Excerpt from Pioneers of the West It is said that by 1700 it was possible, in journeying from southern Virginia to Portland, Maine, to pass each night in a sizable village. Westward movement into unoccupied lands gradually became for Americans no less inevitable than their struggle toward political independence. With that movement began what has well been termed the second American colonial period; and a new race arose - the American pioneers. To the able if arrogant Lieutenant-Governor Spotswood of Virginia belongs the honor of having been, so far as definite records are concerned, the first explorer of the Appalachians. About his expedition of 1716 clings a suggestion of the romance that surrounds the Spanish conquistadores, "with lance and helm and prancing steed, glittering through the wilderness." With a party of fifty he climbed the Blue Ridge by way of the upper Rappahannock; crossed the Shenandoah, which he christened Euphrates; and took solemn possession for His Majesty George the First. Having taken eight weeks to cover 440 miles, he returned to Williamsburg preceded inscribed: Sic juvat transcendere montes (Thus 'tis our pleasure to go o'er the mountains) - the allusion being to the fact that for mountain-work the horses had been shod with iron shoes, not then used in lowland Virginia. This picturesque enterprise led to nothing. The first white men to cross the Great Mountains and enter the central plain were probably wandering hunters who, in following game-trails, also followed streams to the sources and penetrated many a clove and notch. Southwestward from Central Pennsylvania the Appalachians run in parallel ranges through West Virginia and Virginia, eastern Tennessee and the western Carolinas, into northern Georgia. Along the furrows between these parallel ridges, emigrants from Pennsylvania began about the middle of the eighteenth century to pass toward the new country they called "the West." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.