Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 101 



who climbed them look down on the fabled Sea of Verrazano 

 which, early map-makers believed, made a deep indentation 

 into the American continent about the fortieth parallel? 



John Smith had wondered about this and itched to know 

 the answer. He had taken the shallop up the James to the falls 

 in an effort to reach the river's fall line. But he had never 

 solved the mystery of the Back Woods, or what lay beyond the 

 mountains. 



For more than a century Englishmen had held a strip of 

 the Atlantic coast running from the Penobscot to Savannah, 

 but nowhere more than one hundred and fifty miles wide. Fur 

 traders brought tales of great freshwater seas to the north, and 

 of rivers and valleys between ranges of hills in which the In- 

 dians grew corn of fabulous height and yield. The French, 

 going by canoe from the St. Lawrence, had discovered the 

 Ohio and the Mississippi. But how near, or how far, these 

 rivers were from Virginia, or what sort of land lay between it 

 and them, no one knew. As for what lay beyond the Missis- 

 sippi . . . 



It might well be, averred several of those periwigged riders 

 in attendance on Sir Alexander Spotswood, that China was a 

 great deal closer to Virginia than some of them suspected. 



The Governor's expedition up the mountain wall and 

 through Swift Run Gap, whence he looked down into the 

 Great Valley, is one of the turning points in American history. 

 By it this country emerged from infancy and entered upon its 

 adolescence. No more could Virginia be said to end at the 

 Back Woods. No more would Virginians be content with the 

 Tidewater. Eyes that had looked on the Great Valley drowsing 

 under the August sun, with the silvery Shenandoah threading 

 the woodlands and the Indians' cornfields, would never again 

 be satisfied with the known lands. 



Beginning in the eastern edge of the Alleghenies in south- 

 eastern Pennsylvania, the Great Valley runs in a trough 

 through western Maryland then widens into a gracious vale 

 between sheltering mountain walls. This traverses the width 



