The immigrants to America of that stock had, many of them, at once on
reaching the new land found the foot-hills of mountains, chiefly in
Pennsylvania. Here they settled, gradually pushing their way southward in
the troughs of the mountain streams and making finally a "broad belt from
north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of the
seaboard and the red warriors of the wilderness," the same men who
declared for American independence in North Carolina before any others,
even before the men of Massachusetts. With this stock there went over the
mountain men of other origins, of course, English, French Huguenots,
Germans, Hollanders, Swedes; but the Scotch-Irish were the core of the new
life, which in "iron surroundings" became strongly homogeneous--"yet
different from the rest of the world--even the world of America, and
infinitely more the world of Europe."
In the north the great rivers lay across the tedious paths that ran with
the lines of latitude. And so it was partly for physiographic reasons that
the first far-stretching expansions of the New England settlements were
not toward this great western wilderness but northward along the narrower
valleys.
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