112 Singing Valleys 



families of them were wiped out in those years of stealthy, 

 bloody raids no one will ever know. Later comers into the 

 mountains often found tracts of second growth timber amid 

 the virgin forest growth, and in the center of these the charred 

 ruins of a cabin. Wild grape vines overhung the standing stone 

 chimney; a vixen and her cubs curled in the deserted oven. 



But even in those blood-stained years, the movement west- 

 ward over the mountains went on. The road which ran down 

 through the Great Valley had, apparently, no ending. Men 

 slipped off clerks' stools, from behind counters and school- 

 masters' desks to take the road to the open. Americans wanted 

 land. They wanted the feel of it under their feet; and they 

 wanted that land to be their own. Their corn-titles gave them 

 the freedom of a self-sufficient individualism. That, they dimly 

 felt, was what it meant to be American. 



This feeling which runs through the whole body of Ameri- 

 can thought derives directly from the American corn. Because 

 he had a grain which yielded so bountifully that a small, 

 transportable quantity would provide a crop for a man, his 

 family and his cattle, a grain which one man working single- 

 handed, or even a woman alone, could sow, dress, harvest and 

 mill, a grain which throve on new land in which the tree 

 stumps still stood, the men of the American frontier were free 

 of the bondage to the soil as wheat-, rye- and barley-growers 

 could never be. The corn-grower had no need of neighbors to 

 help him cradle and thresh. His crop did not compel him to 

 harvest it all at a particular moment, under threat of losing it. 

 He was not even dependent on millstones and miller. He 

 could go forth into the wilderness alone, with his sack of seed 

 corn, secure in the knowledge that he would not starve. 



This sense of security and independence from others sepa- 

 rates the American from the European. Even though the 

 intense industrialization of this country during the last half- 

 century has undermined our sense of inner freedom while fill- 

 ing our hands with sewing machines, electric devices and auto- 



