THE ROMANTIC STORY OF THE EARLY PIONEERS INTO VIRGINIA,
THE CAROLINAS, TENNESSEE, AND KENTUCKY 1740-1790
BY
Some to endure and many to fail,
Some to conquer and many to quail
Toiling over the Wilderness Trail.
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1920
TO THE HISTORIAN OF
OLD WEST AND NEW WEST
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER
WITH ADMIRATION AND REGARD
ivThe country might invite a prince from his palace, merely for thepleasure of contemplating its beauty and excellence; but only addthe rapturous idea of property, and what allurements can theworld offer for the loss of so glorious a prospect?
—Richard Henderson.
viiiThe established Authority of any government in America, and thepolicy of Government at home, are both insufficient to restrainthe Americans.… They acquire no attachment to Place: Butwandering about Seems engrafted in their Nature; and it is aweakness incident to it, that they Should for ever immagine theLands further off, are Still better than those upon which theyare already settled.
—Lord Dunmore,
to the Earl of Dartmouth.
The romantic and thrilling story of the southward and westwardmigration of successive waves of transplanted European peoplesthroughout the entire course of the eighteenth century is thehistory of the growth and evolution of American democracy. Uponthe American continent was wrought out, through almost superhumandaring, incredible hardship, and surpassing endurance, theformation of a new society. The European rudely confronted withthe pitiless conditions of the wilderness soon discovered thathis maintenance, indeed his existence, was conditioned upon hisindividual efficiency and his resourcefulness in adapting himselfto his environment. The very history of the human race, from theage of primitive man to the modern era of enlightenedcivilization, is traversed in the Old xSouthwest throughout the course of half a century.
A series of dissolving views thrown upon the screen, picturingthe successive episodes in the history of a single family as itwended its way southward along the eastern valleys, resolutelyrepulsed the sudden attack of the Indians, toiled painfully upthe granite slopes of the Appalachians, and pitched down into thetransmontane wilderness upon the western waters, would give tothe spectator a vivid conception, in miniature, of the westwardmovement. But certain basic elements in the grand procession,revealed to the sociologist and the economist, would perhapsescape his scrutiny. Back of the individual, back of the family,even, lurk the creative and formative impulses of colonization,expansion, and government. In the recognition of these social andeconomic tendencies the individual merges into the group; thegroup into the community; the community into a new society. Inthis clear perspective of historic development the spectacularhero at first sight seems to diminish; xibut the mass, the movement, the social force which he epi