the Susquehanna, however, the land was so rocky and poor that
even the Scotch shied at it, and so, when eastern Pennsylvania became
crowded, the overflow of settlers passed not westward but southwestward,
along the Cumberland Valley, into western Maryland, and then into the
Shenandoah and those other long, narrow, parallel valleys of western
Virginia that we noted in our first chapter. This western region still
lay unoccupied and scarcely known by the Virginians themselves. Its
fertile lands were discovered by Pennsylvania Dutchmen. The first house
in western Virginia was erected by one of them, Joist Hite, and he
established a colony of his people near the future site of Winchester. A
majority of those who settled in the eastern part of the Shenandoah
Valley were Pennsylvania Dutch, while the Scotch-Irish, following in
their train, pushed a little to the west of them and occupied more
exposed positions. There were representatives of other races along the
border: English, Irish, French Huguenots, and so on; but everywhere the
Scotch-Irish and Germans predominated.

And the southwestward movement, once started, never stopped. So there
went on a gradual but sure progress of northern peoples across the
Potomac, up the Shenandoah, across the Staunton, the Dan, the Yadkin,
until the western piedmont and foot-hill region of Carolina was
similarly settled, chiefly by Pennsylvanians.

The archivist of North Carolina, the late William L. Saunders, Secretary
of State, said in one of his historical sketches that "to Lancaster and
York counties, in Pennsylvania, North Carolina owes more of her
population than to any other known part of the world." He called
attention to the interesting fact that when the North Carolina boys of
Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch descent followed Lee into
Pennsylvania in the Gettysburg campaign, they were returning to the
homes of their ancestors, by precisely the same route that those
ancestors had taken in going south.

Among those who made the long trek from Pennsylvania southward in the
eighteenth century, were Daniel Boone and the ancestors of David
Crockett, Samuel Houston, John C. Calhoun, "Stonewall" Jackson, and
Abraham Lincoln. Boone and the Lincolns, although English themselves,
had been neighbors in Berks County, one of the most German parts of all
eastern Pennsylvania.

So the western piedmont and the mountains were settled neither by
Cavaliers nor by poor whites, but by a radically