Historic Highways of America Volume XI Part 1

Historic Highways of America.

Vol. 11.

by Archer Butler Hulbert.

PREFACE

The first chapter of this volume presents an introduction to the two volumes of this series devoted to Pioneer Roads and Experiences of Travelers. The evolution of American highways from Indian trail to macadamized road is described; the Lancaster Turnpike, the first macadamized road in the United States, being taken as typical of roads of the latter sort.

An experience of a noted traveler, Francis Baily, the eminent British astronomer, is presented in chapter two.

The third chapter is devoted to the story of Zane's Trace from Virginia to Kentucky across Ohio, and its terminal, the famous Maysville Pike. It was this highway which precipitated President Jackson's veto of the Internal Improvement Bill of 1830, one of the epoch-making vetoes in our economic history.

The last chapter is the vivid picture of Kentucky travel drawn by Judge James Hall in his description of "The Emigrants," in _Legends of the West_.

The ill.u.s.trations in this volume have been selected to show styles of pioneer architecture and means of locomotion, including types of earliest taverns, bridges, and vehicles.

A. B. H.

MARIETTA, OHIO, December 30, 1903.

Pioneer Roads and Experiences of Travelers

(Volume I)

CHAPTER I

THE EVOLUTION OF HIGHWAYS: FROM INDIAN TRAIL TO TURNPIKE

We have considered in this series of monographs the opening of a number of Historic Roads and the part they played in the development of the most important phases of early American history. But our att.i.tude has been that of one asking, Why?--we have not at proper length considered all that would be contained in the question, How? It will be greatly to our purpose now to inquire into the methods of road-making, and outline, briefly, the evolution of the first trodden paths to the great highways of civilization.

From one aspect, and an instructive one, the question is one of width; few, if any, of our roads are longer than those old "threads of soil"--as Holland called the Indian trails; Braddock's Road was not longer than the trail he followed; even the c.u.mberland Road could probably have been followed its entire length by a parallel Indian path or a buffalo trace. But Braddock's Road was, in its day, a huge, broad track, twelve feet wide; and the c.u.mberland Road exceeded it in breadth nearly fifty feet. So our study may be pursued from the interesting standpoint of a widening vista; the belt of blue above our heads grows broader as we study the widening of the trail of the Indian.

To one who has not followed the trails of the West or the Northland, the experience is always delightful. It is much the same delight as that felt in traversing a winding woodland road, intensified many fold. The incessant change of scenery, the continued surprises, the objects pa.s.sed unseen yet not unguessed, those half-seen through a leafy vista amid the s.h.i.+mmering green; the pathway just in front very plain, but twenty feet beyond as absolutely hidden from your eyes as though it were a thousand miles away--such is the romance of following a trail. One's mind keeps as active as when looking at Niagara, and it is lulled by the lapsing of those leaves as if by the roar of that cataract.

Yet the old trail, unlike our most modern roads, kept to the high ground; even in low places it seemed to attempt a double-bow knot in keeping to the points of highest alt.i.tude. But when once on the hills, the vista presented varied only with the alt.i.tude, save where hidden by the foliage. We do not choose the old "ridge roads" today for the view to be obtained, and we look continually up while the old-time traveler so often looked down. As we have hinted, elsewhere, many of our pioneer battles--those old battles of the trails--will be better understood when the position of the attacking armies is understood to have been on lower levels, the rifles shooting upward, the enemy often silhouetted against the very sky-line.

[Ill.u.s.tration: INDIAN TRAVAIL]

But the one characteristic to which, ordinarily, there was no exception, was the narrowness of these ancient routes. The Indian did not travel in single file because there was advantage in that formation; it was because his only routes were trails which he never widened or improved; and these would, ordinarily, admit only of one such person as broke them open. True, the Indians did have broader trails; but they were very local in character and led to maple-sugar orchards or salt wells. From such points to the Indian villages there ran what seemed not unlike our "ribbon roads"--the two tracks made by the "travail"--the two poles with crossbar that dragged on the ground behind the Indian ponies, upon which a little freight could be loaded. In certain instances such roads as these were to be found running between Indian villages and between villages and hunting grounds. They were the roads of times of peace. The war-time trails were always narrow and usually hard--the times of peace came few and far between. As we have stated, so narrow was the trail, that the traveler was drenched with water from the bushes on either hand. And so "blind"--to use a common pioneer word--were trails when overgrown, that they were difficult to find and more difficult to follow. Though an individual Indian frequently marked his way through the forest, for the benefit of others who were to follow him or for his own guidance in returning, the Indian trails in native state were never blazed. Thus, very narrow, exceedingly crooked, often overgrown, worn a foot or more into the ground, lay the routes on which white men built roads which have become historic. Let us note the first steps toward road-building, chronologically.

The first phase of road-making (if it be dignified by such a t.i.tle) was the broadening of the Indian path by the mere pa.s.sing of wider loads over it. The beginning of the pack-horse era was announced by the need of greater quant.i.ties of merchandise and provisions in the West to which these paths led. The heavier the freight tied on either side of the pack-horse, the more were the bushes bruised and worn away, and the more the bed of the trail was tracked and trampled. The increasing of the fur-trade with the East at the beginning of the last half of the eighteenth century necessitated heavier loads for the trading ponies both "going in" and "coming out"--as the pioneers were wont to say. Up to this time, so far as the present writer's knowledge goes, the Indian never lifted a finger to make his paths better in any one respect; it seems probable that, oftentimes, when a stream was to be crossed, which could not be forded, the Indian bent his steps to the first fallen tree whose trunk made a natural bridge across the water. That an Indian never felled such a tree, it is impossible to say; but no such incident has come within my reading. It seems that this must have happened and perhaps was of frequent occurrence.

