It is not the oldest West with which this chapter deals. The
oldest West was the Atlantic coast. Roughly speaking, it took
a century of Indian fighting and forest felling for the colonial
settlements to expand into the interior to a distance of about
a hundred miles from the coast. Indeed, some stretches were
hardly touched in that period. This conquest of the nearest
wilderness in the course of the seventeenth century and in the
early years of the eighteenth, gave control of the maritime sec-
tion of the nation and made way for the new movement of west-
ward expansion which I propose to discuss.

In his "Winning of the West," Roosevelt dealt chiefly with
the region beyond the Alleghanies, and with the period of the
later eighteenth century, although he prefaced his account
with an excellent chapter describing the backwoodsmen of the
Alleghanies and their social conditions from 1769 to 1774.
It is important to notice, however, that he is concerned with a
backwoods society already formed; that he ignores the New
England frontier and its part in the winning of the West, and
does not recognize that there was a West to be won between
New England and the Great Lakes. In short, he is interested
in the winning of the West beyond the Alleghanies by the
southern half of the frontier folk.

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