e First Explorations of the Trans-Alleghany Region by the Virginians 1650-1674

The First Explorations of the Trans-Alleghany Region by the Virginians 1650- 1674

By Clarence Walworth Alvord and Lee Bidgood Published by The Arthur H. Clark Company, Cleveland, Ohio, 1912

Preface
The Discovery of the Ohio Waters
I. Encouragement from the Assembly
II. The Discovery of New Brittaine
III. The Discoveries of John Lederer
IV. Governor Berkeley as a Promoter of Exploration
V. The Expedition of Batts and Fallam
VI. The Journeys of Needham and Arthur
VII. Coxe's Account of the Activities of the English in the Mississippi Valley in the Seventeenth Century
Bibliography

Preface

After the brilliant researches of Francis Parkman and ,Justin Winsor, it is remarkable that a new chapter in the history of the explorations of North America has remained so long unwritten; yet the story of the discovery of the Trans-Allegheny region by the Virginians is here first told in its entirety. Since the success of these early enterprises has been doubted and frequently denied by our best historians, the attempt to piece together the story from the scattered sources and to determine its truth needs no excuse. For the same reason, it is desirable that all the sources, whether previously printed or not, be published in order 'that others may test for themselves the conclusions. If the memory of these hardy English explorers be revived and given a place by the side of their better known but not more daring French contemporaries, Mr. Bidgood and myself will feel rewarded for our pains. As I read again the manuscript before sending it to the press, I cannot but feel that a great injustice has been done these Virginians by history. Although the pen of a Francis Parkman could hardly raise them to the rank of Joliet, Marquette, and La Salle, for these latter opened to the knowledge of mankind a continent, still the names of Wood, Batts, Fallam, and Needham should surely be as well known as those of the many lesser lights that surrounded these greater French explorers.

At the request of the publishers, the following expansion of abbreviations has been adopted in the reprinting of the manuscript originals: Majestie; Lordship, and, which, with; and occasionally others have been expanded. In the case of the letter "u" used for "v" and of "yt" for "that," the usual practice of making the alterations has been followed. "Ye" used for "the" has been retained in some documents.

For assistance in the preparation of this volume our thanks are due first to Miss Agnes Laut who kindly loaned us her manuscript and notes. We wish to make acknowledgments to Dr. J. Franklin Jameson, Dr. Solon J. Buck, Mr. James Mooney, Mr. Earl G. Swem, and Professor Frederick J. Turner for valuable assistance and suggestions; and also to Miss Margaret L. Kingsbury for cooperation on the bibliography.

CLARENCE W. ALVORD.
University of Illinois.

The Discovery of the Ohio Waters

The Indies are discovered and vast treasures brought from thence every day. Let us, therefore, bend our endeavors thitherwards, and if the Spaniards or Portuguese suffer us not to join with them, there will be yet .region enough for all to enjoy. - LORD HERBERT.

On the fourteenth of June, in the year 1671, there was gathered on a hill overlooking the rapids at that picturesque centre of the Great Lake system of North America, Sault Ste. Marie, a crowd of Indians, inhabitants of the shores of these inland seas. To this spot there had come in canoes representatives of the Potawatomi, the Sauk, the Winnebago, the Cree, the Ottawa and their neighbors, to the number of fourteen tribes to listen to the message of their "great father" from across the water. This message had been brought to them by Daumont de Saint-Lusson, who, arrayed in all the gorgeous coloring of silk and velvet, such as might be seen in the court of Louis HIV, was the centre of a little group of Frenchmen, dressed like 'himself in colors to impress the savage mind or else in the raiment of the Jesuit fathers, no less impressive if more somber. With the accompaniment of religious ceremony and amidst the silence of men and nature, a huge cross of wood was reared and planted in the ground. The Frenchmen, with heads bared to the breeze, sang the Vexilla Regis. Beside the cross was then raised a cedar post carrying a metal plate engraven with the royal arms, and the Europeans broke out again in the chant of 'the Exaudiat. After this, one of the Jesuits lifted up his voice in prayer to Heaven that God might bless this enterprise of the "most Christian monarch."

Advancing with drawn sword in one hand and in the other a clod of earth, Saint-Lusson read in a loud voice the following proclamation to the nations of the world:

In the name of the Most High, Mighty, and Redoubted Monarch, Louis, Fourteenth of that name, Most Christian King of France and of Navarre, I take possession of this place, Sainte Marie du Saut, as also of Lakes Huron and Superior, the Island of Manitoulin, and all countries, rivers, lakes, and streams contiguous and adjacent there unto, both those which have been discovered and those which may be discovered hereafter, in all their length and breadth, bounded on the one side by the seas of the North and of the West, and on the other by the South Sea: declaring to the nations thereof that from this time forth they are vassals of his Majesty, bound to obey his laws and follow his customs; promising them on his part all succor and protection against the incursions and invasions of their enemies; declaring to all potentates, princes, sovereigns, states, and republics, to them and to their subjects, that they cannot and are not to seize or settle upon any parts of the aforesaid countries, save only under the good pleasure of His Most Christian Majesty, and of him who will govern in his behalf; and this on pain of incurring his resentment and the efforts of his arms. Vive Le Roi.¹

With such impressive ceremonies and presumptuous language was inaugurated the period of active discovery and occupation of the great American inland valley by the French.

Three months after Daumont de Saint-Lusson proclaimed the dominion of the grand monarque over land, lakes, and rivers of the West, three Englishmen of the colony of Virginia crossed the Appalachian divide and pitched camp by the side of a stream whose waters, after joining the Ohio flowed to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Footsore and weary after the hard journey over the mountains where they had experienced the perils of cold and hunger, with their homely clothing torn to shreds by the brambles, there was no possibility of equaling the grand ceremony which, a few weeks before, had been performed far to the north on the banks of the lakes, nor has such display been characteristic of the English advance westward. In the simplicity of their actions these first British Americans in the western valley foreshadowed the great migrations of the future. First of all, as good and loyal subjects, they cried out: "Long live Charles the Second, by the grace of God King of England, Scotland, France, Ireland and Virginia and of all the Territories thereunto belonging." They then proceeded to set their marks upon their discovery: four trees were barked; on one was branded the royal insignia; on two others the initials of Governor Berkeley and of the man who had sent them forth, Abraham Wood; and on the fourth, those of the two leaders of the party, Thomas Batts and Robert Fallam.²

Thus almost at the same moment, the two great rivals, France and England, set up their claims to the immense interior valley. The struggle for its mastery, perhaps the most portentous in the annals of history, which was to last almost a century, was inaugurated. The subject of this volume is the history of the first act played by men of English speech in this century long drama. It is one of the ironies of history that an event which redounds so much to the credit of Englishmen, and substantiates so completely the claims of the mother country to that particular territory for which she made war on her rival at such a cost of blood and money, is practically unknown and has even been frequently denied by historians. The names of Frontenac, Joliet, Marquette, and La Salle are familiar to every school-boy, while those of their English competitors in exploration, who were in every respect their equals in daring and enterprise, have remained till this day in obscurity, almost in oblivion.

The brilliant pen of Francis Parkman, which has made the name of La Salle a household word, wherever is found the love of adventure and of history, wrote:

It has been affirmed that one Colonel Wood, of Virginia, reached a branch of the Mississippi as early as the year 1654, and that about 1670 a certain Captain Bolton penetrated to the river itself. Neither statement is sustained by sufficient evidence.³

What the most brilliant and at the same time most careful historian of America wrote has been followed without investigation by his successors. Justin Winsor, after investigating the sources, arrived at the same conclusion. In one of his well-known volumes on western history, he wrote:

There is much less certainty that at about the same time, as is claimed, some Englishmen pushed west from the head waters of the James River in Virginia, and passed the mountains. The story is told in Coxe's Carolana as coming from a memorial presented to the English monarch in 1699, and the exploit is ascribed to a Colonel Abraham Wood, who had been ordered to open trade with the western Indians, which he did in several successive journeys. No satisfactory confirmation of the tale has ever been produced.⁴

Within these pages are printed the sources of information concerning the western explorations of the Virginians and they leave no doubt about the event. Unquestionably, Englishmen were among the first to see the waters that flow westward and southward. They camped by the side of a branch of the Ohio two years before Joliet and Marquette made their famous expedition which disclosed the great Mississippi to the world. They knew the region of the upper Ohio years before the French had any record of the river's course.⁵ If priority of discovery is the proof of do minion, then the territory in dispute between France and England, that caused the French and Indian War, belonged by right to the latter, as she claimed; and contemporary pamphleteers, like Dr. John Mitchell were absolutely correct in the mustering of their proof, although they were misled concerning some of the facts and the actual date of the events.⁶

Before recounting the story of these hardy Virginians, who first crossed the great divide, it is necessary to remind ourselves of the environment of which they were a product, for their actions were not isolated phenomena, nor were their discoveries wholly disassociated with the event in the far north, an account of which opens this introduction.

Historians have generally interpreted the seventeenth century as one of the pivotal eras in the world's history. It saw the end of the religious wars, the organization of the modern state, and the rise of new world powers. No less than in the world of politics, the century was the turning point from the old to the new in the world of business. The former supremacy of the city merchant- barons in Italy and Germany had passed away. With the opening of new and broader fields of enterprise in Asia and America, business had become nationalized; and finally by the seventeenth century there were developed the great stock companies for trading and colonizing. This change brought with it tremendous business expansion. Enterprises were started that foreshadowed the Mississippi plans of John Law and the South Sea Bubble. The European population was educated in get-rich-quick schemes of every variety; and rapidly the market for the sale of shares in such undertakings was developed. Men were looking everywhere for rapid financial returns. In the history of business as of politics, the close of the century marks the beginning of the present day world.

This desire for quick profits was the most powerful motive of discovery in the new world. It was the hope of gain that lured men to undertake the long, wearisome, and dangerous voyage across the Atlantic and incited explorer, warrior, and trader to plunge into the interior through the unknown dangers of the almost impenetrable forests. The hope of profits moved the statesmen at home to urge these adventurers to renewed efforts and to play their own cards craftily in the diplomatic game. The great nations of Europe were all seeking to acquire dominion in America that they might share in the treasures of the "Indies." Spain had been first, then came Portugal; and after a hundred years, the two great rivals, France and England, reached out for North America. Their stake in the game of profits was the great interior valley, long before discovered by Spanish adventurers, but never exploited and so almost forgotten.

In both countries associations of moneyed men were formed for the exploitation of this world that was being opened up. Their first thought had been to rival Spain in the finding of the precious metals, and Portugal in the discovery of a new route to Asia.. When these twin expectations seemed less attainable, they laid their plans for the development of the fur trade, which in the course of time became an effective force in the discovery and colonization of America. In this enterprise, France had an advantage from her position on the St. Lawrence River with its direct water communication into the interior; and soon French traders and priests were roaming over the Great Lakes, where they heard of the "great water" beyond. Before the first Virginians reached the head waters of the Ohio, it is probable that more than one wandering Frenchman had crossed the narrow divide that separates the Lakes from the Mississippi system, but there is only one recorded instance that is not open to dispute.⁷ At the time when the first successful English exploration was being executed, the French were making plans for the expedition of Joliet and Marquette which has brought them so much renown.

The success of the fur traders of Quebec and Montreal who, with their supporters in France, had secured the monopoly of the rich territory around the interior lakes, acted only as a spur to the ambition of other Frenchmen, who sought eagerly for similar fields. In La Salle, these rivals of the Jesuits and their trading friends found a worthy leader. The southern shore of the lakes offered a promising opportunity. La Salle's exploratory expedition into this region, in 1668, was a failure on account of ill health, for he did not reach the Ohio as was claimed for him later by his friends.⁸ From his talks with the Senecas, however, he was persuaded of the possibility of his plans and soon found many supporters in France who were ready to advance money in the enterprise. It was La Salle's fortune to open up the Illinois and Mississippi region and there to organize the furtrade; but his activities fall after the period narrated in this volume, and therefore belong to a later period of the rivalry between his country and England.

