268 Singing Valleys 



whatever situation they might find themselves in. God and 

 gumption saved New England from famine, the "salvages/' 

 communism and Salem witchcraft. The combination was in- 

 vincible. 



But as the colonists began to push up the Tidewater rivers 

 toward the Back Woods, and westward to the Connecticut 

 Valley and the Housatonic, they removed themselves further 

 from the thought of Europe and closer to the life of the In- 

 dian. They came into contact with primitive forces which 

 awoke echoes in their own unconscious. The genius loci is a 

 very real presence. That of the corn-growing American fron- 

 tier led the pioneers to lay aside the concept of woman as 

 the mate of man which they had brought with them from 

 Europe, and to revert to the worship of an older and more 

 primitive woman-image, that of the Mother. 



America has a mother-goddess. Her worship was born on the 

 frontier. There Coatlicue, mistress of the cornfields, gave 

 birth to her progeny. There the "Old Woman Who Never 

 Dies," as the Sioux called the moon, demanded of her sons 

 service and worship, even to the offering up of their own 

 hearts. Henry said, "An American Virgin would never dare 

 command; an American Venus would never dare exist." But 

 the American Mother commands with an authority which is 

 vested in all the ancient earth and mother worship of the race. 



The women who made the journey on horseback down into 

 the Great Valley, who hoed corn in clearings in the Back 

 Woods while their men were hunting; who held the doors 

 against Indians and their own hearts against fear, were in every 

 sense the mates of their men. They sprang from a Europe 

 which had attained to a concept of women which prompted 

 Frenchmen who believed in the Salic Law to follow The Maid 

 into battle. It had enabled an ill-favored, neurotic British 

 spinster to say, with full confidence that men would accept 

 her statement, "I am England." It was the next generation 

 of American women, born in the tamed and fertile cornlands, 

 who became Mothers. 



