partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the
advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the
influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines.
And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions,
and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the
really American part of our history.

In the course of the seventeenth century the frontier was advanced up
the Atlantic river courses, just beyond the "fall line," and the
tidewater region became the settled area. In the first half of the
eighteenth century another advance occurred. Traders followed the
Delaware and Shawnese Indians to the Ohio as early as the end of the
first quarter of the century.[5:1] Gov. Spotswood, of Virginia, made an
expedition in 1714 across the Blue Ridge. The end of the first quarter
of the century saw the advance of the Scotch-Irish and the Palatine
Germans up the Shenandoah Valley into the western part of Virginia, and
along the Piedmont region of the Carolinas.[5:2] The Germans in New York
pushed the frontier of settlement up the Mohawk to German Flats.[5:3] In
Pennsylvania the town of Bedford indicates the line of settlement.
Settlements soon began on the New River, or the Great Kanawha, and on
the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad.[5:4] The King attempted to
arrest the advance by his proclamation of 1763,[5:5] forbidding
settlements beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the Atlantic;
but in vain. In the period of the Revolution the frontier crossed the
Alleghanies into Kentucky and Tennessee, and the upper waters of the
Ohio were settled.[5:6] When the first census was taken in 1790, the
continuous settled area was bounded by a line which ran near the coast
of Maine, and included New England except a portion of Vermont and New
Hampshire, New York along the Hudson and up the Mohawk about
Schenectady, eastern and southern Pennsylvania, Virginia well across the
Shenandoah Valley, and the Carolinas and eastern Georgia.[6:1] Beyond
this region of continuous settlement were the small settled areas of
Kentucky and Tennessee, and the Ohio, with the mountains intervening
between them and the Atlantic area, thus giving a new and important
character to the frontier. The isolation of the region increased its
peculiarly American tendencies, and the need of transportation
facilities to connect it with the East called out important schemes of
internal improvement