The contrast offered by the rapid western advance of the French with the slower movement of the English is one of the commonplaces of American history. The founder of Quebec saw the Great Lakes; and before his death, one of his followers, jean Nicollet, had reached the western shore of Lake Michigan. La Salle, a gentleman of France, who became familiar with court life, plunged into the wilderness shortly after his arrival in Canada, and fifteen years later had reached the Illinois River. The rapidity and boldness of this westward advance arouses the imagination. In the actions of its leaders there is typified the eternal conflict of man with nature. The Frenchman alone in the wilderness, a thousand miles from his connections, is a Prometheus confident in his strength hurling defiance at Zeus. Undoubtedly this is one of the reasons why the heroes of French exploration are so well known; their exploits have all the elements that appeal to the romantic aspirations of our nature.

The English advance, on the other hand, has been slower and more secure. They have not reached out into the unknown, until the settlements at their back have offered them a safe base for their operations; and in all periods of our history, the men of adventure have generally been reared in a society particularly well fitted to train them for the life of exploration. These conditions have been found on what is known as the frontier, that line between civilization and savagery, ever slowly, irresistibly, and inexorably advancing westward.⁹ The Englishmen, who were to become the rivals of the French explorers, were members of the first real American frontier; and, therefore, a few words of explanation of this unique society is necessary for a complete understanding of their careers.

From 1607 to 1645 the English frontier was the American shore line, and the newcomer in stepping from his ship to terra firma abandoned security and civilization for the dangers and barbarisms of the border land and entered upon the work of adjusting himself to the new environment. All Virginia was in 1644 still exposed to the Indian menace, and a large proportion of its settlers actually perished in the rising of that year. Nothing more than a pioneer life, economic and social, existed in any or all the groups of settlements that constituted the colony. The next year, as a direct result of Opechancanough's massacre, forts were established along the first inland frontier, the fall line of the rivers. These were destined to be successfully maintained and strengthened from time to time; and no serious Indian raid broke through this line of defense. Henceforth savage warfare was transferred from the tidewater territory to the country between the falls and the mountains.

To this region there gradually drifted the characteristically pioneer and border elements of the population; and in the next generation, there was evolved the first truly American backwoods society with all its familiar activities: Indian trade, exploration, hunting, trapping; raising of hogs, cattle, and horses, which were branded and ran loose on the wild lands; pioneer farming, capitalistic engrossment, and exploitation of the wilderness. The American frontiersman, a new type in history, was developed before 1700. He was not inferior in any respect save numbers to his descendants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The military posts at the falls of the James, the Appomattox, the Pamunkey, and later, the Rappahannock, the Blackwater, and the Nansemond, at once became, and for a century remained, the foci of this new society, the points of departure of western adventure and exploitation, centers of trade and traffic with settlers and savages far and near. They were the Leavenworths and Laramies of our first inland frontier; and in the course of time cities have developed on some of these sites, as has so frequently been the case during the American westward march. In the protected region between the fall line and the ocean, economic and social development proceeded rapidly; and, though frontier conditions lingered for many years between the rivers and about the edges of the great swamps, pioneer life had in the main been transferred before the end of the century to the second frontier belt, pushed out by a new and distinct civilization, the famous society of tidewater Virginia, with which, however, we are not here concerned, except to remember that the pioneer community was never completely separated from the better populated settlement of the coast, whose relation to it was that of a parent.

The period of exploration actually began with the first settlement. Tidewater Virginia is everywhere easy of access by ships and boats, and was promptly mapped by John Smith and his companions. The earliest settlers, also, soon obtained from the Indians some vague notions of the principal features of the interior, such as the Appalachian mountains.¹⁰ Smith and Newport in the spring of 1607 and again in the autumn of 16o8 passed beyond the falls of the James, and on the second trip reached the Monacan [Manakin] town, some thirty miles above the falls.¹¹ Other adventurers may in very early times have made their way some little distance above the head of tide on the rivers.

The first serious project to explore and exploit the country beyond the reach of navigation seems to have been formed in 1641. In June of that year, four prominent men of the colony petitioned the Assembly for "leave and encouragement" to undertake discoveries to the southwest of Appomattox River. The legislators complied in March, 1643, with a law which assured the adventurers any and all profits which they could make out of their undertaking, for a term of fourteen years, reserving only the royal fifth from any mines that might be discovered.¹² It does not appear that the projectors carried out their enterprise, for prior to 1652, when the next similar grant was made, their concession had been annulled.¹³ None of them reappear in the subsequent history of western exploration.

The importance of the act of 1643 lies in the fact that it served later as a precedent, often specifically cited, for similar legislation applying to the southern as well as to the western frontier.¹⁴ The usual duration of the grant was, as in the first instance, fourteen years, and the monopoly of trade was always absolute for that time; but in 1652 the important qualification was made, and subsequently followed, that of the lands discovered the favored parties should have first choice, but that later comers were not to be excluded from patenting the remainder.¹⁵

Perhaps the Indian outbreak of 1644 had interfered with the plans of these first adventurers. That disaster, on the other hand, prepared the way for new operations, for its suppression was followed, in February, 1645, by an act establishing forts at the falls of the James, at Pamunkey, and on the ridge of Chickahominy, all north of the James.¹⁶

In March of the year following the Assembly provided for a fourth post, at the falls of the Appomattox, to protect southside Virginia and from which expeditions might be led against the Indians. "Fort Henry," as it was called, had a garrison of forty-five men.¹⁷ Its commander, Captain Abraham Wood, was to play an important part in the subsequent explorations.

Regular military establishments are always too expensive for rude and thinly settled communities to maintain. The salaries of the four commanders each receiving six thousand pounds of tobacco annually-were probably the heaviest expenditure, but constituted in themselves a grave tax on the community. Vile find the Burgesses ingenuously reasoning in the preamble of an act of the October session of that very year (1646) that the forts are very necessary, but if maintained at public cost, a great burden; hence it will be best to have them kept up by individual "undertakers," who will in compensation receive land and privileges. Acting on this principle, the posts were transferred to persons named in the act, with suitable arrangements in each case. Fort Henry passed to Abraham Wood. That portion of the act which provided for the transfer to him is worth reading, for it is not only representative of the remaining cessions, but it also clearly illustrates the dependence of institutions on conditions and the revival of discarded systems, such as feudalism, whenever in new times and places the conditions from which they first sprang are reproduced.:

Be it therefore enacted that Capt. Abraham Wood whose service hath been employed at Forte Henery, be the undertaker for the said Forte, unto whome is granted sixe hundred acres of land for him and his heires for ever; with all houses and edifices belonging to the said Forte, with all boats and amunition att present belonging to the said Forte, Provided that he the said Capt. Wood do maintayne and keepe ten men constantly upon the said place for the terme of three yeares, duringe which time he, the said Capt. Wood, is exempted from all publique taxes for himself and the said tenn persons.'¹⁸

This fortified post remained the property and the home of Abraham Wood for at least thirty years; and there, doubtless, he died, leaving it as an inheritance to his children. He himself always called it "Fort Henry," but the station or the settlement that grew up about it was long known as Wood.¹⁹ Only when the town was incorporated, in 1748, does the name "Petersburg" seem to have become attached to it.²⁰ Under Wood and his successors, this establishment was the most important and interesting of the stations that dotted the fall line in Virginia. On the other important rivers were similar posts, centers like it of all the varied activity of the frontier. That one which grew into the city of Richmond is particularly well known through the activities and writings of the Byrds. Cadwallader Jones, at the head of tide on the Rappahannock, in 1682, had a considerable trade with the Indians four hundred miles to the south-southwest, and wrote to the Proprietor of Maryland for permission to secure in that province shell money for carrying it on.²¹ The military history of all the posts can be followed in 'the laws and the state papers of the colony; but Fort Henry is entirely typical of all, and we know more about it than about any of the others. From it went out the Occoneechee or Trading Path southward to the Catawbas and beyond, and also the trail leading westward to the headwaters of the Roanoke and over the mountains to the New River - the two great roads of early trade and settlement, both of them first explored by Abraham Wood and his associates.

Fort Henry in Wood's time was a place like Augusta, Georgia, in the middle of the eighteenth century or Chicago in the early nineteenth, or any one of a dozen others that come to mind as examples of the western frontier town and military and trading center. In it were conducted all the familiar activities of similar settlements of a later period, and with proper geographic changes we may without serious error project back upon it our clearer picture of the life of the far western posts whose romantic and picturesque qualities have won so large a place in literature. Although the contemporary documents are relatively scanty, yet they enable us to describe directly the old Virginia post, and to show it as the prototype of western towns of all times, even of Athabasca Landing in our own day.

Garrisons were from time to time provided by the Assembly. Later, in the last decade of the seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth century, one of the squadrons of rangers went out, at stated intervals, from its palisades to beat about the country for hostiles. Just across the river was situated the principal village or "town" of the Appomattox Indians, who furnished Wood with messengers, hunters, porters, and courageous and faithful guides. At its warehouses were fitted out the pack-trains of the Indian traders. Sometimes these traders were the servants or paid agents of Wood or of his associates, sometimes they were free traders, "of substance and reputation," who received goods on credit, and contracted to pay for them at a stipulated price. Wood imported from England the varied articles of barter, chiefly:

Guns, Powder, Shot, Hatchets (which the Indians call Tomahawks), Kettles, red and blue Planes, Duffields, Stroudwater blankets, and some Cutlary Wares, Brass Rings and other Trinkets. These Wares are made up into Packs and Carryed upon Horses, each Load being from one hundred, fifty to two hundred Pounds, with which they are able to travel about twenty miles a day, if Forage happen to be plentifu1.²²

In the early days, before the competition of Charleston began to be felt, the pack-trains might count a hundred horses. Guided by only fifteen or sixteen men they filed off with tinkling bells southward along the Occoneechee path to visit the Indians of the South Carolina and Georgia piedmont, or even to swing around the end of the Appalachian mountains and track northward again to the Cherokee.²³ Chiefs of distant tribes, like the "king" of the Cherokee, came in with their followers to trade and treat with Wood and received suitable entertainment; though rival traders and the Indians ''of the nearer tribes, anxious to retain their position as middlemen, tried by force or fraud to intercept them and frequently succeeded. Exploring expeditions were sent out from time to time, and these were often followed by supporting and searching parties.

Such was the residence and business headquarters of Abraham Wood, who was to prove himself the Frontenac of Virginia, the organizer of the first great explorations of British America. He made himself so much a part of the frontier community and was so actively concerned in person or through his agents in the western expeditions throughout the generation prior to 1676, that the history of westward expansion during the period is almost a biography of this remarkable man.

Inquiry into his origin and his life before he became commander of Fort Henry in 1646 encounters most serious difficulties. A lad named Abraham Wood came to Virginia in the "Margaret and John" in 1620, as an indentured servant, and he was living in the service of Captain Samuel Mathews on that worthy's plantation across the river from Jamestown in 1623 and in 1625.²⁴ This boy is usually identified with the distinguished man of later years. The ages would seem to fit well, and after diligent search, it has been impossible to find mention of another Abraham Wood in the colony in the early seventeenth century. Since the rise to prominence of a former indentured servant is in several instances established, that fact cannot militate against the identity. It should be noticed, however, that before the dissolution of the London Company in 1624, it was practically necessary for anyone, not a member of the company to enter into indenture of some sort in order to go to the new country; and the census of 1625 shows that on many of the "particular plantations" all except the commander were ranked as "servants." The terms of these indentures are unknown and there is no reason to suppose that all were alike, so that it is not necessary to think that Abraham Wood, the servant, was a menial, or a field hand, or that his extraction was not good and colonial connections helpful.²⁵ The surname Wood is indeed not uncommon in early Virginia,²⁶ and there is no certain proof of the identity of the boy and the man, yet there is no direct evidence to the contrary, and the identification seems on the whole sufficiently probable to receive provisional acceptance.

The first appearance of Abraham Wood as a man, and undeniably the Wood of history, is in 1638, when, according to the identification just accepted, he was twenty-eight years old. From that time until 1680, the records have by assiduous patching of tiny fragments been made to give us a reasonably continuous, though by no means complete and satisfactory account of him. No record of the date or circumstances of his death has been found, and he passes from the stage as shrouded in obscurity as he entered it. During forty-two years of known active life he attained eminence as a landowner, politician, soldier, trader, and explorer. His position in each of these lines of endeavor was as high as the colony afforded, and the first adequate presentation of his life reveals him as, with the possible exceptions of Bacon and Berkeley, the most interesting and commanding figure of contemporary Virginia.

