It was not until the migration had filled the meagre limits and
capacities of these smaller valleys and had carried school-houses and
churches and town halls well up granite hillsides, that the western exodus
came, to leave those hillside homes and institutional shelters as shells
found far from a receding sea, empty or habited by a new species of
immigrant. [Footnote: In one of those far northern valleys which I know
best there was a school, before the exodus, of some seventy pupils,
gathered from the farmers' families of the neighborhood. Now there are not
a half-dozen pupils, and they are carried to a neighboring district.]
Farms were abandoned for the fertile fields of the far west, from which
wheat can be imported for less than the cost of raising it on the sterile
hills and in the short-summered valleys. New England had once claimed a
fraction of the great west, as, indeed, had most of the other seaboard
colonies. But these claims were surrendered to the general government, as
we shall see later, "for the common good," and so her migrants had none
other than that instinct which follows lines of latitude to keep them
practically within the zone of her relinquished claims.
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