organization of corporations and the planting of trading depots before the sixteenth century ended. The accident that the Atlantic seaboard had no exploitable products at once made the American commercial trading company of little profit and translated its depots into resident colonies. The first instalments of colonists had little intention to turn pioneer, but when religious and political quarrels in the mother country made merry England a melancholy place for Puritans, a motive was born which produced a generation of voluntary frontiersmen. Their scattered outposts made a line of contact between England and the American wilderness which by 1700 extended along the Atlantic from Maine to Carolina. Until the middle of the eighteenth century the frontier kept within striking distance of the sea. Its course of advance was then, as always, determined by nature and geographic fact. Pioneers followed the line of least resistance. The river valley was the natural communicating link, since along its waters the vessel could be advanced, while along its banks rough trails could most easily develop into highways. The extent and distribution of this colonial frontier was determined by the contour of the seaboard along which it lay.

Running into the sea, with courses nearly parallel, the Atlantic rivers kept the colonies separated. Each colony met its own problems in its own way. England was quite as accessible as some of the neighboring colonies. No natural routes invited communication among the settlements, and an English policy deliberately discouraged attempts on the part of man to bring the colonies together. Hence it was that the various settlements developed as island frontiers, touching the river mouths, not advancing much along the shore line, but penetrating into the country as far as the rivers themselves offered easy access.

For varying distances, all the important rivers of the seaboard are navigable; but all are broken by falls at the points where they emerge upon the level plains of the coast from the hilly courses of the foothills of the Appalachians. Connecting these various waterfalls a line can be drawn roughly parallel to the coast and marking at once the western limit of the earliest colonies and the line of the second frontier. The first frontier was the seacoast itself. The second was reached at the falls line shortly after 1700.

Within these island colonies of the first frontier American life began. English institutions were transplanted in the new soil and shaped in growth by the quality of their nourishment. They came to meet the needs of their dependent populations, but they ceased to be English in the process. The facts of similarity among the institutions of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or Georgia, point clearly to the similar stocks of ideas imported with the colonists, and the similar problems attending upon the winning of the first frontier. Already, before the next frontier at the falls line had been reached, the older settlements had begun to develop a spirit of conservatism plainly different from the attitude of the old frontier.

The falls line was passed long before the colonial period came to an end, and pioneers were working their way from clearing to clearing, up into the mountains, by the early eighteenth century. As they approached the summit of the eastern divide, leaving the falls behind, the essential isolation of the provinces began to weaken under the combined forces of geographic influence and common need. The valley routes of communication which determined the lines of advance run parallel, across the first frontier, but have a tendency to converge among the mountains and to stand on common ground at the summit. Every reader of Francis Parkman knows how in the years from 1745 to 1756 the pioneers of the more aggressive colonies crossed the Alleghanies and meeting on the summit found that there they must make common cause against the French, or recede. The gateways of the West converge where the headwaters of the Tennessee and Cumberland and Ohio approach the Potomac and its neighbors. There the colonists first came to have common associations and common problems. Thus it was that the years in which the frontier line reached the forks of the Ohio were filled with talk of colonial union along the seaboard. The frontier problem was already influencing the life of the East and impelling a closer union than had been known before.

The line of the frontier was generally parallel to the coast in 1700. By 1800 it had assumed the form of a wedge, with its apex advancing down the rivers of the Mississippi Valley and its sides sloping backward to north and south. The French war of 1756–1763 saw the apex at the forks of the Ohio. In the seventies it started down the Cumberland as pioneers filled up the valleys of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee. North and south the advance was slower. No other river valleys could aid as did the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee, and population must always follow the line of least resistance. On both sides of the main advance, powerful Indian confederacies contested the ground, opposing the entry of the whites. The centres of Indian strength were along the Lakes and north of the Gulf. Intermediate was the strip of "dark and bloody ground," fought over and hunted over by all, but occupied by none; and inviting white approach through the three valleys that opened it to the Atlantic.

The war for independence occurred just as the extreme frontier started down the western rivers. Campaigns inspired by the West and directed by its leaders saw to it that when the independence was achieved the boundary of the United States should not be where England had placed it in 1763, on the summit of the Alleghanies, but at the Mississippi itself, at which the lines of settlement were shortly to arrive. The new nation felt the influence of this frontier in the very negotiations which made it free. The development of its policies and its parties felt the frontier pressure from the start.

Steadily after 1789 the wedge-shaped frontier advanced. New states appeared in Kentucky and Tennessee as concrete evidences of its advance, while before the century ended, the campaign of Mad Anthony Wayne at the Fallen Timbers had allowed the northern flank of the wedge to cross Ohio and include Detroit. At the turn of the century Ohio entered the Union in 1803, filled with a population tempted to meet the trying experiences of the frontier by the call of lands easier to till than those in New England, from which it came. The old eastern communities still retained the traditions of colonial isolation; but across the mountains there was none of this. Here state lines were artificial and convenient, not representing facts of barrier or interest. The emigrants from varying sources passed over single routes, through single gateways, into a valley which knew little of itself as state but was deeply impressed with its national bearings. A second war with England gave voice to this newer nationality of the newer states.

The war with England in its immediate consequences was a bad investment. It ended with the government nearly bankrupt, its military reputation redeemed only by a victory fought after the peace was signed, its naval strength crushed after heroic resistance. The eastern population, whose war had been forced upon it by the West, was bankrupt too. And by 1814 began the Hegira. For five years the immediate result of the struggle was a suffering East. A new state for every year was the western accompaniment.

The westward movement has been continuous in America since the beginning. Bad roads, dense forests, and Indian obstructers have never succeeded in stifling the call of the West. A steady procession of pioneers has