Apart from the services to Western exploration, which would in any case have entitled him to a place in American history, Wood's career merits careful study as that of a typical Virginian of the seventeenth century. Even in the obscurity of his origin he was representative of a large section of the successful colonists of his time. As with most of his fellows, no personal or family records have preserved his memory to us. A single letter, now first printed, is the only known paper that has come down from his hand. In the direction of his energies and in the methods by which he achieved success, he is the perfect example of the seventeenth century Virginian of the upper or "planter" class. The following condensed sketch of his personal fortunes aims to add another to the small group of individual or family studies which alone enable us to make a basic and reliable analysis of the economic foundations, structure, and conditions of growth of early Virginian society, and particularly of the so-called aristocracy.²⁷

To secure land, and in large amounts, was the earliest care of any ambitious colonist. Accordingly, we first find Wood busily engaged in taking up large tracts in Henrico and Charles City Counties. On May 14, 1638, he patented four hundred acres in Charles City, on the Appomattox River.²⁸ The next year he secured two hundred acres in Henrico, and in 1642, seven hundred more in the same county.²⁹ In 1646 he acquired another six hundred acres in the Fort Henry tract, by special grant of the Assembly.³⁰ His land hunger, as well as the means of satisfying it, apparently increased with his growing power, for on June g, 1653, we find him patenting one thousand, five hundred, fifty seven acres on the south side of the Appomattox River in Charles City County,³¹ and acquiring another seven hundred acres in Henrico in the following year, and apparently finishing his endeavors in this direction on September 16, 1663, by patenting two thousand and seventy-three acres in Charles City, on the south side of the Appomattox, adjoining Fort Henry.³²

The grants listed include a total of six thousand two hundred and thirty acres, unless, as is probable, one or more of them was a re-grant of patents allowed to lapse by nonpayment of fees. This amount alone is large for the early time and for the soon thickly settled and valuable lands along the tidal reaches of the James and Appomattox; but it is extremely improbable that it includes all of Wood's holdings, particularly in view of the fact that no addition has been found later than 1663. This is enough to illustrate the gradual method of acquisition, and to show the man as one of the substantial landowners of the colony by the time he had reached middle life. Perhaps, after 1663, the press of other and more profitable and absorbing interests diverted his attention from the engrossing of wild land.

Men who would rise in early Virginia turned naturally and necessarily to politics, and for large landowners success was easy and almost automatic. Six years after his appearance as a patentee, Wood made his entrance into the political field as member of the House of Burgesses for Henrico County, at the session beginning October 1, 1644. He continued to serve in this capacity for two years and was present at the session mentioned and at those beginning February 17, 1644/5, November 29, 1645, March, 1645/6, and October 5, 1646. As burgess for Charles City County, he was present at the sessions beginning November 20, 1654, and December, 1656. During this time he rendered the usual service on committees, being placed on the committee for private causes, November 29, 1654, and on the committee on markets, March 20, 1655. His most important service of this kind was on the committee "for Review of Acts" (December, 1656), designated to codify the laws of the colony. This committee labored diligently at its task, and digested all the acts of Assembly into one volume, in which form they were enacted at the session of March, 1657/8.³⁴

The Council was the goal of political endeavor in colonial Virginia. It was not merely the upper branch of the Assembly, but an administrative body advisory to the governor, and the highest court in the colony. It numbered but a dozen men, and these were usually, even uniformly, the most influential and wealthy in the colony. Membership was for life, and a council seat was the highest place open to a colonist. In the spring of 1658, Wood passed into this body. It was during the period of the provisional government, and vacancies in the council were being filled by the local authorities. There may have been a conflict between the executive and the popular chamber over the manner of Wood's choice, for he is reported as elected councillor by the burgesses, March 13, 1657/8,³⁵ and again as being nominated by the governor and approved by the House, April 3, 1658.³⁶

Wood lived to serve in this, the highest governing body of the colony, for at least twenty-two years. His name occurs occasionally in its fragmentary records, but nothing of importance about him is preserved." The last appearance is in a curious connection. For January 23, 1679/80, there has been preserved a tantalizing fragment of the council journal: "For insulting words to Major-- General Wood, forgiveness to be asked."³⁸ Evidently the septuagenarian councillor retained his spirit, and some indiscreet unknown was forced to eat his words. His death must have occurred shortly thereafter.³⁹

In colonial Virginia law was closely associated with politics. Even before the emergence of a group of trained lawyers, the ordinary prominent citizen took a keen and intelligent interest in legal affairs. The association of landowning, too, with local judicial service was almost as strong as in contemporary England. Wood's career is somewhat typical in this regard also. His service while in the House of Burgesses on the committee for private causes and that for review of acts has just been mentioned. In 1656, we find him petitioning the House that courts be held on the south side of the river, for the benefit of the inhabitants of the south side of Charles City County.⁴⁰ For some years he was one of the justices of the peace of his home county.⁴¹ Finally, on November 28, 1676, he was appointed by the home government a member of the special commission of oyer and terminer for Virginia, which was to settle affairs in the colony after Bacon's Rebellion.⁴² He thus rendered distinguished service, and received honorable recognition in this, as in all other lines of endeavor characteristic of the colony in his day.

Nearly every prominent Virginian of the seventeenth century served as an officer in the colonial militia. The intimate connection between land-holding and leadership in the public defense, inherited from sixteenth century England, had not been broken. A commission in the militia meant, not only title, uniform, and parade duty but also readiness for prompt active service, sudden alarms, toilsome marches through the wild country, and often dangerous fighting, varied with garrison duty for a few, and occasional general musters against actual or expected naval attacks from overseas.⁴³

Abraham Wood is first mentioned as a militia soldier in 1646, when his rank was that of captain. In thirty-four years of known service he rose successively through every grade to the ranking position of major-general, in which his military authority in the colony was, for at least a decade, inferior to that of the governor only. Just when he entered the militia is not known, but he is listed as "Mr." in the records of the burgesses until the session of October, 1646, so it is probable that the command at Fort Henry in the spring of that year was his first commission. By 1652 he is "Major" Wood, and in 1655 he is described as "Lieutenant-colonel." In December of the following year he received his promotion to the colonelcy of the Charles City and Henrico regiment, by special act of the Burgesses growing out of the legislative investigation and removal of Colonel Edward Hill for misconduct as commander in the well-known affair at the forks of the Pamunkey, where the Virginians and friendly Pamunkeys were so badly defeated by the strange Ricahecrian Indians from beyond the mountains. Just when he was made one of the major-- generals of the colony does not appear, but it was not earlier than 1663 nor later than 1671.⁴⁴

The Charles City and Henrico regiment had more Indian fighting to do than any other of the militia bodies, owing to the location of the counties in question; and Wood must have gained much experience in active service. This, together with his unrivaled knowledge of the western country and of the Indians, made him probably the most trusted and valued of the militia officers. During the serious Indian troubles early in 1676, Berkeley complained to the home government that Wood was "kept to his house thro infirmity," and that certain of the subordinate officers were either dead or for various reasons unavailable.⁴⁵ The unaccustomed vacillation and inefficiency of the governor in this crisis may have been due in great measure to the absence of his reliable commanders. The old general's health seems to have mended, how ever, for in the Indian alarm of 1678 general supervision of all arrangements for defense was committed to "Major [General?] Abraham Wood," and all persons were warned to obey him.⁴⁶

Wood's last public service, so far as known, was the conduct of negotiations with a threatening Indian war confederacy in the winter of 1679-1680. Nicholas Spencer wrote to the Lords of Trade and Plantations on March 18, 1680, that "Colonel Wood, a person well skilled in all Indian affairs," had been chosen by the governor and council to try to effect the desired arrangement with the hostiles.

He negotiated the same with great prudence and at length arranged that the chief men of the Indian confederate hostile towns should meet at Jamestown on the loth of this month, to be heard on behalf of their towns and to answer the charges against them. They received every assurance of safe protection but appeared not, whether kept back by the knowledge of their guilt, or misapprehensions of our sincerity (for which the Christians have given but too good reasons), or perverted by the clandestine designs of some Indian traders, who wished to upset this arrangement of Colonel Wood for their own ends, I cannot guess. I incline to think the last is the true reason. . . When we consider that Captain Byrd killed seven surrendered Indians and took away their wives and children prisoners, on the mere suspicion that they were assassins of our people, we can hardly wonder at the failure of the treaty.⁴⁷

Because of the lack of Wood's letters and other papers, it is impossible to give any satisfactory account of his activities as a trader; but the documents printed in this volume display the character and extent of his interest in the Indian trade. The early date and broad sweep of his explorations, and the large sums of ready money expended on them;⁴⁸ the many incidents in the documents revealing the extent of his Indian connections and influence; the favorable location of his trading post and the growth of Petersburg upon its site; and the jealousy of other traders, mentioned in his letter to Richards⁴⁹ and in Spencer's letter just quoted, all go to show that his ventures in this traffic must have been the most extended and among the most successful of the time. From the analogy of contemporaries and rivals, like William Byrd, we may infer that he was also a local merchant, but there is no direct information on the point. In the economic society of that day, trade was the greatest avenue to the acquisition of ready money, and Wood's fortune, was, like those of so many of the most prominent Virginians of the time, doubtless based largely upon it.

Of the family and descendants of Abraham Wood but little has been learned. Whom he married is not known. The only child whose existence and identity are certain is a daughter, Mary. ⁵⁰ Like her father's, her career was typical of the American pioneer society. Her married life covered not less than fifty-nine years, counting intervals of widowhood. During this time she had three husbands and probably out lived the last of them.⁵¹ Whether it was Peter Jones, her last husband, or one of his descendants, who robbed Wood of his rightful fame by giving a name to the town of Petersburg, is a subject of dispute, and no clear proofs are offered for either assertion.⁵² Nothing further concerning Wood's family has come to light, and inasmuch as his will was probably lost in the destruction of the Charles City records⁵³ the facts may never be fully known.

After having thus learned to know the man it is time to turn to his activities as an explorer, the story of which is so largely a part of the general history of the westward movement of his era.

The governors of Virginia had occasionally displayed an interest in westward exploration, and in the possibility of crossing the mountains, long before any serious plans for that purpose were made. Thus the governor and council wrote to the Privy Council on May 17, 1626, that "discoveries by land....are of great hope both for the riches of the mountains and probabilities of finding the passage to the South Sea . . ." and desired that munitions for this and other purposes be furnished by the home government.⁵⁴

No reflection of the private project of 1641-1643⁵⁵ has been found in the governor's correspondence; but when interest in exploration revived after the establishment of the fall-line posts, the executive as well as private parties and the burgesses gave attention to the subject. From letters which reached England from Virginia in March, 1648, we learn that Indian rumors had already come to Governor Berkeley concerning the lands beyond the mountains, of its great river systems, of the Gulf of Mexico, and of the redcapped Spaniards, riding on asses, who occasionally visited its shores. Berkeley was reported to be on the point of leading a party to pass the mountains and visit this country, and thus open the trade route to Asia for which the earlier explorers had so vainly sought - a project which he kept more or less in mind for twenty years but never carried out.

An unknown writer's words bring us still something of the excitement and confident expectation felt by the people of that day.

