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With the Piscataways out of the way, the interior seemingly lay wide open to resettlement by English colonists, and those who had already explored the interior saw great opportunities there. Maryland ranger Richard Brightwell, for example, found the Piedmont “extraordinarily rich.” Louis Michel, who sought to establish an enclave of Swiss Protestants in America, was drawn to “the rather unknown western regions” of the Potomac interior, “of which the Indians here have wonders to tell, on account of their high mountains, warm waters, rich minerals, fruitful lands, large streams and abundance of game.” In 1707 Michel enlisted several Indians and Indian traders from Pennsylvania to guide him as far as the lower Shenandoah Valley. Michel was particularly impressed with the area around the Piscataways’island, and set about trying to settle his Swiss colony there. One of his associates, Baron Christoph von Graffenried, visited the island in 1712 and declared it“a remarkably beautiful spot.”He“examined the admirable situation of the same region of country and in particular the charming island of the Potomac River above the falls” and “discovered still finer land” beyond the mountains. When the upper Potomac site proved unworkable, Graffenried lamented “that I can not live in this beautiful land.”1 Given these recommendations, and given the real attractions of the interior— the rich Piedmont bottomlands along the Potomac and its tributaries, and the fertile soils and fine pastures of the Shenandoah and Cumberland valleys—it seems strange that planters did not rush to take up lands there. On the contrary, the expansion of European settlements actually slowed, and only a bare trickle of planters flowed into the interior. So little did the frontier expand that after the creation of Prince George’s County, Maryland, in 1696 no new county was created on either side of the Potomac until 1721. In 1706 Prince George’s County still c h a p t e r ฀ t e n “I Can Not Live in This Beautiful Land” ., “I Can Not Live in This Beautiful Land” 175 had only about 460 households, all of which were below the fall line and most of which were on the Patuxent River rather than on the Potomac; the district of New Scotland, which encompassed roughly the same terrain as the modern-day District of Columbia, had only 20 resident landowners. On the Virginia side, no one took a land grant above the falls until 1709,and the pace at which land grants were issued did not really quicken until 1717. Even then the grants were thinly strung along the Potomac bottomlands and islands and up Goose Creek, well below the Blue Ridge. Though the dribble of migrants above the falls increased to a trickle in the mid-1720s, it did not swell into a regular flow until the 1730s and did not really take off until the mid-1740s.2 Why didn’t land-hungry colonists rush into the interior? What delayed the resettlement of this vast and fertile region for a full generation after the departure of the Potomac nations for Pennsylvania? Why did it finally happen when it did (in the 1730s) and where it did (far upriver from the Great Falls, mostly in the Shenandoah, Cumberland, and Monocacy valleys)? The answers to these mysteries can be found at three different knots in the web of connections between the environment, the colonists’ ecological imaginations, and the human relations that went along with their chosen ways of living upon the land. First, this was a problem of cultural ecology. Each society must create a workable system for living with and within its natural surroundings, and the tobacco culture adopted by the planters of the lower Potomac was, during the early eighteenth century, ill suited for expansion into the Piedmont and interior valleys . Second,“changes in the land”predating colonization continued to shape life in the interior. Even though the last of the Potomac nations had just joined forces with the Susquehannocks, Five Nations, and other northern groups, the Potomac interior was still caught in the centuries-old gap between northern and southern Indian nations. The fault line between north and south, which had for many generations lain between the Susquehanna River and the Potomac, had now opened up to include almost the entire span between the Susquehanna and the Carolinas. People who ventured into the interior still found themselves caught in the resulting crossfire. Third, although English notions about boundaries and exclusive property rights—a way of registering their power...

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