The Frontier in American HistoryTurner, Frederick Jackson
History
The Frontier in American History
Turner, Frederick Jackson
Frontier and pioneer life -- United States; Frontier thesis; United States -- History; United States -- Territorial expansion
The manorial practice gave a bad name to New York as a region for
settlement, which not even the actual opportunities in certain parts of
the colony could counteract. The diplomacy of New York governors during
this period of the Old West, in securing a protectorate over the Six
Nations and a consequent claim to their territory, and in holding them
aloof from France, constituted the most effective contribution of that
colony to the movement of American expansion. When lands of these tribes
were obtained after Sullivan's expedition in the Revolution (in which
New England soldiers played a prominent part), it was by the New England
inundation into this interior that they were colonized. And it was under
conditions like those prevailing in the later years of the expansion of
settlements in New England itself, that this settlement of interior and
western New York was effected.
The result was, that New York became divided into two distinct peoples:
the dwellers along Hudson Valley, and the Yankee pioneers of the
interior. But the settlement of central and western New York, like the
settlement of Vermont, is a story that belongs to the era in which the
trans-Alleghany West was occupied.
We can best consider the settlement of the share of the Old West which
is located in Pennsylvania as a part of the migration which occupied the
Southern Uplands, and before entering upon this it will be advantageous
to survey that part of the movement toward the interior which proceeded
westward from the coast. First let us observe the conditions at the
eastern edge of these uplands, along the fall line in Virginia, in the
latter part of the seventeenth century, in order that the process and
the significance of the movement may be better understood.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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