And the Indians have of late acquainted our Governour, that within five dayes journey to the westward and by South, there is a great high mountaine, and at the foot thereof, great Rivers that run into a great Sea; and that there are men that come hither in ships, (but not the same as ours be) they weare apparell and have reed Caps on their heads, and ride on Beasts like our Horses, but have much longer eares and other circumstances they declare for the certainty of these things. That Sir William was here upon preparing fifty Horse and fifty Foot, to go and discover this thing himself in person, and take all needfull provision in that case requisite along with him; he was ready to go when these last ships set sail for England in April last: and we hope to give a good ac compt of it by the next ships, God giving a blessing to the enterprize, which will mightily advance and enrich this Country; for it must needs prove a passage to the South Sea (as we call it) and also some part of China and the East Indies.⁵⁶
In a similar pamphlet printed the next year we hear of pearls, of mines, and of the proximity of the South Sea beyond the mountains, together with suggestions for exploration. Some idea of the Ohio-Mississippi waterway was now taking a more definite shape, for this writer states that of the great rivers heading out from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, one, as yet undiscovered, runs along all the back of Virginia, southward toward Florida." It is to be observed that the distance which separated Virginia from these alluring regions was even then conceived as far smaller than is the actual fact. Farrer appended to his map of 1651 the opinion that "the Sea of China and the Indies" could be reached in ten days overland from the head of James River.⁵⁸

At least one important journey into the western country was actually made during these years.⁵⁹ On the twenty-seventh of August, 1650, a little party filed out from Fort Henry and directed their march towards the southwest. These first adventurers were Edward Bland, an English merchant settled in Charles City County, Captain Abraham Wood, and two gentlemen of the colony, Sackford Brewster and Elias Pennant by name, all mounted, together with a white servant of each of the first two, and an Appomattox Indian guide, on foot. The Tuscarora villages seem to have been the objective point. The Virginia piedmont across which their journey took them is a rolling or hilly country sloping gently to the east. At the time when the explorers entered this practically unknown land, it offered a pleasant variety of forest and grass lands, intersected by narrow meadow and swamp tracts in the stream "bottoms." Here, as almost everywhere, the Indians followed the custom of burning over the country in the fall, so that the level uplands and long gentle slopes were kept as open grazing country, pasture for deer, elk, and buffalo. The poorer, stonier, and steeper ground was covered with forests of deciduous growth, and the bottoms, where not cleared by the Indians for their fields, were covered with a practically impenetrable tangle of well-nigh tropical luxuriance. Food for the wild things was plentiful, so that game was found in almost inconceivable plenty, and the abundant watercourses teemed with fish, particularly - in the rivers and larger streams - the huge sturgeon. Even today the country abounds in wild fruits and flowers as do few other regions, and berries of every sort line the road-sides and fill the open spaces in the woods in midsummer.

It was with feelings of admiration, wonder, and awe, that the explorers entered this region which gave such hope for the future, and with keen eyes they marked the spots for plantations and cities, that their descendants would enjoy. They picked up an additional guide at a Nottaway village some twenty miles out, on the first day, and kept on in a southwestwardly direction for five days. They crossed the Blackwater, Nottaway, and Meherrin Rivers, with several of their tributaries, and on the fifth day reached the falls of the Roanoke, where the Dan and Staunton unite to form that river, at the present site of Clarksville, Virginia, close to the North Carolina line, and in an air line some sixty-five miles from their starting point. Bland estimated that they had traveled one hundred and twenty miles; and making allowances for the natural exaggeration of distances traversed in the wilderness, and for the deviations in their course, this was not a surprising overestimation. He was also under the erroneous impression that they had actually come to a westward-flowing river, and does not speak of the country thereabout as a part of Virginia, but as an entirely separate region - "New Brittaine."

The party passed through numerous Indian villages on the way, where they were not very hospitably received. The demeanor of the natives grew more and more unfriendly and threatening as they advanced, and several attempts were made to frighten or deceive them. Some of the latter met with success. A runner, who was dispatched to the Tuscarora chief and to an Englishman supposed to be then among the Tuscaroras, went instead to give the alarm to a tribe farther down the river. Fearing the plots that seemed to be forming around them, they contented themselves with examining the falls, the sturgeon fishing place, and the adjacent country, and then turned back, regaining Fort Henry in four days, by a slightly different route. They slept on their arms and set a watch every night during the journey, but met with no harm or bloodshed.

Bland made a careful and apparently accurate note of the distances, directions, and streams crossed every day, and in addition observed and recorded the topography and soil at every sub-stage of the journey. Drainage, timber, and vegetation are faithfully described. Much of the land crossed was then champaign country. With the soil about the Roanoke River the travelers were especially delighted, and they even persuaded themselves that its climate was superior to that of settled Virginia.

The narrative makes it plain that the region covered was already familiar ground to the Virginia traders. Bland's party professed to come to trade, but he at least was evidently more interested in landlooking; and his praises of the new country as a region for colonization, and especially the ardent exhortation "To The Reader" to further its settlement,⁶⁰ and the quotation from Raleigh,⁶¹ reveal him as antedating William Byrd by three quarters of a century as the original "boomer" of this "Eden." On his return Bland promptly obtained an order from the Assembly (October 20, 1650), allowing him to explore and colonize the new country, provided he should attempt it with a hundred well-armed men.⁶² His book, printed in London the following year, and affording our knowledge of the expedition, was doubtless published with a view to aiding in the assemblage of this force. His early death, about 1653, probably prevented the execution of the plan.

Bland and his party told. the Indians that they were sent out by the governor of Virginia. ⁶³ Whether this was spoken in truth or merely to overawe the natives, Berkeley seems to have referred the question of further exploration to the home government for settlement, for an order of the Council of State of September 25, 1651, directed "the Committee of the admiralty to consider what is fit to be done concerning the discovery to be made to the west of the falls of James River in Virginia and report thereon."⁶⁴

Whether the Admiralty reported does not appear, but in the following year private parties were actively interested, and received encouragement from the Virginia Assembly. In November, 1652, the latter body passed an order, reciting the fact of the grant of 1643⁶⁵ and of its subsequent voidance, and giving to William Clayborne, the celebrated parliamentary commissioner and enemy of Lord Baltimore, and Captain Henry Fleet, a gentleman prominent in the colony, a monopoly of trade for the usual term of fourteen years, and first choice of lands, in any regions in which they might make new discoveries. "Major Abraham Wood and his associates" received separately the same privileges.⁶⁶ The order which Bland had secured from the Assembly in 1650 had named him specifically, but had allowed "any other" the same license to prosecute the colonizing enterprise. Whether Wood was instrumental in securing this provision, and proposed to act separately, or whether he was associated with Bland in 1650, and whether Bland was among Wood's associates in 1652, or whether he had already passed from the stage, or whether, again, Wood had in mind a different venture, cannot be determined. It is a likely conjecture that Wood was always the moving spirit, even in the expedition of 1650, notwithstanding the fact that Bland wrote its history and made himself the most conspicuous 'figure in it.

More tantalizing still is the order of the Assembly of July, 1653, wherein "diverse gentlemen" who had "a voluntarie desire to discover the Mountains and supplicated for lycence" to do so were permitted to go on their quest, provided they should take a force strong both in men and ammunition.⁶⁷ Who these gentlemen were, or whether they fulfilled their desire, cannot be found in the records now known to be extant. Could we find out their names and fortunes the most baffling problem of this whole period of exploration, namely, Wood's alleged discoveries of 1654, might be solved.

Cropping out in all the literature of Mississippi Valley exploration, from the eighteenth century to the monographs of contemporary scholars, is the bare statement, now calmly presented as a fact, now contemptuously mentioned as a lie, that in the year 1654, or at various times in the decade following that year, Abraham Wood gained the banks of the Ohio, or of the Mississippi, or of both. It can probably never be either proved or disproved with absolute certainty, but long and patient search has yielded the facts about to be recited, and only these. They .are trustworthy as far as they go, and in spite of meagreness appear to warrant the statement in categorical form of the conclusions drawn from them.

Dr. Daniel Coxe, whose career will be dealt with later,⁶⁸ was the first to mention the episode. His account appears in a memorial to King William, presented to the Board of Trade Nov. 16, 1699,⁶⁹ and in the younger Coxe's book Carolana.⁷⁰ Coxe states that at several times during the decade 1654-1664 Wood discovered "several branches of the great rivers Ohio and Meschacebe." In confirmation, Coxe alleges that he was at one time in possession of a journal of a Mr. Needham, one of the agents Wood employed in his exploring expeditions. Now Wood's men did discover branches of the Ohio and Mississippi, in the years 1671-1674; and the Needham referred to was employed in the most brilliant of those discoveries. Since Coxe states incorrectly both Wood's title and place of residence,⁷¹ it is most probable that his information about the date was also in correct. One of Coxe's later memorials to the Board of Trade, which constitutes the last chapter of this volume, omits all mention of the episode.

It would seem that subsequent writers have simply followed Coxe, either at first or second hand. The earliest and most often cited of these, the authors of the State of the British and French Colonies (1755) and of the Contest in America, reproduced Coxe's statements with fair correctness, attributing to Wood the discovery in 1654 of certain branches only of the great western river system. Later historians, of whom Parkman and Winsor are the most distinguished, have usually reproduced the story so as to make it appear as if Wood or his agents were said to have discovered the Mississippi itself. The whole tone of the Fallam journal⁷² and of Wood's letter regarding the explorations of 1673-1674,⁷³ and especially Wood's references in that letter to the discoveries of Batts and Fallam in 1671,⁷⁴ make it reasonably certain that Wood had not been on the western waters at any prior time.⁷⁵

Dismissing, therefore, this alleged discovery of the western waters in 1654 as unproved and even improbable, let us return to the course of events concerning which there is less doubt. About the year 1658 three gentlemen of the colony, Major William Lewis, Mr. Anthony Langston, and Major William Harris applied to the Assembly for a commission to explore the mountains and the country to the westward, and "to endeavour the finding out of any Commodities that might probably tend to the benefitt of this Country." The commission was granted, both for their encouragement and for that of others of similar public spirit;⁷⁶ but the sources do not inform us of the result of their activities.

This ended the period of preliminary explorations into the territory lying between the falls of the rivers and the mountains. The accounts that have been preserved for us are meagre enough, but from them and later ones it is evident that the Virginia traders had become fairly familiar with the back country, and 'that trade routes to the Indian tribes of the region were regularly followed. Besides this opening of the trade, land speculators had begun to view the country and were planning its colonization, although actual settlement had not yet advanced much beyond the fall line.

In the seventh decade of the seventeenth century, western exploration .received an impetus that was to carry it to a successful fulfillment of its object, the crossing of the mountains. This impetus, probably, did not originate in Virginia, but was an influence extending hither 'from the mother country, to which it is necessary to turn for an explanation of its character. In 1660, the period of the English Commonwealth was definitively brought to a close by the crowning of King Charles II. The contrast of the gaiety and gorgeousness of his court with the sombre hues of its predecessor has always exercised an influence on the imagination to such an extent that we are prone to forget, in describing the contrast, that the age of the Restoration is one of tremendous expansion in all lines of human endeavor. The court of Charles II was not the breeder of mistresses and poor poets only, but it swarmed with explorers, adventurers, promoters of financial schemes, and speculators of every variety. The modern business world seemed to have jumped full grown from the head of Britannia. The court became fully alive to the necessity of fostering these new enterprises and at the same time keeping them under control. For that purpose, a special board was appointed, whose duties were later placed in the hands of a committee of the Privy Council.⁷⁷ The merchants were not the only ones interested in this new business expansion, but found eager supporters among the nobles and even in the king himself. Profits seemed to become the lodestone of the generation.

Certain men, in the inner circle of public life, placed themselves at the head of the undertakings which promised the largest returns. The names of Lords Ashley (later Shaftesbury), Albemarle, Clarendon, Arlington, Berkeley, and Craven, and Sir George Carteret, appear in various groupings on all the important charters or as engaged in some manner in the various enterprises.

It was the Duke of York with his personal friends, Clarendon, Carteret, and Berkeley who originated the movement to seize New Amsterdam, in 1664, from the Dutch. A short time afterwards, the first cargo of furs arrived in the Thames from that region, and London merchants began to catch a glimpse of the wealth to be derived from this traffic. Their interest in a business, somewhat new to them, was heightened by the arrival of M. des Grosseilliers, bearing a letter of introduction from the British ambassador at Paris, Lord Arlington, to Prince Rupert. There was no man better able to impart information concerning the profits of the American fur-trade than Grosseilliers. He had been one of the most successful furtraders of Canada for years, and his business had led him as far west as the present site of Wisconsin and north to Hudson's Bay. Angered at his treatment in Canada and France he came to seek his fortune in England and was immediately received as adviser by some of the members of the inner circle of politicians. In 1668, Grosseilliers was provided with a ship on which he set sail to Hudson's Bay. The day of his return was one of triumph for he brought with him a rich cargo of furs.

