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Jonas Bronck was a Dutch man who leased land from the Dutch West India Company to build a farm located along the Harlem River in the early 17th century. Jonas Bronck was probably one of the first people of European heritage to settle that area.The creek that flowed by his farm was later named Bronck’s Kill (kill is the Dutch word for a creek). The river that abutted his farm was later named Bronck River. For shorthand, it was called The Broncks; other rivers in the area were styled in similar ways.Brothers Richard Morris and Louis Morris acquired the land in 1670. The Morris family renamed the land Morrisiana, but the Bronx River kept its name.The land later became part of the British empire, and the Province of New York was officially organized. In 1683, the New York General Assembly decided to create twelve counties. When the New York General Assembly described the land that encompassed Westchester County, it said Westchester County included the “Annexed District of The Bronx,” referring to the land surrounding the Bronx River.In 1874, the City of New York annexed the land west of the Bronx River. It was referred to as the Annexed District of The Bronx.In 1886, the land was officially organized as the Borough of The Bronx. The remainder of the City of New York was officially organized as the Borough of Manhattan. The land east of the Bronx River was later annexed by the City of New York and joined the Borough of The Bronx. A few years later, City Island was annexed by the City of New York and joined the Borough of The Bronx too.In 1912, New York State separated the land of the Borough of The Bronx from Westchester County, and it officially became Bronx County, not The Bronx County. This is why, when referring to the county, the word The should not be included.

Mostly the movement over the mountains was an attempt to get “free” land of their own and escape the drudgery of working for some one else. During this period, the settlers introduced commodity agriculture to the area. Tobacco, corn, and other crops were developed as major commodities, and the hunting and subsistence stages of frontier life faded away much more quickly than most observers are willing to admit. In many places, a frontier clearing became a town in a mere decade — a small city in a single generation. [i]The mortality rate was high almost everywhere in the Western world in the 17th and 18th centuries, but the open spaces and clean waters of North America were thought to provide a more healthful climate. Nonetheless, moving to a sparsely settled frontier region heightened a concern for personal and family safety. Added to the very real threat of attacks by Indians, bushwhackers, bandits, or venomous snakes were common farms accidents, bad water, indispositions, nutritional deficiencies, and bad weather—all capable of striking without warning, but still a part of the fabric of ordinary life. Common sicknesses and difficult childbirths were made more threatening by distance from friends, kin, and established patterns of care. Possibly for this reason many emigrants traveled in extended family groups, uprooting married sons, daughters, and grandchildren when making a move.Alexis de Tocqueville described his impressions of a New York frontier clearing: "Some trees cut down, trunks burnt and charred, and a few plants useful to the life of man sown in the midst of the confusion of a hundred shapes of debris, led us to the pioneer's dwelling."Expansion and ExplorationThe thirteen English colonies had, by the time of the French and Indian War (1754), accumulated a population estimated at 1.3 million persons, black and white. The majority of the English population clung to the coastal settlements and cities, leaving the frontier regions sparsely populated by comparison. During the French wars, the New England border with Canada was an ever shifting line of small outposts and charred settlers’ cabins. The Mohawk Valley settlements relied on the friendship of the Iroquois (and especially the Mohawk) for its defense, and the Blue Mountains of Pennsylvania separated the frontier from the more settled farms and towns of the Quakers. William Penn had recruited his Quaker population disproportionately from among the tough Cheshire and Welsh farmsteads of Britain. For generations these farmers had successfully carved out a living in a difficult environment. They combined their religion and their agricultural experience into a spiritual framework that well served the economically challenging conditions of a new land. This led to Pennsylvania's unchallenged economic dominance in the colonial period.Hundreds of miles of ever shifting frontier settlements were not readily defensible against Indian raids, and the only effective strategy was retaliation so brutal as to deter further incursions. These frontiersmen not only stayed on the frontier, but they banded together to protect their homes and families by taking the fight to the enemy. Colonial militias periodically organized punitive expeditions into the frontier regions. Since the Indians rarely chose to stand and fight, colonials learned to threaten and burn the natives' crops and villages. The Indians were thereby forced into an active defense of their families and homes that could be broken by trained soldiers.Many of the Scots-Irish and German immigrants that arrived late in the process of land acquisition with little money had moved through the settled areas to the frontier where they simply squatted on the land. It has been estimated that two of every three acres occupied on the frontiers were held with no legal rights other than the improvements made on them. More than 90 percent of the backcountry settlers had Scottish or Scots-Irish roots, with the remainder being composed almost entirely of German-speaking immigrants. The total number of persons of Scottish ancestry migrating to these regions during these periods may have been in excess of 250,000. Many families had a roof over their heads and were debt free, but they were also essentially penniless. The majority of these farmer-emigrants were fierce Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, who historian James Webb, U.S. Senator from Virginia, himself an offshoot of Scots-Irish