other interests were diligently at work while dogged pioneer farmers, who wanted only to find good land and build their homes, prepared to cross the mountains and claim the interior. The westward movement gathered momentum amid the clamor of land speculators and traders, presenting England with the bald fact that, no matter what the pressure groups wanted, or her own self-interest required, settlers were going to cross the mountains. The best that could be hoped for was the enactment of measures that would postpone western settlement until a policy could be formulated that would satisfy the vested interests and lessen the mounting threat of full-scale war with the Indians. [5]

Map III. After the Treaty of Paris, 1763. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

The solution of the London policymakers was the Proclamation of 1763, which established the Appalachian highlands as the temporary boundary of settlement on the western border of the Atlantic colonies. At the same time, the proclamation established the Province of Quebec northwest of the Ohio River; East and West Florida; and the vast region north of the Floridas, west of the Appalachians, and south of the Ohio River as a reservation for the Indians, with land purchases from them forbidden. The Proclamation of 1763 and subsequent efforts in the same direction were, for the most part, hardly more than gestures. Events had passed beyond the control of the British authorities, who but dimly understood the forces at work in the Colonies.

Decrees from faraway London, intended to control the westward movement, could neither deal effectively with the surge of immigrants nor prevent conflict with the Indians. Indian fear and resentment expressed itself almost immediately in the bloody Pontiac uprising of 1763-64. For a time the frontier faced disaster, but the superior resources of the settlers ultimately prevailed, notably at the Battle of Bushy Run. (See pp. 140-141.)

The site of the "flourbag fort," Bushy Run Battlefield State Park. (Courtesy, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg.)

The tide of pioneers flowed through the mountain passes. Trading posts sprang up on the Ohio below Fort Pitt, and the first settlement in the present State of Ohio was made at Schoenbrunn in 1772. (See p. 220.) In New York the thin line of settlement that pointed west along the Mohawk spread north up the Hudson Valley, and south toward the Delaware. German and Scotch-Irish immigrants filled the fertile valleys of western Pennsylvania, and rude cabins dotted western Maryland and northwestern Virginia. Since the 1730's, indeed, settlers from Pennsylvania had streamed south and west to Springdale (see pp. 235-236) and other places in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. This valley, in turn, offered a natural highway to the Carolina Piedmont, and from the farms and settlements of the Piedmont and Southern Highlands colonists drifted into eastern Tennessee, along the Watauga River (see the Bean Cabin and Fort Watauga sites, pp. 228, 229), and through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.

This marker stands at the traditional site of Fort Watauga, Tenn. (National Park Service)

War with Indian and European rivals, treaties with these nations, land speculation, and the ceaseless coming and going of the hunters and fur traders—all these helped to plant the new frontier beyond the Appalachians. But the real strength of the westward advance lay in the sustained movement of thousands of settlers who left the safety of the Colonies on the Atlantic, or came directly from Europe, to wrest a new life from the wilderness across the mountains. In the 18th century the pattern of the frontier movement emerged. One day it would carry the Nation to the Pacific.