Practically a new business was thus introduced into England. The firms in London and Bristol, which had cured and dealt in furs up to this time, were not comparable, in the quality or quantity of their output, to the great houses of Leipsic, Amsterdam, Paris, and Vienna, to which even the English noblemen and wealthy merchants resorted for their fur-trimmed costumes; but there was now started an enterprise which turned the course of trade and made London the centre of the market for furs. The English world was thoroughly awakened to the possibilities, and it is probable that the necessary rivalry with France added zest to the adventure. Some lines of poetry, written in 1672 and attributed to Dryden, express the popular craze.

Friend, once 'twas Fame that led thee forth
To brave the Tropic Heat, the Frozen North,
Late it was Gold, then Beauty was the Spur;
But now our Gallants venture but for Furs .⁷⁸

The immediate outcome of Grosseilliers's success was the formation of the Hudson's Bay Company, among the members of which were Prince Rupert, the Duke of Albemarle, Earl Craven, Lords Arlington and Ashley. It is not necessary to follow further the history of this long-lived company, which down to the present time has exercised a very great influence on the imperial politics of Great Britain. For the present purposes, sufficient has been said to explain the influences out of which the company grew and to know the interests of the society in which lived the men who were instrumental in imparting a new impetus to western exploration in Virginia.

The English always had in view other interests besides trade in the founding of colonies, and the main motive of the Lords Proprietors in securing a charter to Carolina in 1663 appears to have been the profits accruing from the exploitation of land, as is shown by their advertisements.⁷⁹ It is not surprising to find that the proprietors belonged to the same group of politicians who were interested in New York and the Hudson's Bay Company.⁸⁰ Their representative in America was Sir William Berkeley, the Governor of Virginia, to whom was entrusted the inauguration of the new government.⁸¹

With the development of the interest in the fur trade, shortly after the founding of the colony, the thought was very natural that by crossing the mountains to the West, an entrance could be gained to the territory which the French fur-traders were exploiting. There were, as a matter of fact, three points of departure that were under the influence of the same group of politicians, namely Hudson's Bay, New York, and the South (Virginia and Carolina); and within a short time, there were made most earnest efforts from all three points to secure the monopoly of the trade from the French, in spite of the king's well-known predilection for that nation.

The profits of the fur-trade were not the only allurement to these western expeditions. It was not to be expected, when such men as Frontenac and La Salle, with their more complete knowledge of the water systems of the interior valley, were still dreaming of the discovery of a short waterway across America to the rich commerce of Asia, that those whose information was still very meagre, confined, as it was for the most part, by the great mountain belt immediately to the westward, should not also nurse the hope that they possessed the key to this great communication across the continent and should place more emphasis in the first instance on this phase of their undertaking, as being the one most likely to spur the imagination. It is to be noticed also that another attraction, as old as the hope of the discovery of a water communication with Asia, namely, the finding of mines of the precious metals comparable to those in the possession of the Spaniards, was still an active spur to action. Thus the lure that attracted men westward was triple-headed: Asiatic commerce, mines of gold and silver, and the fur-trade. All these furnished the impetus to the Virginians to undertake discovery, just as they all were spurs to the French at the north; but in the end, the last was the permanent impulse and has remained, even till our own day, the guide to westward advance.

Although direct proof of any instructions being sent by the Lords Proprietors of Carolina to Sir William Berkeley of Virginia is lacking, no explanation of the renewed interest in western exploration is adequate, except to connect it with this outburst of English enthusiasm for western enterprises. Carolina itself was not sufficiently developed to offer a base from which such expeditions could start, whereas in Virginia, the frontier posts had already become the centers of Indian trade and around them were collected the first group of American pioneers, trained from childhood to endure the hardships of such enterprises. Furthermore Governor Berkeley, the American agent of the interested noblemen, had in Abraham Wood, the man best fitted to organize and carry to completion the work.

The date when this new impetus was felt in Virginia is known. In the spring of 1668, Governor Berkeley began preparing a great expedition "to find out the East India sea," as he writes to Lord Arlington, who, as has been seen, had just sent Grosseilliers with that letter of introduction to Prince Rupert, which ended in the formation of the Hudson's Bay Company. Berkeley declared that two hundred gentlemen of the colony had engaged to accompany him and he expressed the hope of finding silver mines on the way, "for certaine it is that the Spaniard in the same degrees of latitude has found many."⁸² Heavy rains checked the undertaking, and the memory of what befell Raleigh for his unauthorized adventure on the Oronoco caused him to defer the expedition until a royal commission could be secured. If this should be granted, he promised to make the journey, in the spring of 1670, in sufficient force to overcome "all opposition whether of the Spaniards or Indians."⁸³ It is probable that the politicians supporting Berkeley could not obtain the royal mandate, for King Charles in the year after this letter was written entered into the secret treaty of Dover with Louis XIV, which is certainly sufficient explanation of the fact that the subsequent explorations were undertaken without the royal patronage. Governor Berkeley never made the projected trip in person; but he did, in the year mentioned, dispatch agents, who failed, however, to cross the Blue Ridge.

Before the governor entrusted the great undertaking to the hands of Abraham Wood, an opportunity to prosecute the work of discovery was offered him by the presence in the colony of a German physician, John Lederer by name, who possessed a bent for travel in strange lands. Of the man's origin and early career, there is no certain knowledge. He remained in Virginia a year and a half and probably longer, and during that time made three attempts to penetrate the wilderness, but did no better than to traverse the piedmont and on two occasions to gain the summit of the Blue Ridge. Shortly after returning from his last trip he was compelled to leave Virginia in some haste. Lederer alleged that the cause of his flight from Virginia was popular anger at the large subsidies devoted by the governor to his expeditions, but the truth of this is not certain.⁸⁴ He went to Maryland, and there made friends, one of whom, Sir William Talbot, prepared from Lederer's oral narratives and Latin memoranda of his travels a little book, which was dedicated to Lord Ashley. This was published in London in 1672 and is reprinted as the third chapter of the present volume.

Lederer may be characterized as the Hennepin, or better as the Lahontan of English exploration. His story contains a good many obvious untruths, and in the matter of his alleged journey into the Carolinas the latter part of his second expedition - he undoubtedly made a deliberate but clumsy attempt to deceive. In general the criticism of his veracity should not be too severe, for most of his striking untruths in matters of detail were not lies, but the misconceptions of a European, new to the country, or merely the harmless exaggerations natural to a certain type of mind.⁸⁵ Hence while it is true that his unsupported word is open to a certain suspicion, it is believed that no material risk of inaccuracy is incurred in accepting his narrative where there is no external or internal evidence of its improbability.

Lederer started on his first expedition, March 9, 1669, from the Chickahominy Indian village at the falls of the Pamunkey, accompanied only by three Indians. He pursued his way up the river, and passed its head springs on the thirteenth. On the next day he gained from a hilltop his first distant view of the Blue Ridge, lying like a low cloud on the horizon, before which his Indian guides prostrated themselves in reverence to the mountain spirits. The day following he crossed the Rapidan. He was now traversing the western edge of the piedmont, a land of sunshine and clear rushing streams, nestling securely under the southeast flank of the blue mountain wall.

On the seventeenth of March, after nine days of travel, the little party were under the face of the mountains, probably in Madison County. Lederer found the slopes and approaches densely set with hardwood timber, which offered as great an obstacle to the traveler as did the height and steepness of the ranges. He was the first white man to view the beauty of this region and on his several trips had an opportunity to learn how nature here presents an ever changing scene. Here the blues of the mountain barrier, varying from amethyst or deep purple to sky-blue or pale mist-like gray, and the gorgeous sunsets, are to be seen at all seasons. In spring, the hollows and the moist, open spaces at the foot of the mountains flame with the blossoms of the Judas tree or redbud; in fall the foliage shows a brilliancy and harmony of color unmatched outside the Appalachian region. Wherever fire or axe or thinness of soil have given it light and room the mountain laurel grows. In May it blooms in the lower woods and on the rough little foothills irregularly dotting the western edge of the piedmont. In June the main ranges show mile after mile of blossom; in the cool stream-notches and north-side hollows of the higher slopes and summits, the laurel is joined by its larger and handsomer cousin, the rhododendron, pink and white; and there one finds midsummer yet gay with bloom.

Lederer required a full day to ascend the mountain. The horses were left at the foot, but even to man, the dense underbrush offered almost insuperable obstacles. At last he reached the summit, which was probably here as elsewhere a range about a mile wide, so wind-swept by the winter blast ac to be only partially timbered. His eyes naturally sought first of all the west, but here was only disappointment for the view was cut off by higher ridges, a sight that was to prove so discouraging to the Virginia explorers, who felt that there was no end to the mountains. When he turned away from this hopeless scene, his eyes ranged over the piedmont which he had crossed. It looked almost level and faded away into an horizon, so delusive that, on a misty morning, many a later visitor has claimed, as did Lederer, that he "had a beautiful prospect of the Atlantic washing the Virginian shore." The doctor's first journey ended on the summit of the Blue Ridge. After wandering about in the snow for six days, vainly trying to find a pass, the cold proved unendurable, and he descended and retraced his path homeward.

Whether Governor Berkeley dispatched Lederer on his first and third journeys, the latter does not explicitly state. The second expedition, however, was certainly fathered by the governor; and for our knowledge of the first part of it, we are not dependent solely on Lederer, but have also a letter of the governor's secretary, Ludwell, to the home government, in which the results of the expedition are briefly reported.⁸⁶ Ludwell does not give any names, but the correspondence of dates and details is so close as to leave no doubt as to the identity of the parties. Lederer was accompanied by Major Harris, the same who had a dozen years previously manifested a desire to explore the mountains,⁸⁷ and who seems now to have been in command, of "twenty Christian horse and five Indians."

The party set out from the falls of the James (the site of Richmond) on the twenty-second of May, 1670.⁸⁸ On the third day, they passed through the Manakin village on the James, only twenty miles above the falls, and paying no attention to the advice of the Indians as to trails, struck out due west by compass. They soon found it very bad going, and wore out man and horse in trying to hold a straight course over the rough and rocky hills south of James River. After four or five days of this kind of travel they strut k the James again, in Buckingham County, probably near the Appomattox County line.⁸⁹

The river here they found to run nearly due north and to be as wide as it is a hundred miles lower down, rocky, and very swift. Harris did not recognize it as the James. About ten miles distant beyond the river they made out the ragged outlines of the foothills that form one fragment of the broken chain which geologists style "the Atlantic coast range," and of which the well known "Monticello" is a more northerly link. Their characteristic morning mists seemed to augur the proximity of the western waters; but Harris, completely discouraged by the difficulties of the country and considering the river impassable, turned homeward. After some unpleasantness, Lederer claims to have produced a commission from the governor authorizing him to proceed by himself; and he struck off southward accompanied by a single Susquehannock guide.⁹⁰

On the fifth day after he separated from Harris, he came to the village of the Sapony Indians, on a branch of the Staunton River in Campbell County, Virginia. Here he was hospitably received and directed on his way. Three days of easy travel carried him fifty miles southwest to the village of the Occaneechi, then located according to his map and description on an island in the Dan River. These Indians, the fiercest and most treacherous of the Siouan tribes of the Virginia piedmont, bore out their reputation for bloodthirstiness by treacherously murdering six strange mountain Indians who had come to treat with them, the second night that Lederer was there. Frightened, he slipped away and pursued his course southwest. He visited successively the Eno Indians, the Shakori, and the Wataree, and came, on June 21, to the village of the Saura, then apparently located on a northern affluent of the Yadkin and by Lederer's computation seventy-four miles southwest of the Occaneechi village on the Dan.

So far Lederer's narrative bears evidences of truth. It may be that he obtained from Virginia Indians some of the information regarding the country and natives described; but it is, so far as it can be checked, correct. After he left the Saura village, no certainty can be evolved from the mass of palpable falsehood. Some names can be recognized as those of tribes residing in the South Carolina piedmont; but Lederer could never have visited them, for his narrative is full of many fantastic tales about them and their country. Space does not permit the recounting and critical examination of the story of his experiences from this point until his arrival at the Appomattox village across from Fort Henry on the seventeenth of July. It makes pleasant reading: Silver tomahawks, Amazonian Indian women, peacocks, lakes "ten leagues broad," and barren sandy deserts two weeks' journey in width, when located in the Carolina piedmont sound like the tales of Baron Munchhausen.

