VII. BABES IN THE WOODS
Once they got started, people kept coming and coming and coming to America as if they never would stop! In our own part of North America, that is now the United States, three million people were living a hundred and fifty years after the Puritans came. There were many thousands of negro slaves. Most of the white people were English. We owned all the land from the Atlantic ocean to the Mississippi River. This land was fifteen hundred miles long and a thousand miles wide. But all those three million people lived on a narrow strip of land along the sea coast. They began to feel crowded.
Why didn't they move back from the sea, and spread over the land? They couldn't. There was a wall. It was a wide, high, double wall of mountain ranges. The wall was nearly straight, but the seacoast bent in and out. Here the land ran away out into the water. There the water took a big bite out of the land. So in some places the seacoast land was more than a hundred miles wide. In others it was much narrower. The Indians were pushed and pushed back by the white people. At last they went over the mountain wall. They went by a trail that the white men could not find for a long time.
White men lived far up on the mountain slopes. The land there was rough, rocky hills. It was not good for growing corn and wheat. Men had to hunt like Indians to get enough to eat. They were strong and brave and hardy. They could do everything the Indians did. Much of the time they lived in the woods. While in the mountains back of the Virginia plantations, a party of white hunters found the Indian trail over the wall. It was through a high, narrow valley. The Cum-ber-land River started there, in mountain springs. It cut a deep pass through which men could ride on horseback. The pass was called Cum-ber-land Gap.
These daring hunters went through the Gap and down the Western slope. They built no fire. They kept their food pouches filled, their moccasins tied to their guns. They rolled in blankets at night, and slept on their guns. They thought the Indians might see them. On the least alarm they slipped into the deep woods. One morning they saw a park-like country at their feet. There
