106 Singing Valleys 



Moravians and Ulster folk who were to cut their mark deep 

 into the whole Back Woods region, flowed on, drawn by the 

 promise of new land. A thousand acres of fertile soil to a 

 family. The canny Scots knew that for a bargain. 



So they took the trail from Pennsylvania into the Cumber- 

 land Valley. There some turned west over Pack-Horse Ford, 

 near Shepherds town. The first white settler in West Virginia 

 was Morgan Morgan who built his log house at Mill Creek in 

 the present Berkeley County. There he lived like a Gaelic 

 chief, taking his tribute in corn from the sacks later comers 

 brought to his mill to be ground, and settling his children and 

 grandchildren in the coves of the hills for miles around. 

 Scotch-Irish fur traders had crossed over Braddock's Road and 

 reached the Ohio years before the French and Indian wars. 

 They had paddled down the river bargaining with the red- 

 skins, and amazed at the country that unrolled richly before 

 them as they rounded each river bend. They had felt out the 

 valleys of the Youghiogheny and the Kanawha; they had 

 started a town of their own at the meeting of the waters of 

 the Allegheny and the Monongahela. 



Maine and Massachusetts thought of the expansion of the 

 colonies in terms of ships, trade with Surinam and China. But 

 the men of the middle colonies knew that the country must 

 grow westward, away from the coast, away from Europe. This 

 was possible because every trader brought back word of a 

 plenitude of wild game and fish, and of Indian villages sur- 

 rounded by liberal cornfields. Where the corn flourished 

 Americans could live. Benjamin Franklin wrote enthusias- 

 tically of planting two new colonies between the Ohio and 

 Lake Erie. He lamented that the glory of founding settlements 

 in that rich country would, in all probability, not fall to him. 

 Meanwhile, in Virginia, the Ohio Company was formed and 

 purchased from the Crown two hundred million acres along 

 the river between the Monongahela and the Kaskaskia. 



Not all the new settlers and restless ones turned to the 



