Tomahawk Rights and Corn Titles 107 



Ohio country. The majority kept on southward until they 

 entered the gracious vale of the Shenandoah. It was the first 

 time the movement of white settlers had been north and south, 

 not from east to west. So Joist Kite, with fifteen families, 

 chopped a way from York, Pennsylvania, to Winchester. So 

 Daniel Boone's father and his eighteen-year-old son went from 

 their farm on the Schuylkill down the Great Valley into back- 

 woods Virginia. So the Lincolns went. There, in the Valley, 

 they swung their axes and cut logs for cabins, roofing these 

 with bark or slabs of limestone. There they girdled trees and 

 burned underbrush to clear fields for their first crop of corn. 

 The wood ashes further enriched the soil. Dr. John Mitchell, 

 traveling in Virginia in 1767, commented, "the woodlands are 

 to a planter in North America what a dunghill is to a farmer 

 in Britain." And with the shoulder blade of a deer they hoed 

 their corn hills, as the Iroquois did. 



These men entered the Valley arrogantly. When demanded 

 to tell by what right they squatted, they replied, "It was 

 against the laws of God and nature that so much good land 

 should be idle while so many Christians wanted it to work on 

 and to raise bread." 



These Scotch-Irish pioneers left a deeper mark on the 

 Valley than did the noble lords Spotswood, Randolph and 

 Fairfax. Throughout a century they and their descendants 

 gradually overspread the whole Appalachian highlands. Not 

 content with the Virginia Back Woods, they ran down into 

 the Carolina Piedmont where Carolina offered land at cheaper 

 rates than any in Virginia. They pushed southwestward over 

 the Warriors Path, later to be known as the Wilderness Road, 

 into the dark and bloody ground of Kentucky. 



Their faith was in the new land. Richard Henderson em- 

 ployed Boone to map Transylvania beyond the mountains. 

 He counted on Boone, who had the Indians' respect, to make 

 the bargain he knew he, himself, could not make. For twenty 

 million acres they paid the Cherokees 10,000 in blankets, 



