READINGS IN THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN NATION

PART I

THE COLONIES

I

THE ENGLISH SETTLER AND THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS

Love of Nature in its wilder forms was not common to men of the seventeenth century, whether in Europe or America, and it is not strange, therefore, that we do not find the early settlers given up to admiring the forests or appreciating the beauties of the untamed wilderness. The following extract gives us some idea of how the settlers were affected by their surroundings.

If there had been any love of Nature in the seventeenth century, American settlers would have shown some appreciation of its aspects in a new world. But the prevailing sentiment of the time was that Nature had long been steadily deteriorating, and that the everlasting frame of the universe was in a state of rack and decay. For the sublime in external Nature there was no taste. An accomplished English traveler in 1621 describes the "hideous" Alps, which he had crossed, as uncouth, huge, monstrous excrescences of Nature." This, we may suppose, represents the sentiment of English settlers toward the grand primeval wilderness about them. "Uncouth" is Captain John Smith's only epithet for the picturesque wilderness trails through which he marched; and George Sandys, though a poet, never

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seems to look upon the wilderness except as an obstruction and an enemy. The colonial verse writer does not suffer any intrusion into his meditations of the overawing effects of Nature, primitive and unsubdued, as he encountered it. What contemplation there is in the books and letters of the time expends itself on the supernatural, or revels in the merely grewsome.

This "uncouth, huge, monstrous" wilderness puts its thumb mark on the character of the people otherwise than by contemplation. They grew up in the earlier generations woodsmen. Distinctively English characteristics fell away from them. The exigencies of a new country made them quick-witted and shifty. The dignity and repose of bearing that belong to a fixed position in an older civilization were lost, for the time at least. The American was pushing, aggressive, inquisitive. He was also more open-minded than his ancestors; a change of circumstances broke up the conservative crust of centuries of English life. The "go" of a new country came into the new life and a hundred years after the early settlement of the colonies an English clergyman in Virginia sketches the American as we have known him- nimble-witted, but less patient and profound than the Englishman.

Edward Eggleston: The Transit of Civilization, pp. 126127. D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1901.

QUESTIONS

Why was the seventeenth century Englishman left unimpressed by the beauty of the American wilderness? With what feelings did he regard it? How did a few generations of life on the American frontier, near the wilderness, affect the settler mentally?

II

THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER

The English settlements for a century and a half clustered close to tide water, while the French traversed the St. Law

rence and Mississippi valleys from end to end and linked their settlements at Quebec and New Orleans with scattered villages in Illinois. The St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi with its tributaries each in turn invited the canoe of the French explorer and adventurer, while the Appalachians repelled the English pioneer. A vivid mental picture of the physical difficulties of crossing the mountains is necessary to an intelligent understanding of the history of the English colonies.

It is difficult, in the present state of our control over this continent, to conceive the importance which lies in the facts concerning the original sites of the French and English settlements on the American shore. We now traverse this land in every direction with perfect ease; as for the mountain barriers of the Appalachians, with their great forests and unnavigable streams, they now demand but a ton or two of coal to carry in one railway train a greater population than was ever at one time before the beginning of the eighteenth century imported to our coast. In those old days the Appalachian system of mountains constituted a really impassable zone extending from Georgia to the far north, broken only at one point by a navigable waterway and the great valley it occupies, the St. Lawrence basin and river. It is true that the Hudson in its principal tributary, the Mohawk, in a fashion divides the Appalachian axis, but it opens no pathway into the Mississippi Valley. The Mohawk is unnavigable, and the region about its headwaters contained, perhaps, the densest part of the Indian population north of the Ohio, composed of very vigorous and combative tribes.1 Although the Appalachians have peaks of no great height, their ranges are singularly continuous, and the passes formed by the streams in the numerous wall-like ridges

1 The famous Iroquois Confederacy. The English regarded them as uncertain friends whose friendship was not to be in any way presumed on. The French dread of them is evidenced by the wide berth their explorers gave to the upper Ohio Valley till well into the eighteenth century.

afforded in early days no natural ways whatever. From Maine to Alabama the woods were unbroken and impassable. This great Appalachian forest was, in primitive days, an exceedingly dense tangle. At a few points the aborigines had worn narrow footways through it; but these trails were not adapted to pack animals, the original means of transportation brought by the Europeans, but were for the use of men who journeyed on foot, and could thus climb steeps inaccessible to a burdened beast. To add to the difficulties of the country, a large part of the district from central Pennsylvania northward was bowlder strewn, affording no footing for horses. Even in the present state of New England, where the superficial layer of glacial erratics has been to a great extent cleared away, it is easy to conceive how impassable the surface must have been in early times. It required a century of enterprising, unrecorded labor to open the paths across the stony and swampy fields of New England to the valley of the Hudson. The undergrowth of this forest country is far more dense than that which is commonly found in European lands. The shrubby plants and the species of smilax or green briar and other creeping vines, make most of our Appalachian forests very nearly impassable, even at the present day.

N. S. Shaler: Nature and Man in America, pp. 194-5. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893.

QUESTIONS

What is the configuration of the Appalachian barrier? Where is the only wide depression in the mountains south of Canada? Why was it not open to settlers in the eighteenth century? What is the nature of the Appalachian forest? How has glacial action made progress through the wild country north of central Pennsylvania difficult?