Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 103 



them that he had discovered "the best land I ever saw any- 

 where." He and they sold their stock in trade, bought corn 

 and cattle and turned south to claim 40,000 acres of the 

 Great Valley. As the rumor spread, it seemed as though a land 

 hunger seized on colonists up and down the coast. Men re- 

 sorted to all manner of ruses to get more and more valley 

 land. Jacob Stover hit on the plan of baptizing his cattle and 

 entering their names as prospective settlers in order to widen 

 his own holdings. And there was a bold young woman who 

 dressed in male attire and presented herself several times over 

 to fill applications for tracts in the Great Valley. 



The great tide of migration began soon after 1730 and con- 

 tinued up to the revolutionary period. It seemed as though all 

 America was on the move. Lord Dunmore wrote home: 



... the established authority of any government in America 

 and the policy of Government at home are both insufficient to 

 restrain the Americans. . . . They do and will remove as their 

 avidity and restlessness make them. . . . Wandering about seems 

 engrafted in their nature. They do not consider that Government 

 has any right to forbid their taking possession of a vast tract of 

 new country. 



There were Massachusetts men, like the blacksmith Morde- 

 cai Lincoln who sold his forge and his grist mill near Hing- 

 ham, where his forbears had settled about 1640, to take up 

 land in the new colony of New Jersey. Forty years later his 

 son, "Virginia John/' sold his three hundred acres of Jersey 

 cornlands to take the trail down into the Great Valley. He 

 settled himself and his five sons on holdings in and around 

 Rockingham County. Fifteen years later his son Abraham 

 followed Daniel Boone over the Wilderness Trace that went 

 past his farm into Kentucky. There he blazed his name, the 

 date and an acreage on a tree establishing tomahawk rights 

 to some seventeen hundred acres. There, hoeing the corn that 

 would give him "corn title" to the land, he was killed by a 

 Cherokee's bullet. His sons who saw him fall took up his 

 musket, his axe and his hoe and held the land. One of those 