frontier ancestors, has noted for their “values-based combativeness, insistent egalitarianism, and … refusal to be dominated” — all characteristics shared by these American frontiersmen.Calling themselves settlers and emigrants, families from across the states began a march into the vaguely empty space west of the Appalachian Mountains as soon as the Revolutionary War had ended. The immigrants then moved to the farmlands of the Midwest and the dark soils of the Southeast. The simplest maps of the unknown interior spurred thousands of Americans to relocate to towns that existed nowhere except on land office surveys. With them, in many cases, came their slaves, forced to emigrate sometimes in ways that forever broke black family ties. Before them stood the Indians with their own families, aboriginal inheritors of the land, poised to be swept aside and ultimately to be dispossessed of their heritage. Native Americans resisted white settlement, and by 1776 there were fewer than 200 settlers in Kentucky. After the American Revolution, however, settlers soon began pouring into the region.Daniel Boone escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap by Caleb Bingham (1851–1852) — The defeat of the Shawnee in 1774 emboldened land speculators in North Carolina, who believed much of what is now Kentucky and Tennessee would soon be under British control. Daniel Boone (1734-1820) and his wife Rebecca traveled westwards to Kentucky. The westernmost part of Kentucky, west of the Tennessee River, was recognized as hunting grounds belonging to the Chickasaw by the 1786 Treaty of Hopewell, and remained so until they sold it to the U.S. in 1818.The Ohio River and its tributaries initially provided the most direct route to the lands of the Midwest. The movement of immigrants usually paralleled the valleys of the Ohio or the Tennessee Rivers. Early pioneer families floated or poled their way down these waterways and their tributaries on a wide assortment of rafts, barges, and keelboats. Others moved west on overland courses parallel to the rivers where the going was easier and the topography more gently changing. The rivers wore gaps in the mountains that made their passage feasible. The Cumberland Gap is the best known of these. Formed by an ancient creek that was later redirected by geologic forces into the Cumberland River, the gap was used for centuries by Native Americans to cross the mountains. Daniel Boone was credited with opening the gap to white settlers entering Kentucky and Tennessee, and the foot trail through it was later widened to accommodate wagons.This common attitude toward geographical movement was formulated as part of the frontier thesis of historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1893), who saw the availability of “western” land as a political and economic safety valve for the growing American Republic as well as a formative ingredient in the American character. Westward movement was essential to the continued existence of the nation. Turner’s original work dealt primarily with the settlement of the Mississippi Valley from 1830 to 1850 and the controversy over the extension of slavery that it engendered. Nonetheless, his thesis, although more than a century old today, remains fundamental to formulating an understanding of the period of national expansion.On the American frontier, men were more closely defined by their work than in any other part of the nation. Among the most common men in the West in the Antebellum Period were prospectors, miners, mountain trappers, emigrant train guides, and soldiers. Sometimes solitary, sometimes traveling in bands of a hundred these were arguably the first persons to open the mountains and plateaus to exploitation.Two objects of commercial gain gave birth to their wide and daring enterprises: the precious metals of the West, and the rich peltries of the North. As Francis Parkman noted in 1846, “Traveling in that country, or indeed anywhere, from any other motive than gain, was an idea of which they took no cognizance.” Moreover, it was their tales and their trails that led the emigrant trains westward. These two pursuits have thus, in a manner, been the precursors of civilization. Nowhere was a man’s character more important or more sorely tested, than on the emigrant trails to the West.Expansion, especially to the west, also offered an opportunity to perfect America, to synthesize the best of the old settlements, to create a new and more perfect Union — to escape aristocracy, slavery, government, or the restrictions of class by birth.It is ironic that the expanding American empire should have been made possible in its infancy by Thomas Jefferson’s clearly extra-constitutional purchase of a territory belonging to a foreign country. Nowhere in the Constitution was the power to add territory to the nation even addressed. Although it doubled the size of the nation, the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleonic France in 1803 was considered by some conservative voices in the Northeast ‘‘a great waste’’ of national treasure and a liability that would require the establishment of a massive armed force for its protection and security. Conservatives in the Federalist Party—dominated by shipping and maritime interests—pointed out that the new frontier states carved from this ‘‘unpeopled wilderness,’’ which the expansionists envisioned, would give the Jeffersonian Republicans a secure and possibly insurmountable majority in the US Senate, two by two.In fact, the exploration and domination of the North American continent was no haphazard series of fortuitous ramblings and random discoveries, but a careful process initiated by Jefferson and programmed in stages thereafter from the urban centers of the mid-Atlantic and midwestern states, particularly Washington, DC, New York, and St. Louis. Politicians, land speculators, and businessmen formulated specific instructions and sent explorers, traders, artists, and soldiers into the unfenced expanses of grass, the towering mountains, and the formidable deserts to gather information that would further the development of the continent under US rule.Meanwhile in 1796, Congress had authorized the construction of Zane’s Trace, a road from western Virginia to Kentucky that became a major