They were Jacks of all trades, weaving their own cloth and making nearly everything they needed.They were the first people in America to develop the use of the rifle, and they used it in the Back Country all the way down into the Carolinas at a time when it was seldom seen in the seaboard settlements.In those days, rifles were largely manufactured in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and there were several famous gunsmiths in Philadelphia.Some of the best of these old rifles have been preserved and are really beautiful weapons, with delicate hair triggers, gracefully curved stocks, and quaint brass or even gold or silver mountings.The ornamentation was often done by the hunter himself, who would melt a gold or silver coin and pour it into some design which he had carved with his knife in the stock.
The Revolution offered an opportunity after the Ulstermen's heart, and they entered it with their entire spirit, as they had every other contest which involved liberty and independence.In fact, in that period they played such a conspicuous part that they almost ruled Philadelphia, the original home of the Quakers.
Since then, spread out through the State, they have always had great influence, the natural result of their energy, intelligence, and love of education.
Nearly all these diverse elements of the Pennsylvania population were decidedly sectional in character.The Welsh had a language of their own, and they attempted, though without success, to maintain it, as well as a government of their own within their barony independent of the regular government of the province.The Germans were also extremely sectional.They clung with better success to their own language, customs, and literature.The Scotch-Irish were so clannish that they had ideas of founding a separate province on the Susquehanna.Even the Church of England people were so aloof and partisan that, though they lived about Philadelphia among the Quakers, they were extremely hostile to the Quaker rule and unremittingly strove to destroy it.
All these cleavages and divisions in the population continue in their effects to this day.They prevented the development of a homogeneous population.No exact statistics were taken of the numbers of the different nationalities in colonial times; but Franklin's estimate is probably fairly accurate, and his position in practical politics gave him the means of knowing and of testing his calculations.About the year 1750 he estimated the population as one-third Quaker, one-third German, and one-third miscellaneous.This gave about 50,000 or 60,000 to each of the thirds.Provost Smith, of the newly founded college, estimated the Quakers at only about 40,000.But his estimate seems too low.
He was interested in making out their numbers small because he was trying to show the absurdity of allowing such a small band of fanatics and heretics to rule a great province of the British Empire.One great source of the Quaker power lay in the sympathy of the Germans, who always voted on their side and kept them in control of the Legislature, so that it was in reality a case of two-thirds ruling one-third.The Quakers, it must be admitted, never lost their heads.Unperturbed through all the conflicts and the jarring of races and sects, they held their position unimpaired and kept the confidence and support of the Germans until the Revolution changed everything.
The varied elements of population spread out in ever widening half circles from Philadelphia as a center.There was nothing in the character of the region to stop this progress.The country all the way westward to the Susquehanna was easy hill, dale, and valley, covered by a magnificent growth of large forest trees--oaks, beeches, poplars, walnuts, hickories, and ash--which rewarded the labor of felling by exposing to cultivation a most fruitful soil.
The settlers followed the old Indian trails.The first westward pioneers seem to have been the Welsh Quakers, who pushed due west from Philadelphia and marked out the course of the famous Lancaster Road, afterwards the Lancaster Turnpike.It took the line of least resistance along the old trail, following ridges until it reached the Susquehanna at a spot where an Indian trader, named Harris, established himself and founded a post which subsequently became Harrisburg, the capital of the State.
For a hundred years the Lancaster Road was the great highway westward, at first to the mountains, then to the Ohio, and finally to the Mississippi Valley and the Great West.Immigrants and pioneers from all the New England and Middle States flocked out that way to the land of promise in wagons, or horseback, or trudging along on foot.Substantial taverns grew up along the route; and habitual freighters and stage drivers, proud of their fine teams of horses, grew into characters of the road.When the Pennsylvania Railroad was built, it followed the same line.In fact, most of the lines of railroad in the State follow Indian trails.The trails for trade and tribal intercourse led east and west.The warrior trails usually led north and south, for that had long been the line of strategy and conquest of the tribes.
The northern tribes, or Six Nations, established in the lake region of New York near the headwaters of the Delaware, the Susquehanna, and the Ohio, had the advantage of these river valleys for descending into the whole Atlantic seaboard and the valley of the Mississippi.They had in consequence conquered all the tribes south of them as far even as the Carolinas and Georgia.All their trails of conquest led across Pennsylvania.
