the upper waters of the Ohio, reaching the gateway to the Mississippi Valley, before the colony passed from the control of the Penn family.
In the South, the westward march was even swifter. Under the system of extensive and wasteful cultivation by slave labor, the rich coastal plain was quickly occupied, forcing small farmers in search of homes to flock into the upland regions. As soon as settlements were well started in the piedmont, they were fed by streams of migration from the German and Scotch-Irish regions of Pennsylvania. By this process of unremitting penetration, the Blue Ridge country and the Shenandoah Valley were occupied while the English flag still floated over the frontier posts. Even the higher mountain barriers were pierced; as early as 1654 a Virginia colonel was in the Kentucky country, and within forty years trafficking was begun with the Cherokees in the forests of Tennessee.
On the eve of the American Revolution, explorers were zealously searching that segment of the frontier in every nook and cranny—state builders at work. In 1751, Christopher Gist was paddling his canoe on the waters of the Kentucky River; a few years later John Finley was tramping over ground that was soon to be dark and bloody. In 1769, that fearless Nimrod, Daniel Boone, "ordained of God to settle the wilderness," led a band through the Cumberland Gap into the new promised land. Following in the trail of the forerunners went groups of pioneer farmers.
Inspired by their reports, a North Carolina promoter, Richard Henderson, dreaming of profits to be made in western land, organized a company, purchased from the Indians in 1775 an immense domain lying between the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers, and founded the settlement of Transylvania. Thus, before Washington took command of the revolutionary army at Cambridge a fourteenth English colony was in process of formation far beyond the seaboard line. Speaking of America as a whole, a fertile domain many times the area of England was already