Lederer was to make yet another attempt to find a way across the mountain barrier, this time in company with a certain Colonel Catlett, nine mounted colonists, and five Indians. They left the falls of the Rappahannock, near the present town of Fredericksburg, on August 20, 1670, and following the north fork of that stream, reached the Blue Ridge on August 26, probably about the border line between Rappahannock and Fauquier Counties. Leaving their horses with some of the Indians, they ascended the ridge on foot. From the summit they beheld the Great North Mountain discouragingly far away across the Shenandoah Valley to the northwest. They were so tired by the climb and chilled by the change in temperature on the mountain top that they contented themselves with drinking the King's health in brandy and then made their way down the mountain and homeward.

The beginning and closing pages of Talbot's book are filled with Lederer's notes on the geography of the Atlantic slope, on Indian customs, and with advice to travelers and traders in the wilderness. The information seems to be remarkably correct and valuable and the advice, for the time, judicious. The German doctor departed sometimes from the ways of truth, but he contributed much to the exploration of the piedmont and was the first white man 'on record to look into the Valley of Virginia. He gave occasion, moreover, for the production of a book of great historical and ethnological value.

If Governor Berkeley was responsible for Lederer's three expeditions, and he probably was, his persistency in following up the results makes him the equal, if not the superior of the contemporary French governors. The plan to send out a party equipped to pass the river which had stopped Harris and Lederer, of which mention was made in Ludwell's letter, may have resulted only in the last expedition of the German explorer; but, the next summer, other plans were being formulated. Lord Arlington was informed in June, that "the heats of summer are now too farr advanced for a journey to the Mountaines but after a pawse upon what is allready doun and we have taken breath I doubt not but that we shall goe further in the discovry." The belief was to be justified, and Englishmen were soon to drink of the western waters.

This new effort to "goe further" was made under the auspices of Abraham Food. On the first of September, 1671, there filed out from the Appomattox Indian village across the river from Fort Henry a little party which was to make the first recorded passage of the Appalachian mountains and thus to lay a foundation for England's claim to the waters that seek the gulf. It consisted of Captain Thomas Batts, a successful colonist of good English family, and two other gentlemen, Thomas Wood, perhaps a kinsman of Abraham Wood, and Robert F allam. They were accompanied by a former indentured servant and Perecute, an Appomattox chief, whose faithfulness and iron courage should have preserved his name. Robert Fallam kept the journal of the expedition, a brief document, but containing notes of the essential facts from day to day, so that this is the easiest of all the westward journeys to trace accurately. Several copies of the journal were made and transmitted to England by different persons, and what is probably the most accurate of them is reprinted in the fifth chapter of this volume. The three gentlemen bore a commission from Major-general Wood "for the finding out tile ebbing and flowing of the Waters on the other side of the Mountains in order to the discovery of the South Sea."

They struck off due west along a trail that was evidently already familiar, and having five horses made rapid progress. On the fourth day 'they reached the Sapony villages, one of which Lederer had visited the year before. They were "very joyfully and kindly received with firing of guns and plenty of provisions." They picked up a Sapony guide to show them to the Totero village by "a nearer way than usual," and were about to leave when overtaken by a reinforcement of seven Appomattox Indians sent them by Wood. They sent back Mr. Thomas Wood's worn out horse by a Portuguese servant of General Wood's whom they had found in the village, and pushed on to the Hanahaskie "town," some twenty-five miles west by north, on an island in the Staunton River. Here Mr. Thomas Wood was left, dangerously ill.

The rest of the party kept on westward, and the next day about three o'clock they came in sight of the mountains. The country was now very hilly and stony. On the eighth of September they bore slightly north, over very rocky ground, crossing the Staunton River twice during the day. About one o'clock they passed a tree upon which had been burned the letters M.A. NI. At four o'clock they arrived at the first foothill of the Blue Ridge. Pushing on over it, they camped that night under the main range. The next morning they forded Staunton River again, climbed one of the irregular ranges which break the surface of the valley, crossed "a lovely descending valley" about six miles in width, and again dropped sharply into the Roanoke⁹¹ Valley at the Totero town, not far from the modern city of Roanoke. Here, among the Toteros, they remained for two days, for Perecute was very sick with fever and had an attack of ague every afternoon. The Indians proved to be very hospitable.

On the twelfth day, the travelers left their horses at the village and securing a Totero guide set out on foot southwestwardly, up and down mountains and steep valleys, crossing and recrossing the Roanoke and its tributaries. At four o'clock Perecute was again seized with ague, so they camped beside the Roanoke, almost at its head, and beneath the main range of the Alleghenies.

The trail from the Roanoke to the New could not have been very far from the line now followed by the Virginian Railway, except that on the descent it probably bore down the divide between Lick and Crab Creeks. In the morning a three mile walk brought the travelers to the foot of the divide, and another three miles of steep and slippery path led them to the top. They sat down there very weary and gazed over high mountains "as if piled one upon the other," as far as the eye could reach - "a pleasing tho' dreadful sights" wrote Fallam. The descent into the beautiful valley of the New River was easy. Three miles beyond the divide they came to two trees, one branded M A. N I., the other cut with the letters M A and other marks which were undecipherable. Close by was a swift run, flowing northwestthe western waters at last. So Batts and Fallam were not the first white men to pass the eastern continental divide and drink from the waters that flow into the Ohio, that thirteenth day of September, 1671. They were simply the first to leave us their story.

The explorers marched on over rich ground, watered by many streams flowing into the "great River," through "brave meadows, with grass about man's hight." During the day they crossed the New River three times, first about three and one-half miles due north of the present town of Radford. The farther they went west the richer was the soil, and the more numerous the open meadows and old fields. For the next three days, they tramped through the valley, traversing a pleasant land, but were delayed and distressed by many misfortunes. Food was exhausted by the fourteenth of September. The party stopped to hunt, but owing to the dryness of the ground the Indians could kill no game, so for two days they had only the wayside haws to stay their stomachs. Perecute continued very ill but insisted upon further advance. The Totero guide deserted on the fifteenth. On the sixteenth they managed to kill some game, but their Indians were restive, and having reached the New River again it was thought best to call a halt. They had come to the point where the New breaks through Peters' Mountain, at Peters' Falls, in Giles County, Virginia, and on the West Virginia line.

Early the next morning the explorers prepared to take possession of the country thus discovered, the story of which act has already been told in the opening paragraphs of this volume. Remembering the terms of their commission, the white men made their way through some tangled old fields, which the Mohetan (Cherokee) Indians had not long since cultivated, down to the water side, stuck up a stick, and persuaded themselves that the water was ebbing, though not very rapidly. The Indians would not let them stop long; but as they were turning homeward they saw from a hilltop a fog and a glimmer as of water, and returned in the confidence that they had reached the tidal waters on the confines of the western sea. From his letter of two years later it is seen that Wood knew better.

When the travelers reached the Hanahaskie village on the way back, they found that Mr. Thomas Wood had died and was buried. They made faster time on the return, and came into Fort Henry on Sunday morning, October 1. "God's holy name be praised for our preservation," piously wrote Mr. Fallam.

There is an account of the achievements of Batts and Fallam other than their journal, and much better known. It is found in Robert Beverley's History of Virginia.⁹² In it the genesis of the expedition is ascribed to Governor Berkeley, Wood is not mentioned, the leader is styled "Captain Henry Batt," and the numbers of the party given as about fourteen white men - all unnamed and as many Indians. No dates, precise distances or details are given, and the whole affair is clouded in an atmosphere of vagueness. Beverley's personal opinion is that the explorers did not cross the mountains at all, but rather skirted them southward. When they were actually starving, he represents them as traversing a hunter's paradise of incredibly numerous and tame animals. Beverley's narrative was written more than a generation after the event, and was evidently based on vague tradition. It should be regarded as devoid of any value or authenticity whatever.

It has, nevertheless, an importance; for historians, and particularly those of Virginia, have almost without exception derived from it their sole knowledge of the expedition, thus naturally bringing discredit on the whole affair. Beverley should be associated with Coxe as the twin perverter of the history of western exploration in Virginia in the seventeenth century. As in the case of Coxe, the later writers, whether credulous or contemptuous, who have copied the story have done their part to twist the account. Some have not troubled to look up even Beverley himself at first hand, and Batts' very name undergoes surprising transformations.⁹³

It should not be supposed that Abraham Wood was alone in his desire to obtain knowledge of the mountain trails and of the mysterious waterways and seas that lay beyond. The period was one in which fur-trading was politically and economically one of the dominant industries of the colony, and when there was a corresponding activity in furthering the work of western exploration on the part of those who held great financial interests in the Indian trade. The stake which Berkeley had in the fur business was a matter of common knowledge in the colony and a cause of his growing unpopularity with the agricultural element, and particularly with that part of it which had pushed out close to the fall-line frontier. Bacon's rebellion, the seeds of which were being planted in these years, was in one aspect the prototype and one of the bloodiest examples of the sort of struggle which is going on at this moment in the Peace River Valley between the settlers and the Hudson's Bay Company. Bacon, who lived on the edge of the farming frontier, complained bitterly, in his statement of grievances to the home government, of Berkeley's financial interest in the fur-trade, charging that "these traders at the head of the rivers buy and sell our blood."⁹⁴ In the rebellion, to which Bacon has given his name, the great traders either clung to the government, as did Wood, or tried to hedge, as did William Byrd.

Byrd was Wood's principal rival in the attempt to open the great western country. We learn from Fallam's journal that when his party was at the Totero village, midway in the valley of Virginia, on its return (September 19, 1671) , Byrd with a "great company" had just been within three miles of the place on an exploring expedition.⁹⁵ We know nothing more of Byrd's activities in exploration, but after Wood's death he was regarded as the best informed man concerning western matters in the colony, and had sources of information sufficiently remote to hear as early as 1688 of the descent of the French into the Mississippi Valley, and to be apprehensive that it would result in cutting off the Virginia fur-trade.⁹⁶

If Beverley is to be believed, Governor Berkeley was greatly aroused by the news of Batts' success and resolved to go exploring in person, and we are told that the Assembly passed an act to further the plan, but that it was not carried out before Bacon's Rebellion intervened.⁹⁷ Certain it is that during the winter (January 22, 1671/2), he wrote to the committee for trade and plantations that he would send out a party in February, and hoped after their return to be himself an eye witness to the "happy discovery to the West" which he had so often contemplated. There is nothing to inform us whether he dispatched the explorers; or if so, what they accomplished; and from this time the record is silent regarding the old governor's plans. Although he may have originally chosen Wood to carry out the plans of exploration, the next expeditions seem to have been undertaken by the latter on his own initiative; yet the first may have been the one the governor expected to send out in February.

From the foregoing narrative, it is clear that by 1671 much had been done. Wood may well have gone in person or sent out men who passed the Blue Ridge before Batts and Fallam. The fact that he commissioned the latter simply to find out about the tidal waters beyond the mountains would seem to indicate that the passes were already known. The men who left their initials east of the Blue Ridge and again beyond the Alleghanies were probably not his; but whosever they were, their markings show that by 1671 at least three parties of white men had been far beyond the Blue Ridge along the New River trail, and two of them beyond the Allegheny divide. The path which Fallam followed is seen from his references to it to have been a plain Indian trail, doubtless well known to the guides. From the behavior of the Indians in firing salutes and the like it appears certain that in the villages along the route, as far as that of the Toteros, white men were welcome and familiar guests. So far had the Virginians progressed on the way to Kentucky, a century before Daniel Boone and forty-five years before Spotswood's "pleasant summer picnicking excursion" into the Shenandoah Valley.

The trail to the present site of Tennessee was the next to be traced. The information concerning the expeditions which ended in the opening of the trade with the distant Cherokee Indians has been preserved in a letter written by Abraham Wood to his friend, John Richards of London. Richards had been in Virginia, whence he returned to England and was employed as treasurer by the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, so that it was natural that the important letter containing an account of the explorations should be addressed to him.⁹⁸ This letter passed into the hands of the Earl of Shaftesbury, whose secretary, John Locke, annotated it. It is published for the first time in this volume.

