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April 21, 2007 at 9:21 pm #2955
I have been thinking about migration patterns…did some searching and found some interesting links.
http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/Me-Mu/Migration-and-Population-Movement.html
Yet Europeans were only the most conspicuous populations on the move. The migrations of slaveowning colonists created a forced migration of African Americans, particularly in the southern colonies. As whites and blacks moved into new areas, they displaced Native Americans who consequently relocated into other regions and uprooted other peoples. This pattern of peoples bumping into each other characterized American migrations throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The pattern pertained as well to Europeans, who—as Bernard Bailyn in The Peopling of British North America (1986), David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly in Bound Away: Virginia and the Westward Movement (2000), and others had demonstrated—were of such vast cultural, if not ethnic, diversity that their migrations often challenged the cultural ways of previous settlers….Between the 1770s and 1790s, therefore, the patterns of white migration, forced black migration, and Native American displacement and migration that had formed in the colonial era became more evident and ingrained in American western development. As the Old Southwest opened in the late 1790s, these patterns and their consequences became even more dramatic…
http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/us/A0861809.html
Westward movement was stimulated under Gov. Alexander Spotswood, who himself discovered (1716) the Swift Run Gap in the Blue Ridge Mts., leading into the Shenandoah valley. Spotswood also imported (1714–17) Germans to work his iron furnaces in the Piedmont area, and numerous others followed their countrymen. They helped settle the Shenandoah valley (beginning c.1730) as did many newcomers from Pennsylvania—German Lutherans, English Quakers, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, and a lesser number of Welsh Baptists.
http://www.loudounhistory.org/history/indians-to-speculators.htm
…In the very early days the land was covered by dense forest broken only by great clearings. These areas, in ever greater numbers, were cleared by Indians, who burned them out to create grazing grounds in which native grasses grew that were particularly attractive to buffalo. Buffalo were one of the staples of the Indians and until as late as 1730 buffalo were found in abundance in this area.
Archeologists estimate that in 1600 the Indian population in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Loudoun County, Virginia numbered only about 1,500 – certainly a scanty habitation.
Several different Indian groups were scattered over the whole region. Historically, the Indians occupying the “coastal” area-below the falls and to the south and east of the Potomac River – have been attributed to the Algonquin group. But the “upland” area, north and west of the falls is believed to have been peopled by groups of the Siouan elements, although this is not supported by modem archeological evidence.
The Susquehannocks and tribes of the powerful Iroquois nation made use of the Shenandoah Valley as a prime war path between themselves and groups to the South. Iroquoian battling over hunting rights in the area caused the other Indians present to migrate eastward, which accounts for some of the Indian settlements in the Piedmont area by Sioux and Dakotas. After the defeat of the Tuscaroras in 171 1 by the English and their subsequent withdrawal to the Iroquois ” Long House” in central New York state, these groups drifted westward again, leaving only a smattering of Indian groups in this region…
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/TURNER/chapter1.html
http://www.virginiaplaces.org/transportation/paths.html
Shirley
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