Over into New
York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania her children overflowed till a map of
these States in 1820, colored to show the origin and character of their
various communities, made practically all of western New York, a part of
New Jersey and the northern third of Pennsylvania, an expanded New
England. Meanwhile the hardiest joined the transmontane migration, and in
the decade after the opening of the Erie Canal (1830-40) the whole
northern edge of the valley takes color of New England conquest.
So the first peopling was a mingling of the children of the first
strugglers with a raw savage continent; men already schooled in adversity,
already acquainted with some of the frontier problems--civilization's most
highly individualized, least socialized material, the wheat of the new
world's first winnowing.
What is particularly to be observed is that men of the north and the
south, as far apart as Carolina and Massachusetts, came together beyond
the mountains in the united building of commonwealths; for over those
mountains the rivers all ran toward the Mississippi, which tied the
interests of all together.
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