92 Singing Valleys 



But persistently, indomitably, the colonists pushed their 

 frontier ever farther and farther west. Each ridge of hills was 

 a bastion only until a new supply of colonists arrived. These 

 were urged to climb the ridge and try the next valley. Com 

 grew in valleys. With corn and venison and partridge, and 

 trout from the amber brown pools, men and women could 

 live. They could raise families, build houses with dignified, 

 even elegant, doorways carved with the pineapples of plenty, 

 and chastely classic churches. They could form townships, and 

 counties and ultimately a commonwealth. 



So corn provided infant America with a backbone while it 

 was developing the use of its legs. 



America was growing, quite literally, up the cornstalk. Set- 

 tlers driving their cattle before them, with a sack of corn slung 

 over the cow's back, and their copper and brass pots and kettles 

 and bedding on their own, moved by Indian trails into the 

 unknown. Before them had gone the fur-traders, following the 

 Indians who retreated sullenly before the advancing tide of 

 white immigration. It was the fur-traders who spied out and 

 reported on the fat lands, and who brought back tales of 

 richer and still richer valleys beyond the blue western hills. 

 They told of the Genesee Valley, that garden of the Iroquois, 

 where the corn grew eighteen feet tall, and the corncobs were 

 eighteen inches long, where there were forty villages with 

 granaries that held sixty thousand bushels of corn. The power 

 of the Five Nations was in their corn wealth, as Sir William 

 Johnson well knew. When the granaries were full the redskins 

 were harder to manage, costlier to bribe. It was natural the 

 traders should know of the harvests and act, therefore, in the 

 capacity of spies. Shrewd business sense took them into the 

 wild with their blankets, beads, knives, mirrors, colored cloth 

 and ribbons in the fall of the year when the corn was harvested 

 and the bucks were in an expansive mood. 



It would have been all right if these articles had been all 

 they took. But the ever greedier merchants demanded more 

 and more beaver skins to furnish hats for the gentry. And for 



