And now Spotswood's consulship had reached its end. His enemies in London and Williamsburg had been industriously intriguing and upon his return he found he had been superseded. He had acquired a vast estate of over 45,000 acres in the Piedmont forests and to settle and improve those lands he proceeded to devote his great and able energies. But he had far from retired from his public labours. As Postmaster General for the American Colonies he, by 1738, developed a regular mail service from New England to the James; and was about to sail as a major-general on Admiral Vernon's expeditions against Carthagena when he suddenly died. He was buried on his estate, Temple Farm, near Yorktown, where latterly he had made his home. It was in his mansion there, then owned by his eldest daughter Ann Catherine and her husband M. Bernard Moore, Senior, that many years later the negotiations for the surrender of Lord Cornwallis to General Washington closed the American Revolution. CHAPTER IV SETTLEMENT Although Spotswood's treaty, as we now know, had finally ended the Indian menace in Piedmont, the Colonists had to be convinced of that fact by reassuring experience before any great movement to the upper lands would begin. There had been other treaties and, as they well knew to their cost, Indian promise and performance were not always consistent. The first ten years following the treaty, or from 1722 to 1732, are a twilight zone for Loudoun in which one has to depend on fragmentary traditions and comparatively few grants as to actual settlement; but after the latter year the records become increasingly numerous and tradition more definite and the student stands on progressively firmer ground. Slowly there grew a steady increase in trappers and hunters to the cismontane region and then, gradually and cautiously, the landless men, the poorer whites from the lower settlements, the redemptioners or indentured servants who had fulfilled their contracts of service, began to make their way by Indian trail or through the untravelled woodlands. Very soon, however, there were purchases of substantial tracts by a more prosperous class who began to seat themselves upon their new possessions. They were a rough and sturdy folk, those first poorer arrivals, illiterate for the most part, bred to primitive conditions of living, many accustomed from birth to self-reliance in meeting the problems of existence on a sparsely settled land and wholly ignorant of the relative comforts of life enjoyed by the prosperous planters in tidewater. They built their rude cabins of logs in such places as seemed best to them, paying scant attention to land titles and being in fact, for the most part, mere squatters on their holdings; and there they planted small patches of corn and beans which, with the abundant game in the woods and fish in the streams, provided their liberal and hearty fare. It has been traditional that these