The true reason, in the belief of these students, is to be found in the character of the New England population, as compared to the bolder breed of men who overran the western sections of Pennsylvania and for two generations were in continuous touch with the wilderness and its savagery. This subject is taken up interestingly by Horace Kephart, a scholar of much acquaintance with early American history, in the course of an able paper. It is very much worth while for any one who wishes an actual picture of the march across the Appalachians to read his conclusions. “In a vague way we think of all the East as old,” says this writer, “and all the West as new. We picture civilization as advancing westward from the Atlantic in a long, straight front, like a wave or a line of battle. But in point of fact it was not so. There was a permanent settlement of Europeans a thousand miles to the west of us before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Cahokia and Kaskaskia were thriving villages before Baltimore was founded; and our own city of St. Louis was building in the same year that New Jersey became a British possession. At a time when Daniel Boone was hunting beaver on the Osage and the Missouri, Fenimore Cooper was drawing the types for future ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ from his neighbors in a ‘wilderness’ only a hundred and fifty miles from New York City. “American settlement advanced toward the Mississippi in the shape of a wedge, of which the entering edge was first Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, then the Shenandoah valley, then Louisville, and finally St. Louis. When the second census of the United States was taken, in 1800, nearly all the white inhabitants of our country lived in a triangle formed by a diagonal southwestward from Portland, Maine, to the mouth of the Tennessee River, here meeting another diagonal running northwestward from Savannah, with the Atlantic for a base. Central and western New York, northern Pennsylvania, and all the territory north of the Ohio River, save in its immediate vicinity, were almost uninhabited by whites, and so were Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. Yet the state of Kentucky had half as many people as Massachusetts, and Tennessee had already been admitted into the Union. “As a rule, geographical expansion proceeds along the lines of least resistance, following the natural highways afforded by navigable rivers and open plains. It is easily turned aside by mountain chains, dense forests, and hostile natives. Especially was this true in the days before railroads. But the development of our older West shows a striking exception to this rule; for the entering wedge was actually driven through one of the most rugged, difficult, and inhospitable regions to be found along the whole frontier of the British possessions.