But there were differences in the conditions “at home” and in America as wide as those symbolized by the terms “insular,” and “continental,” applied to the geography of the two countries. Chief among these differences were the generally forested character of the new-world land, the necessity of adapting tillage to an unfamiliar climate, in part to new food cereals, especially Indian corn, and the absolute dependence upon markets which could be created or opened by the colonists themselves. It was in fact the problem of a market which so long subordinated farming proper in New England to a species of country living in which small patches of arable supplied most of the family’s food, while forest and stream were the objects of exploitation for marketable furs, for medicinal plants, and for timber products. Yankee ingenuity, which justly became proverbial, had an assignable cause. It was not an inherited quality, or one which was imported and conserved; it was a distinctively American product, explained by the situation of the average New England farmer--who was, by force of circumstances, more of a mechanic and woods worker than a cultivator of the soil. His house, especially in winter, was a busy workshop where clapboards, staves, hoops, heading, ax handles, and a variety of other articles of utility and salability were always in course of manufacture. All the farm “tinkering” was additional thereto. In his contest with the forest for a livelihood, the Yankee farmer was gradually changed from the eastern New England village type to that of the American “pioneer.” His axmanship was unrivaled, his skill in woodscraft, his resourcefulness in the face of untried situations were equal to the best. When the time came for taking agricultural possession of broad spaces in the northern and western interior, the Yankee was the instrument, shaped by four generations of American history, to achieve that object.[12]