The heroes of this, the most truly remarkable as well as romantic of the English explorations of the seventeenth century, were James Needham, a gentleman who had been a freeholder of the infant colony of South Carolina during the first two years of its settled existence, and who had possessed there a reputation for reliability and courage in wilderness travel,⁹⁹ and Gabriel Arthur, an illiterate but clever lad who was probably an indentured servant of Wood. Accompanied by eight Indians they made a start from Fort Henry on the tenth of April, 1673.

Wood evidently determined that lack of food should not be a cause of failure as in the case of Batts and Fallam, so he provisioned the party for three months. This time, however, a still more serious obstacle intervened. The Indians of the frontier and just beyond were frequently jealous of the white traders' enterprises in the hinterland, for these meant to them the loss of profits on the trade for which they acted as middlemen, and the arming with European weapons of more numerous and possibly hostile tribes in their rear. Most of the Indians of the Virginia piedmont, however, seem to have been very friendly to the traders and exploring parties; but the Occaneechi, though of the same eastern Siouan stock as the rest, formed a notable exception. Few in number but fierce and treacherous, they were strongly fortified on their island in the Roanoke River at the modern Clarksville, Virginia, just below the confluence of the Dan and Staunton; and recruiting their numbers from vagabonds and fragments of various tribes, they exercised a great influence on the neighboring peoples and were a great hindrance to the white advance into the interior.¹⁰⁰ The great fur-trading highway through the Carolina piedmont crossed their island, and was named the Occoneechee or Trading Path. Bland and Wood had journeyed thus far in 16So, and in 1673 this trail was frequented for many miles beyond. These Indians, or their neighbors farther on, prevented Needham and Arthur from crossing the mountains on their first expedition.

The persistent Wood sent them out again on the seventeenth of May, with a change of mounts for each of the white men. About the twenty-fifth of June they met a band of Tomahitan, who seem to be identical with the Mohetan and the Cherokee, on their way from the mountains to the Occaneechi village. Despite the machinations of the Occaneechi, who were naturally angry at the loss of their position as go-betweens in the trade, eleven of the Cherokee pushed through to Wood's plantation, and then overtook Needham with the main band on the way to the Cherokee country, and effected an exchange of letters.

Nine days the party traveled southwest from the Occaneechi village, crossing nine eastward-flowing rivers and creeks, to Sitteree, the last village before reaching the Cherokee country, and doubtless on the headwaters of the Yadkin. There they left the trail and struck due west over the great North Carolina Blue Ridge. Four days of hard going, when they had sometimes to lead their horses, brought them to its narrow crest.

This Carolina Blue Ridge, which they traversed, differed only in its greater magnitude and wildness from the Virginia portion. The gorges are here deeper, and their wooded sides black rather than blue, when seen near at hand. The rhododendrons grow more luxuriantly '.on the higher and colder summits, and sooner begin to replace the laurel as one ascends; and at from four to five thousand feet the oaks and chestnuts give way to stately conifers, the spruce, the white pine, and the balsam, which two or three hundred miles farther north are found only on the higher knobs and ridges or in the more inaccessible notches. Here, too, rock faces and crags more often break through the forest-clad slopes; and little waterfalls, frequent throughout the length of the Blue Ridge, become more numerous as one goes southward.

The descent from the summit was found to be easier and within half a day Needham and his party were crossing a level and well watered valley, bounded by tier after tier of noble mountain ranges. Five shallow rivers were crossed, all flowing northwest, and hence most probably the head streams of the New. By this time all but one of the horses had died. They held on due west, crossing a country abounding in game, observing the phenomenon which gives the Great Smoky Mountains their name, and at the end of fifteen days from Sitteree were on the banks of a westward-flowing river the home of their Cherokee friends.¹⁰¹ The Cherokee village stood on a high bluff and was strongly fortified with a twelve foot palisade and parapet on the landward sides. By the waterside were kept a hundred and fifty large war canoes, and in the magazines were large stores of dried fish. White men and horses had apparently never before been seen in the town, so they were the objects of respectful but intense curiosity. The one surviving horse was tied to a stake in the center of the town; and abundant food of whatever sort the Indians possessed, vegetable and animal, was offered it. The two white men and their Appomattox Indian - the single one of the eight who had been courageous enough to attempt the passage of the mountains -were placed on an elevated platform, that the multitude might see but not press upon them.

Novel as were the English visitors, the Cherokee had long been acquainted with the Spaniards of Florida. They possessed, indeed, some sixty Spanish flintlock muskets, and other European implements, and must have traded with the Spaniards directly or through intermediaries for many years. This intercourse had recently ceased, because a party of Indians which had gone to Florida to trade had been half murdered, half enslaved. After a period of captivity two had succeeded in escaping, and brought word to the tribe of their barbarous treatment. Since then, the Cherokee had nursed a deadly enmity for the Spaniards, and on that account Needham had less difficulty in binding them in friendship to the English. One of the two, who had been prisoners among the Spaniards and had learned their language, twice visited Wood's plantation and described the Spanish settlements to him in person.

After a short rest, Needham determined to return to Fort Henry, in company with a dozen Cherokee, and to leave Arthur behind to learn the language. On the tenth of September he reached home, made hurried preparations for another journey, and within ten days had turned his face again toward the mountains. His intention was to make only a short visit to the Cherokee and bring Arthur back with him in the spring. Naturally Wood had been greatly elated at the success of the expedition and had high hopes of the future. He eagerly followed Needham's westward journey, as news of his progress was brought to him, and heard that his agent had safely passed the Eno village and all seemed well. On the twenty-seventh of January, 1674, however, a flying report reached him that his men had been murdered by the Cherokee in their country. Then rumors of the disaster followed each other faster and faster, but the facts were difficult to learn, for the Indians were, as always, fearful of telling the exact truth. Wood dispatched a runner to make inquiries; but before his return, one Henry Hatcher, an independent trader, friendly to Wood and well acquainted with the Carolina piedmont,"' arrived and notified Wood that Needham had certainly been killed, and identified the murderer.

From eye-witnesses Wood later heard the story in all its details. With Needham was an Occaneechi, Indian John or Hasecoll by name, a precious scoundrel who had gone on the first expedition and been suitably rewarded, and retained by Wood to go on the return trip and escort the party safely past his dangerous friends. It was the trader Hatcher, however, who persuaded the Occaneechi to let them pass, and even then several warriors accompanied the explorer, doubtless, as Wood suggested, to see the murder. Near the mountains the treacherous protector became threatening; but Needham maintained a fearless and defiant attitude, his only hope of safety. That evening at their bivouac at the ford of the Yadkin, the treacherous Hasecoll shot the Englishman through the head, before he could draw sword or the Cherokee spring to his rescue. Ripping open Needham's body, he tore out the heart and held it up in his hand, and with face turned eastward bade defiance to the whole English nation. He then commanded the frightened Cherokee to go home and kill Arthur, looted the pack-train to his satisfaction, and made off with the booty loaded on Needham's horse.

Our knowledge of the life of this discoverer of Tennessee, James Needham, is all too meager. What manner of man was this who rivalled the deeds of contemporary Frenchmen whose names, unlike his, are so well known in history? That will never be known. We are even ignorant of the full extent of his discoveries, for the journal he kept, although known to several in the eighteenth century, has been lost. All that can be done is to accept the estimate of him and his work by one who knew him well. James Needham's epitaph has been written by his friend and superior, Abraham Wood, in these words:

So died this heroyick English man whose fame shall never die if my pen were able to eternize it which had adventured where never any English man had dared to atempt before and with him died one hundred forty-foure pounds starling of my adventure with him. I wish I could have saved his life with ten times the value.

Two hundred and thirty-eight years have elapsed since these words were written, and it is to be hoped that at last the pen of Abraham Wood will "eternize" the memory of one to whom history has been so long unjust.

The dazed Cherokee, after the murder of Needham, hurried home and reported what had occurred. The chief of the village was away so that the party friendly to the Occaneechi was, for a moment, in the ascendency. They seized Gabriel Arthur, bound him to a stake, and heaped dry reeds about him. In spite of the protests of some of the Indians, it seemed that another life was to be sacrificed on the altar of exploration. At the critical moment, the chief, ;gun on shoulder, entered the village; and, hearing the commotion, ran to the rescue. An adopted member of the tribe, angered at this interference, defiantly grasped a torch and started to light the pyre; but the war chief shot him dead, cut Arthur loose with his own hands, and led him to his lodge.

The chief promised Arthur to escort him home in the spring, but in the meantime armed him in Indian fashion and sent him out with a war party, doubtless with regard to his safety. The Cherokee, like their neighbors on all sides, were continually at war and sent out bands of warriors often hundreds of miles distant. On such expeditions Arthur was sent and experienced a remarkable series of adventures. Unfortunately he was unable to write and hence kept no journal; his memory of elapsed time and of directions cannot be regarded as accurate, but the main outlines of his story appear trustworthy.

He was first taken on a foray against one of the small Spanish mission settlements in the Apalache country in West Florida.¹⁰³ The band lurked for some time in the vicinity of the post and of an outlying slave settlement, but the strong brick walls defied attack; so after ambushing and killing a Spanish gentleman and a negro and robbing the bodies, they hurried homeward.

In a little while another raid was ordered, this time directed against an Indian village in the immediate vicinity of Port Royal, South Carolina. After being reassured that the Cherokee would do no harm to the English settlers, Arthur went with the party as commanded. Six days brought them over the mountains to the head of Port Royal River. There, they made bark canoes and swiftly descended the stream to a point from which a day and night march to the southeast brought them upon their quarry. Creeping near an English house on the way, Arthur overheard an exclamation which told him that it was Christmas time. At dawn the band surprised the doomed village, slaughtered the inhabitants, but true to their word let a chance English trader go free, and in less than two weeks of swift marching had recrossed the mountains with their plunder.

The chief now took Arthur with him on a visit to his friends the Moneton,¹⁰⁴ ten days' journey due northward, on the Great Kanawha about a day's march from where it flows into the Ohio, and something like a hundred miles below the point at which Batts and Fallam had turned back.

On the Ohio then dwelt a very numerous Indian people, probably the Shawnee, enemies of the Cherokee.¹⁰⁵ Combining duty with pleasure, the visiting band went three days out of their homeward way to "give a clap to some of that great nation;" but this time they received as good as they gave. Arthur was wounded by two arrows, one through the thigh, overtaken, and captured. His long hair saved his life, for the Cherokee kept theirs cropped close to prevent an enemy from laying hold of it. When his captors had scrubbed his skin with water and ashes and found him white, they gave him back his weapons and made much of him. The Shawnee were at this time entirely unacquainted with firearms, had no iron weapons or utensils of any sort among them, and had not been even remotely touched by the fur-trade. Arthur saw them singeing a beaver preparatory to cooking it, and attempted in sign language to tell them of the possibility of exchanging pelts in Virginia for knives like his, and promised to come again to them with articles of trade, at which they were greatly pleased. They finally gave him provisions and started him on his way to the Cherokee.

After his return, the Cherokee took him on one more expedition, a short hunting trip down their river; and then, about the tenth of May, 1674, the chief with eighteen of his people laden with furs, started to escort the young man to Fort Henry. At the Saura village four Occaneechi were waiting to waylay Arthur. Being so few, the Cherokee fled, all deserting their white companion except the former captive among the Spaniards. The young man escaped his would-be slayers, however, and after many adventures, traversing by night the Occaneechi territory and their very island, and living on huckleberries, he came safely into Fort Henry with his companion, on the eighteenth of June, 1674.

Meantime the Cherokee chief, with three of his men, came around by the mountains through the Totero village to the upper course of the James, where they made a bark canoe, descended the river to the Manakin town and thence came across to Fort Henry, on the twentieth of July. Arthur and the "king" were much rejoiced to see each other, and Wood entertained the chief for some days in proper style, and rewarded him well for saving Arthur's life. The Cherokee promised to return in the fall with a more courageous band; and his host entertained no doubts that he would do so, if not intercepted by rival traders.

In his letter to Richards, Wood wrote that his ventures received no encouragement in Virginia, but rather the reverse; that after Needham's return he had placed the situation before the Assembly, but did. not even receive a reply; and that at all stages, his explorations were blocked or hampered in every possible way by his enemies. He appealed to his correspondent, therefore, to secure patronage for him in England.

