The principal reason why Virginia was successful was because her inhabitants were an agricultural people like their ancestors before them in England. Being an agricultural people they had expanded further, geographically, than the inhabitants of any of the other colonies. As early as 1740, cabins were being built in Bedford County, Virginia, over one hundred and fifty miles from the seaboard. There were settlements on the New River, a branch of the Great Kanawha, before the French and Indian war. Fort Loudoun, over the border, was erected in 1756, and Forts Long Island and Chissel in 1758. The Wyoming massacre in New York State in the Revolutionary War occurred on what was then the frontier, though Wyoming was less than a hundred miles from New York City. And, fortunately, this agricultural people was located in the most favorable place along the Atlantic for expansion, for a reason already mentioned. Back of New York and Pennsylvania roamed the Iroquois, Delawares, Shawanese, and other Indian nations. Back of Virginia, whose fine rivers rose in the mountains, lay a comparatively uninhabited country; for, the moment the Indians became allied with either of the encroaching European powers, they ceased contending together in the border-land behind Virginia. It was not until Virginians began to occupy it that it became anew a "dark and bloody ground." Virginia knew less of Indian warfare than some of the neighboring colonies until the era of her expansion when her sturdy people began occupying the land obtained at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix. The expansion of Virginia was greatly facilitated by the geographical position of the mountains along her western frontier. While the mountains of western New York and Pennsylvania obstructed expansion, in Virginia the mountain ranges facilitated it. Further north they trended directly north and south and even the rivers could find a passage-way only by following the most tortuous courses. True, the Hudson and Mohawk valleys offered a clear course to the great highland across to the Niagara River, but it was not until very late in the eighteenth century that the path across this watershed was open to white men. The two routes through Pennsylvania crossed the mountains horizontally and almost feared to follow the waterways. Braddock's Road crossed the waters of one stream three times at right angles in the space of eighty miles and did not follow it one hundred yards altogether. In Virginia the mountain ranges trend southwesterly, with the rivers between them, offering a practicable though roundabout route westward.