"The Ohio company took its settlers out to its new land as a railway does its colonists to-day. Reaching the Ohio River, they descended it in a bullet-proof barge, called 'with strange irony' the 'Mayflower.' They entered the mouth of the Muskingum and anchored under the guns of a United States fort."[4]
This is how New England got into the West. There is no hero story there. The men of the South, men of North Carolina and Virginia, most of whom had come from Pennsylvania and dropped down along the east slope of the Appalachians, as it were sparring these mountain ranges for an opening until at length they had found the ways of the game trails and Indian trails from headwater to headwater, and so had reached the west-bound streams--these actual adventurers had built Harrodsburg and Boonesborough seventeen years before the Ohio company entered the Muskingum. Already there was a West; even a West far beyond Boonesborough and its adjacent corn grounds.
This actual record of the upper states in the exploration of the West is to-day not generally remembered nor understood. Sometimes an ardent New Englander will explain that the Puritans would have earlier pressed out westward had it not been for the barrier of the Iroquois on their western borders. They read their history but ill who do not know that the Iroquois trafficked always with the English as against the French; whereas Kentucky, the land opened by the Southern pioneers, was occupied by a more dangerous red population, made up of many tribes, having no policy but that of war, and no friends outside of each separate motley hunting party, sure to be at knife's point with either white or red strangers. The most difficult and most dangerous frontier was that of the South; yet it was the South that won through.
There are two explanations of this incontrovertible historical fact. One lies perhaps in the general truth that early pioneers nearly always cling to the river valleys, perhaps not more for purposes of transportation by water than in obedience to a certain instinct that seems to hold the pathways of the streams as foreordained guidance. The man that is lost in the wilderness hails with delight the appearance of a stream. It will lead him somewhere; it will guide him back again. Near it will be game, near it, too, rich soil. The man that enters the wilderness deliberately does so along the waterways.