The danger attracted the attention of the Colonial Government as early as 1714, when an act was passed to preserve the trees. In 1727, Provincetown was incorporated, and a dozen years later another act forbade the pasturing of cattle on the sand hills. The Court might as well have forbidden the winds to blow or the sun to shine. Provincetowners cared nothing for laws, and continued to cut wood and turn cattle loose for the next hundred years; in short, until the danger, instead of threatening, actually arrived. The sand buried a house or two, and was advancing toward the town, salt works, and harbor at the rate of fifty rods a year along a four-and-a-half-mile front. In 1825, another commission was sent to study the situation and suggest remedies. This time they found the citizens so frightened by the marching sand that they were ready at last to obey the laws. They planted beach grass on the barren dunes, kept their cattle in the pound, and stopped cutting down young pine trees. Thus was the sand anchored and the town saved. Pilgrim Lake is what is left of East Harbor, an extension of the main harbor of Provincetown that ended in marshes separated by a narrow strip of beach on the outer shore. The sea was a constant threat to this barrier and the people of Provincetown were afraid that it would eventually break through and start sending tons of sand into their valuable harbor, eventually making it unusable. A dike, 1400 feet long and seventy-five feet wide was finally completed in 1869, cutting across the mouth of East Harbor at the entrance to Provincetown Harbor, so that both houses and fishing industry were no longer threatened with burial; but the dunes, though held in some control, have continued to blow. There is a small hill called Mt. Gilboa on one side of the highway at Provincetown, facing another Biblical peak called Mt. Ararat on the other, and if you climb it you can overlook the harbor and the roofs of the town, as well as the dunes and sea in the other direction. (Provincetown, incidentally, consists of a belt of houses narrowly strung along the inner shore with its streets directly oriented toward the harbor, appropriate to a people whose trade and thoughts were toward the sea. This is also true of the houses, which were built longitudinally, parallel to the streets.) In the fall, clam diggers bend down over dark flats at low tide between stretching fingers of water. Dories are stranded in the mud, or move gently on low water. Beyond them are the curving, stockadelike enclosures of the fish weirs, and draggers move in to the mouth of the harbor out of the bay. The sunlight fires the sandy faces of the long, low cliffs that extend down the inner shore of the Cape.