At this point the known contemporary records of the efforts of Wood and the other men of his time to explore the western country come to an end. The particular impetus to such achievements lost itself in the forces that broke out in Bacon's Rebellion, which involved Virginia in a turmoil lasting several years. In England also the persons who had inspired the adventure found other objects to occupy their attention. Thus Lord Shaftesbury, who seems to have been the principal promoter, lost his influence at court and was forced into exile; and the remembrance of his purposes passed away with his political death.

Any attempt to summarize the results and significance of this quarter century of endeavor must be guarded and somewhat tentative, for a new phase of the history of English advance is here treated and there is lacking the guidance of long discussion and criticism by the historical fraternity.

In the first place, the collected records show that by 1674 a distinct class of frontiersmen were already formed in Virginia. They were of English stock, some of excellent antecedents, many former indentured servants. The leaders and large traders, like Bland, Wood, Batts, Fallam, and Needham were well educated and kept careful journals when exploring. Others were ignorant, even illiterate, and thus the stories of many of the pathfinders of the Appalachian wilderness are forever lost to us."¹⁰⁶

Yet they were as a class intelligent, courageous, and surprisingly adaptable and resourceful, even when illiterate. Three classes may be distinguished, though individuals passed through all three: first, the great traders like Wood, Cadwallader Jones, and the Byrds, dwelling in state better than any Canadian seigneur in their plantation posts at the fall line; second, the substantial free traders like Henry Hatcher;¹⁰⁷ third, the indentured servants and the employees of the great traders, of whom several are mentioned in each of the long narratives.

The Virginia frontiersmen are seen as familiar visitors in all the Indian villages in the Virginia and Carolina piedmont. Before the end of the seventeenth century, some of them had settled among the Indians, sometimes even beyond the mountains, perhaps marrying Indian wives.¹⁰⁸ The trail through to the New River was evidently used by the fur-traders, and they kept on to the Ohio at an early date, for in 1700 the French commandant at Detroit stated that for some years the English had been quietly coming to the Beautiful River (Ohio) with their packs; and he instructed his Indians to proceed thither, cut them off, and pillage their goods.¹⁰⁹ In the eighteenth century, when the settlers poured into the New River Valley, there remained a remembrance of the path-finder in that region, for the stream itself was known as Wood's River,¹¹⁰ a fact which proves a continuous intercourse between the region and Virginia, for otherwise the name would soon have been forgotten.

The results of the southwestern explorations by Needham and Arthur were still more important. It is true that the pathless route across the mountains which they followed was probably not used by later travelers, who kept on around the southern end of the Appalachians; but Needham opened the Cherokee trade to the Virginians, and allied that great tribe to the English interest, a service of no small value in the westward progress of the English-speaking people. The traders from Virginia reaped the profits of the fur-trade in that locality for years, before the Carolina colonists reached the mountains. When, a little before 1 700, the latter began to divide the trade, English influence expanded rapidly, and in 1700 the French found Carolina traders on the Mississippi."l The influence of the English among the powerful tribes of the southwest during the first third of the eighteenth century, and its effect on the attempts of the French to colonize and control the lower Mississippi Valley are too well known to need more than mention.

The movement which has been discussed, when viewed in the broadest way, is simply a part of the westward thrust of the English population, proceeding from the oldest and most populous of their colonies. Looking at it from the point of view of the men of that time, the reason which produced this great movement, was simply an effort to grasp one of the two principal business opportunities then open to the Virginia colonists: one of these was tobacco growing; the other, the exploitation of the hinterland.

Of the economic opportunities offered by the West the most important at this early date was the Indian trade. An examination of the documents here collected shows that without exception every exploring expedition or project concerning which there exists any considerable information was in some degree inspired by the wish to share in the profits of the lucrative fur-trade. The large financial returns which it afforded, especially when carried on in virgin territory and among tribes still naive in their valuations, need not be enlarged upon. These early adventures secured for the Virginians the trade of the southern piedmont and Appalachians, and a share of that of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys.

The search for mines was the economic motive next perhaps in importance. Nothing of mineral value was found by them, but from the very earliest mention of a desire to explore the mountains throughout the period under consideration, the prospect of finding mineral wealth is brought forward and reiterated as a leading reason for explorations. Visions of gold, silver, copper, and other mineral riches lured the imaginations of the Virginians even after a century of disappointment, and William Byrd, on his journey to "Eden," found people on the Roanoke and Dan Rivers fairly crazy on the mine question - and shared the dementia himself.¹¹²

A surer basis for gain in the development of the new regions lay in the soil itself. Bland, Lederer, and Fallam noted the character of the soil and products and indications as to climate in the country which they traversed. Other explorers from whom there are less detailed accounts were doubtless equally interested. The peculiar situation in Virginia lies in the fact that all the leading fur-traders were planters as well, and naturally turned to the soil. While the other planters were decrying the traders, the latter were themselves considering the settlement of the new and pleasant lands with which their men had familiarized them. The right to first choice of lands was one of the benefits always conferred in the concessions by the Assembly to explorers. By 1674 the piedmont had become sufficiently known to be ready for the agricultural settler. Plans for extensive colonization beyond the fall line began with Bland and grew more and more numerous toward the end of the century. The process of the engrossment of land in western Virginia was pushed so rapidly and successfully, that the land speculators could seize the opportunity offered by the crowds of Scotch-Irish and Germans landing in America in the eighteenth century, to turn the stream of immigration towards the great valley. It was from the successors of Bland, Byrd, and Wood that the new-comers bought their farms.¹¹³

In this analysis, the purpose which is most persistently put forward by the explorers themselves should not be omitted, even though it was unattainable. In French Canada and in the English colonies, the hope of discovering a water communication across the continent persisted for generations, and explorers went in every direction and underwent countless hardships and dangers in the pursuit of this will-o-the-wisp. The motive cannot, therefore, be passed over in silence, for, although there was no possibility of finding such a water course, still the search for it was of untold value in increasing the knowledge of the world. The grandeur of the enterprise has without doubt appealed to men and governments which might not have been moved to action by the hope of the more solid benefits of the fur-trade.

The motives behind these explorations were almost purely economic. Political designs scarcely entered though they are occasionally mentioned - because the rivalry with Spain had now practically ceased and that with France was just beginning. Mere love of adventure doubtless helped in securing such men as Needham for the field force, and it may be supposed, helped to tinge the undertaking with pleasure for the rest, as it would for any group of men of action.

In their manifest attention to the overshadowing strength of the agricultural settlements made by the English, political historians have somewhat overlooked or done injustice to a movement, the fuller knowledge of which must revise our statement of the bases of the French and English claims to the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys. Economic historians of Virginia, intent upon the plantation system and labor matters, tend also to neglect this important factor in the economic development of the colony. The truth is that upon the agricultural base of the English settlements was imposed an English counterpart of New France, with all the throbbing and varied life of its rival.

Although historians have so completely ignored the achievements of these Virginians that their names are almost unknown and the explorations of James Needham are now for the first time given a place in history, yet the British public of the eighteenth century still retained the remembrance of their deeds. When the question of the right to the Ohio Valley came to an issue between France and England, each country sought for proofs of her right by priority of discovery. France could find nothing among the papers of her great explorer, La Salle; but England possessed the proof of the exploration of Batts and Fallam, and her people had long become familiar with the region through their numerous successors. What Englishmen had so long possessed could not be lightly abandoned.

The final decision concerning the dominion over the region was not reached by the muster of legal proof; that was an issue to be decided by war alone; and even today, the historian, considering the uncertainty and complexity of the question of dominion based on priority of discovery, must hesitate to pronounce judgment. The British title to the Ohio Valley seems as equitable as that of the French to the Mississippi, for her hardy adventurers had equalled the deeds of the French, if difficulty alone is considered, and had placed the insignia of their king upon the banks of the New River. Almost contemporaneously both nations staked their claim in the wilderness, the right to which was not to be determined until after the lapse of nearly one hundred years; and France, in disputing the justice of the English claim to the Ohio Valley, cast into the scales of war all her possessions in America.

The names of Wood, Batts, Fallam, and Needham have not been honored by history as have those of Joliet, Marquette, and La Salle; yet the waters they discovered, although they re-echoed for a period with the gay songs of the French voyageurs, now flow past cities which hum with the business activities of men of English speech. These Virginians "builded better than they knew," and, in spite of the injustice of history, the Greater West is a monument to their achievements.

I

Encouragement from the Assembly Act of Assembly, March, 1642/3
Order of the Assembly, November, 1652
Order of the Assembly, July 1653
Order of the Assembly[1658?]M
Order of the Assembly, March 1659/60

Encouragement from the Assembly Act of Assembly, March 1642/3¹¹⁴
For as much as Walter Austin, Rice Hoe,¹¹⁵ Joseph Johnson and Walter Chiles for themselves and such others as they shall think fitt to joyn with them, did petition in the Assembly in June 1641 for leave and encouragement to undertake the discovery of a new river or unknowne land bearing west southerly from Appomattake river, Be it enacted and confirmed, that they and every of them and whome they admitt shall enjoy and possess to them their heires, executors or administrators or assigns all profitt whatsoever they in their particular adventure can make unto themselves by such discovery aforesaid, for fourteen years after the date of the said month January 1641, Provided there be reserved and paid unto his majesty's use by them that shall be appointed to receive the same, the fifth part Royall Mines whatsoever, Provided also, that if they shall think fitt to employ more than two or three men in the said discovery that they shall then do it by commission from the Governour and Counsell.
Order of Assembly, November, 1652¹¹⁶
Whereas an act was made in the Assembly, 1642, For Encouragement of discoveries to the westward and southward of this country, granting them all profitts arising thereby for fourteen years, which act is since discontinued and made void; It is by this Assembly ordered, That Coll. Wm. Clayborne, Esq.¹¹⁷ and Capt. Henry Fleet, they and their associats with them either joyntly or severally, May discover and shall enjoy such benefitts, profitts, and trades, for fourteen years as they shall find out in places where no English ever have bin and discovered, nor have had perticular trade, and to take up such lands by pattents proveing their rights as they shall think good: Neverthelesse not excluding others after their choice from takeing up lands, and planting in these new discovered places, as in Virginia is now used.

The like order is granted to Major Abra. Wood and his associates.
Order of Assembly, July, 1653¹¹⁸
Whereas diverse gentlemen have a voluntarie desire to discover the Mountains and supplicated for lycence to this Assembly, It is ordered by this Assembly, That order be granted unto any for soe doing, Provided they go with a considerable partie and strength both of men and amunition.
Order of Assembly [1658?]¹¹⁹
Whereas Major William Lewis preferred a petition to the house therein requesting that a Comission might be granted unto them, Mr. Anthony Langston and Major William Harris,¹²⁰ to discover the Mountaines and Westward parts of the Country and to endeavour the finding out of any Commodities that might probably tend to the benefitt of this Country.

"It is ordered for encouragement to them and others that shall be of the like publique and Generous Spiritts that a Comission shall be granted them to authorize their Undertakeings and all such Gentlemen as shall voluntarily accompany them in the said discoverie."
Order of Assembly, March, 1659/60¹²¹
Whereas it hath been formerly granted by act of Assemblie in one thousand, six hundred and fourty and one, And by order of Assembly in one thousand, six hundred, fifty and two, for encouragement of discoverers to the westward and southward of this countrey, granting all profitts ariseing thereby for fourteen yeeres, It is by this Assembly ordered, That Mr. Francis Hamond and his associates either joyntly or severally may discover, And shall enjoy such benefitts, profitts and trades for fourteen yeeres as he or they have found or shall find out in places where no English ever have been or discovered or have had perticular trade, And to take up such lands by pattents (proving their rights) as they shall think good, not excluding others after their choice (from takeing up lands and planting in those now new discovered places as in Virginia now is used) But wholly from the trade during the said fourteen yeeres, that being wholly appropriated to the said Francis Hamond and his associates.

II
The Discovery of New Brittaine Edward Bland's The Discovery of New Brittaine¹²² TO THE
HONORABLE,
SIR<

New River Notes

The First Explorations of the Trans-Alleghany Region by the Virginians 1650- 1674

Table of Contents

Preface

The Discovery of the Ohio Waters

I

II