slight suggestion of the triumphant democracy. The Ordinance of 1787 had the qualities of a constitution in its bill of rights and its provisions for the three departments of government. Its antislavery clause was destined to affect every new commonwealth, and, after seventy-eight years' trial, to become a part of the national Constitution-having first become part of seventeen State constitutions. Before the century closed, the national domain was nearly equally divided between States and Territories. As it is a principle in law that everything capable of ownership must have an owner, so is it in politics that every region capable of government must be subject to civil authority. To this last the Indian lands were an exception. The tribes were treated as hostile nations. They were close neighbors to the settlements. frontier was not more than fifty miles from the Ohio, in the Northwest Territory, and about the same distance from the Savannah in the south. Kentucky, with Tennessee, was an oasis of civilization in a desert of savagery. The settlements in the Cumberland Valley comprised Tennessee. Fear of the Indians still kept the whites penned between the Atlantic and the Appalachian highlands. Pontiac had conspired to accomplish what the French had failed to do. Not until Wayne's victory and the treaty at Fort Greenville, in 1795, did Indian hostilities cease in the Northwest Territory and immigration to the West begin. Within seven years from the close of his terrifying campaign, the population west of Pennsylvania

The

The Indians Bar Migrating Settlers

was sufficient to organize the State of Ohio and the Territory of Indiana. But no similar campaign was undertaken against the even fiercer tribes in the Southwest, and for nearly twenty years longer they served as an impassable barrier to immigration. The effect was to turn the tides of population northwestward and to carry into Ohio and Indiana hundreds of families who otherwise would have settled in Mississippi. But population always moves in the line of least resistance. Into the Western country the Ohio River was the natural highway. It ran out of New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, and lapped their population. Had it not been for the Choctaws and Cherokees, the migrating spirits of Kentucky would have turned southward. The southern part of Indiana Territory was quickly taken. up by settlers from Virginia and Kentucky. Into northern Ohio poured the overflow from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania; the western reserve was New Connecticut. Thus North and South met for the first time in Ohio and Indiana. Thirty years after Wayne's victory, when Ohio had a population of six hundred thousand souls, its General Assembly disclosed, in the nativity of its members, the composite character of the State. Of a hundred members, only one was a native of Ohio.

Before the century closed three lines of migration extended along the wilderness roads into the West. The northern began at Albany and extended to Detroit along the forty-third parallel.

From Albany to Black Rock it was a wagon-road. There it divided. Some immigrants went by boat, others by wagon, to the Ohio country. Gradually a permanent population was established along this route, constituting a peninsula of civilization extending from New England to the head of Lake Erie. The central line was older. It began at Philadelphia and reached to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River. It was the artery that fed central Ohio with some of the best blood of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. The southern line was the Virginian, which turned by many divisions through the valleys into the Southwest and across the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee. Over it passed many settlers from the Carolinas. In after times the New York and Pennsylvania routes became transcontinental, and to-day comprise two vast railroad systems which, with their connections, make the people of all the commonwealths neighbors. The Virginia route has developed into the transportation system of the South Atlantic seaboard, with connections in the Gulf States and westward to California. The beginnings of these three systems date from the early movements of population into the West and Southwest.*

As the century drew to a close it was found that a vast wave of population had overspread the settled area, moving the frontier westward forty-one miles. Isolated settlements were made

* The railroads do not coincide with the early wilderness roads; these led across streams and over mountains; the railroads run in the valleys, and follow the banks of rivers.