[Illustration: Connecticut and Rhode Island.]
The progress of the Westward Movement in colonial times was slow. A
hundred and fifty years passed before the frontier line was pushed
beyond the Appalachian ridge. This slowness was due in part to the
action of the English government. Soon after England (in 1763) came
into possession of the country west of the Alleghanies the king issued
a proclamation reserving most of the newly acquired territory for
the use of the Indians and forbidding the governors of the colonies
to grant lands to white men west of the mountains. If this plan had
been carried out, English civilization would have been confined to the
seaboard, and the richest and fairest portions of the earth would have
been permanently reserved as a hunting-ground for savages and as a lair
for wild beasts. But the War of the Revolution took the Western country
from England and gave it to the United States. The Ohio valley was then
thrown open to settlers, and white men from all parts of the world
rushed into the new lands like hungry cattle rushing into new pastures.
In twenty years after the acknowledgment of our independence (in 1783)
the Frontier Line moved farther westward than it had moved in a century
under British rule.