thoroughfare for migrant families from the upper South to Kentucky. This was the first major internal improvement funded by the federal government. In 1807 the US Senate instructed Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin to prepare a plan for opening roads and building canals for those wishing to emigrate in order to improve the economic growth of the nation as a whole. In 1811 the First National Road from Cumberland, Maryland, across the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania to Wheeling, (West) Virginia, on the Ohio River was completed. This was the first multi-state improvement project attempted by the Federal government, and a number of “pike” towns sprang up along its route. The Boonesborough Turnpike between Hagerstown and that town was paved in macadam in 1823. The National Road was paved in the 1830s. The Shenandoah Valley Pike through Maryland to the Carolinas and Georgia and the Columbia Pike south out of Nashville, Tennessee, were completed in like manner in the 1850s.Gallatin’s far-reaching plan of Federal outlays also included support for a man-made waterway across central New York State from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. In 1825 the opening of the Erie Canal formed a convenient transportation link between the cities of the Northeast, the headwaters of the Ohio River, and via the Great Lakes to all the Midwest as far away as the Indian lands in Wisconsin and Minnesota. In its first year of operation 19,000 vessels passed through the Erie Canal. Its financial success provided an impetus for imitation, and man-made watercourses soon connected separate lakes and streams into a vast and efficient waterborne transportation web. Along the riverbanks and lakeshores a mix of mostly New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and New Englanders created the first great urban centers of the American Midwest.Westward expansion along the growing system of canals and the successful navigation of the Western rivers by steamboats made a number of inland ports equally important. St. Louis, in particular, served as a central hub for river traffic. Located on the Mississippi River near the junction of the Ohio and the Missouri, St. Louis benefited from its connections with both the states of the Midwest and the Western territories of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. Only the Civil War blockade of the Mississippi River strangled its continued growth. By 1840 Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Syracuse, Rochester, and Detroit had emerged as important cities serving the Great Lakes Region. Buffalo, at the western terminus of the Erie Canal, underwent a remarkable transformation from a frontier trading outpost to a virtual metropolis in just a few decades. Detroit had been a disappointment as a fur trading post to its French founders in the 17th century, but it took on a revitalized importance as a commercial center as emigrant farmers entered the region.[i] In 1810, for example, much of what happened in New York was in the east ― the Catskills, Albany, and the Mohawk and Hudson River valleys ― with the western part of the state still largely unsettled. In the six counties between the Pennsylvania border and Lake Ontario there were less than 24,000 residents. No towns had more than 6,000 persons and most were less than half that size.By 1820, New York had become the most populous state in the nation. Most of the newcomers settled on the “frontiers” in northern, central, and western New York, which dramatically shifted the distribution of the state's population. In just a decade, three-fourths of the state's people lived in the newer counties to the north and west of Albany.The famous Ridge Road, opened in 1816 and described as the "Appian Way of Western New York," was one of the most popular stagecoach routes east and west near the south shore of Lake Ontario. By 1845 there were as many as ten stagecoaches each way daily on the Ridge Road and branch lines running to various communities both to the north and south.See:Amazon.com: A Leatherstocking Companion, Novels and Narratives as History (Traditional American History Series Book 13) eBook: James M. Volo: Kindle Store

One of the most famous women in the southern West Virginia coalfields was not a miner or a miner's wife. She was a woman named Mary Harris "Mother" Jones. Her husband and children's deaths in the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1867 left her without family obligations, and she devoted herself to fighting for workers' rights. She became involved with the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), and in speeches throughout the coalfields, Mother Jones utilized a visceral form of maternalist politics to advocate for miners. Adopting the character of a universal mother, Jones questioned the courage and masculinity of coal miners who were reluctant to join the union. "If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight," she told coal miners on the steps of the capitol building in Charleston, West Virginia in 1912. To recalcitrant miners she added, "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves... to see one old woman who is not afraid of all the blood-hounds."Over the first two decades of the 20th century, coal miners and coal companies in West Virginia clashed in a series of brutal conflicts over labor conditions and unionization. The coal miners were a diverse group of men who came from farms in Appalachia, Eastern Europe, and the American South to begin work in the coalfields of West Virginia, where mines were opened in remote areas that often lacked existing towns. Coal companies established towns and imposed a system of rules; miners could be evicted from their company-owned home if they broke the rules. The coal company officials believed that it was their right to control the management of the coalmines. Miners argued that they had the right to discuss unionization and join a union. Within this context, the union movement in southern West Virginia counted women among its strongest supporters and organizers.Women in the early 1900s were barred from working underground in the coalmines, but their work above ground was integral to the coal camp system. In many cases, a wife's unpaid labor made