articularly in view of the captivity that might await them.

In summing up, we find many of the traits of later frontiers in this
early prototype, the Massachusetts frontier. It lies at the edge of the
Indian country and tends to advance. It calls out militant qualities and
reveals the imprint of wilderness conditions upon the psychology and
morals as well as upon the institutions of the people. It demands common
defense and thus becomes a factor for consolidation. It is built on the
basis of a preliminary fur trade, and is settled by the combined and
sometimes antagonistic forces of eastern men of property (the absentee
proprietors) and the democratic pioneers. The East attempted to regulate
and control it. Individualistic and democratic tendencies were
emphasized both by the wilderness conditions and, probably, by the prior
contentions between the proprietors and non-proprietors of the towns
from which settlers moved to the frontier. Removal away from the control
of the customary usages of the older communities and from the
conservative influence of the body of the clergy, increased the
innovating tendency. Finally the towns were regarded by at least one
prominent representative of the established order in the East, as an
undesirable place for the re-location of the pillars of society. The
temptation to look upon the frontier as a field for investment was
viewed by the clergy as a danger to the "institutions of God." The
frontier was "the Wrong side of the Hedge."

But to this "wrong side of the hedge" New England men continued to
migrate. The frontier towns of 1695 were hardly more than suburbs of
Boston. The frontier of a century later included New England's colonies
in Vermont, Western New York, the Wyoming Valley, the Connecticut
Reserve, and the Ohio Company's settlement in the Old Northwest
Territory. By the time of the Civil War the frontier towns of New
England had occupied the great prairie zone of the Middle West and were
even planted in Mormon Utah and in parts of the Pacific Coast. New
England's sons had become the organizers of a Greater New England in the
West, captains of industry, political leaders, founders of educational
systems, and prophets of religion, in a section that was to influence
the ideals and shape the destiny of the nation in ways to which the eyes
of men like Cotton Mather were sealed.[66:1]

FOOTNOTES:

[39:1] Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, April,
1914, xv