scontented, and hard times
contributed to detach them from their homes. Their movement to America
was contemporaneous with the heavy German migration. By the Revolution,
it is believed that a third of the population of Pennsylvania was
Scotch-Irish; and it has been estimated, probably too liberally, that a
half million came to the United States between 1730 and 1770.[103:2]
Especially after the Rebellion of 1745, large numbers of Highlanders
came to increase the Scotch blood in the nation.[103:3] Some of the
Scotch-Irish went to New England.[103:4] Given the cold shoulder by
congregational Puritans, they passed to unsettled lands about Worcester,
to the frontier in the Berkshires, and in southern New Hampshire at
Londonderry--whence came John Stark, a frontier leader in the French
and Indian War, and the hero of Bennington in the Revolution, as well as
the ancestors of Horace Greeley and S. P. Chase. In New York, a
Scotch-Irish settlement was planted on the frontier at Cherry
Valley.[104:1] Scotch Highlanders came to the Mohawk,[104:2] where they
followed Sir William Johnson and became Tory raiders in the Revolution.

But it was in Pennsylvania that the center of Scotch-Irish power lay.
"These bold and indigent strangers, saying as their excuse when
challenged for titles that we had solicited for colonists and they had
come accordingly,"[104:3] and asserting that "it was against the laws of
God and nature that so much land should be idle while so many christians
wanted it to work on and to raise their bread," squatted on the vacant
lands, especially in the region disputed between Pennsylvania and
Maryland, and remained in spite of efforts to drive them off. Finding
the Great Valley in the hands of the Germans, they planted their own
outposts along the line of the Indian trading path from Lancaster to
Bedford; they occupied Cumberland Valley, and before 1760 pressed up the
Juniata somewhat beyond the narrows, spreading out along its
tributaries, and by 1768 had to be warned off from the Redstone country
to avoid Indian trouble. By the time of the Revolution, their
settlements made Pittsburgh a center from which was to come a new era in
Pennsylvania history. It was the Scotch-Irish and German
fur-traders[104:4] whose pack trains pioneered into the Ohio Valley in
the days before the French and Indian wars. The messengers between
civilization and savagery were such men,[105:1] as the Irish Croghan,
and the Germans Conrad We