it possible for the miner to do his job. Women prepared the food that the miners brought to work, and they cleaned the miner's clothes. They managed to support their children on what little pay the miner brought home, often dealing with the monopolistic prices at the company store. Depending on the coal camp, they were tasked with hauling water from nearby creeks or water pumps up to their homes for drinking and bathing. Unlike women who worked in urban factories and lived in tenements, coal miner's wives lived at their husband's workplace -- the coal company often owned the entire coal camp, including the miners' homes. They faced the looming threat of eviction, as well as the chance that their husband or son might be severely injured or perish in the mine. As Chuck Keeney, great grandson of labor organizer Frank Keeney, recalled during his 2014 interview for the documentary The Mine Wars, "these were women who had to deal with harsh circumstances, and they themselves had to have a certain type of toughness, not just physical toughness, but a psychological toughness."When strike organizers in the early 1900s decided to protest the conditions in the coal camps, the strikes had a significant impact on the lives of women. Striking miners and their families were evicted from their company-owned homes and forced to live in tent colonies set up by the union. The tents were erected on whatever private land could be found near the mines. Families in a tented townThomas Andrews explained during his 2014 interview for The Mine Wars that "there was a purpose for these tent colonies beyond simply sheltering people. They were also supposed to keep the foot soldiers in these strikes, the strikers, near the front lines." Women kept the strikers on the front lines by supporting daily life in the tent colonies. They cooked, did washing, and raised children in the tents. Their commitment to the strike was not rhetorical; it meant a material change in their daily lives.In addition to carrying on their household duties in challenging strike circumstances, women also took action to protect the integrity of the strike. The success of the strike depended on the miners' ability to make the company keenly aware of their absence and the loss of productivity, and to compel the company to make concessions in the interest of quickening the miners' return to work. However, coal companies in southern West Virginia, seeking to fulfill their contracts and maintain production, tried to replace the striking workers with new recruits called "transportation men." Wives and daughters would tear up train track, curse at the new recruits, and generally prevent them from entering the mines. Grace Jackson, interviewed during an oral history project in the 1970s, remembered women wielding guns when trains carrying new workers arrived: "The women and the men got their high-powered rifles, and they got on their bellies and laid on each side of the track... and when that train went through... they let one shot fire [and the transportation men] all turned loose."Willie Helton, another woman living in the coalfields at that time, recalled using her dress as effective cover for transporting guns: "And I slipped one gun down into my dress on this side. I had one gun on either side of me, and I had a pocket full of shells. I couldn't hardly walk." Both of these memories highlight the fact that both men and women were active participants in the labor conflict. WGBH American Experience . The Mine Wars | PBSThe Battle of Blair Mountain, I learned, was the largest armed confrontation in America since the Civil War. In August 1921, some 10,000 West Virginia coal miners picked up their Winchesters and marched against the powerful mine owners who ran the state like a fiefdom. "These miners weren't even getting paid American currency," Paul Lucas explained. They earned company scrip and were forced into debt spending it on rent and food at the company store. "I definitely think that the union was needed back in the Mother Jones days."White-haired, matronly, and fiercely socialist, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones helped turn the fledgling United Mine Workers (UMW) into the nation's most powerful labor union. "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living," her famous battle cry, was both a salve and a call to arms. In a 1912 speech to striking miners, she warned West Virginia's governor that unless he called off the guards who'd killed workers at the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek mines, "there is going to be one hell of a lot of bloodletting." She later held up the blood-soaked coat of a wounded guard and proclaimed, "This is the first time I ever saw a goddamned mine guard's coat decorated to suit me."The Paint Creek and Cabin Creek mine owners eventually agreed to the strikers' demands, but the militancy that Mother Jones had encouraged went beyond her control. When coal production began to soar in non-union Logan County, an army of pro-union miners gathered near Charleston and prepared to march across Blair Mountain to free jailed union organizers. Mother Jones tried to call them off by spreading a lie that President Warren Harding would intervene on their behalf, but the ruse was exposed and she was pushed aside as a traitor to the cause. "Them union guys marched out," Paul Lucas told me, "and got met by a company with a machine gun nest." Between 20 and 50 miners are thought to have died; a precise death toll was never established.It was the last time that Mother Jones worked in West Virginia, yet her legacy has become synonymous with the UMW's. She laid the foundation for the union to win the first contracts in the country that required eight-hour workdays, health benefits, and pensions. "She was invaluable, irreplaceable," says UMW spokesman Phil Smith. "She was able to motivate miners to take collective action when in some cases the leadership of the union was not. She was able to motivate the families of miners to support the men who were either on strike or trying to organize, when nobody else could. And she didn't just do it in West Virginia, she did it all over the country." Remembering Mother Jones in Coal CountryWGBH American Experience . The Mine Wars | PBSWest Virginia's Mine Wars