Our first picture, then, of a "blind" trail is succeeded by one of a trail made rougher and a little wider merely by use; a trail over which perhaps the agents of a Croghan or a Gist pushed westward with more and more heavily-loaded pack-horses than had been customarily seen on the trails thither. Of course such trails as began now to have some appearance of roads were very few. As was true of the local paths in Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut and Virginia, so of the long trails into the interior of the continent, very few answered all purposes. Probably by 1750 three routes, running through southwestern Pennsylvania, central Pennsylvania, and central New York, were worn deep and broad. By broad of course we mean that, in many places, pack-horses could meet and pa.s.s without serious danger to their loads. But there were, probably, only these three which at this time answered this description. And the wider and the harder they became, the narrower and the softer grew scores of lesser trails which heretofore had been somewhat traversed. It is not surprising that we find the daring missionary Zeisberger going to the Allegheny River like a beast on all fours through overgrown trails, or that Was.h.i.+ngton, floundering in the fall of 1784 along the upper Monongahela and Cheat Rivers, was compelled to give up returning to the South Branch (of the Potomac) by way of the ancient path from Dunkards Bottom. "As the path it is said is very blind & exceedingly grown up with briers," wrote Was.h.i.+ngton, September 25, 1784, in his Journal, "I resolved to try the other Rout, along the New Road to Sandy Creek; ..."

This offers a signal instance in which an ancient route had become obsolete. Yet the one Was.h.i.+ngton pursued was not an Appian Way: "... we started at dawning of day, and pa.s.sing along a small path much enclosed with weeds and bushes, loaded with Water from the overnights rain & the showers which were continually falling, we had an uncomfortable travel...."[1] Such was the "New Road."

The two great roads opened westward by the armies of Was.h.i.+ngton, Braddock, and Forbes, whose history has been dealt with at length in this series, were opened along the line of trails partially widened by the pack-horses of the Ohio Company's agents (this course having been first marked out by Thomas Cresap) and those of the Pennsylvania traders. Another route led up the Mohawk, along the wide Iroquois Trail, and down the Onondaga to the present Oswego; this was a waterway route primarily, the two rivers (with the portage at Rome) offering more or less facilities for s.h.i.+pping the heavy baggage by batteaus. It was a portage path from the Hudson to Lake Ontario; the old landward trail to Niagara not being opened by an army.[2]

Yet Braddock's Road, cut in 1755, was quite filled up with undergrowth in 1758 as we have noted. It was "a brush wood, by the sprouts from the old stumps."[3] In those primeval forests a road narrowed very fast, and quickly became impa.s.sable if not constantly cared for. The storms of a single fall or spring month and the heavy clouds of snow on the trees in winter kept the ground beneath well littered with broken limbs and branches. Here and there great trees were thrown by the winds across the traveled ways. And so a military road over which thousands may have pa.s.sed would become, if left untouched, quite as impa.s.sable as the blindest trail in a short time.

Other Indian trails which armies never traversed became slightly widened by agents of land companies, as in the case of Boone blazing his way through c.u.mberland Gap for Richard Henderson. For a considerable distance the path was widened, either by Boone or Martin himself, to Captain Joseph Martin's "station" in Powell's Valley. Thousands of traces were widened by early explorers and settlers who branched off from main traveled ways, or pushed ahead on an old buffalo trail; the path just mentioned, which Was.h.i.+ngton followed, was a buffalo trail, but had received the name of an early pioneer and was known as "McCulloch's Path."

But our second picture holds good through many years--that trail, even though armies had pa.s.sed over it, was still but a widened trail far down into the early pioneer days. Though wagons went westward with Braddock and Forbes, they were not seen again in the Alleghenies for more than twenty-five years. These were the days of the widened trails, the days of the long strings of jingling ponies bearing patiently westward salt and powder, bars of bended iron, and even mill-stones, and bringing back to the East furs and ginseng. Of this pack-saddle era--this age of the widened trail--very little has been written, and it cannot be pa.s.sed here without a brief description. In Doddridge's _Notes_ we read: "The acquisition of the indispensable articles of salt, iron, steel and castings presented great difficulties to the first settlers of the western country. They had no stores of any kind, no salt, iron, nor iron works; nor had they money to make purchases where these articles could be obtained. Peltry and furs were their only resources before they had time to raise cattle and horses for sale in the Atlantic states. Every family collected what peltry and fur they could obtain throughout the year for the purpose of sending them over the mountains for barter. In the fall of the year, after seeding time, every family formed an a.s.sociation with some of their neighbors, for starting the little caravan. A master driver was to be selected from among them, who was to be a.s.sisted by one or more young men and sometimes a boy or two. The horses were fitted out with pack-saddles, to the latter part of which was fastened a pair of hobbles made of hickory withes--a bell and collar ornamented their necks. The bags provided for the conveyance of the salt were filled with feed for the horses; on the journey a part of this feed was left at convenient stages on the way down, to support the return of the caravan. Large wallets well filled with bread, jerk, boiled ham, and cheese furnished provision for the drivers. At night, after feeding, the horses, whether put in pasture or turned out into the woods, were hobbled and the bells were opened [unstuffed].... Each horse carried [back] two bushels of alum salt, weighing eighty-four pounds to the bushel." Another writer adds: "The caravan route from the Ohio river to Frederick [Maryland] crossed the stupendous ranges of the ...

mountains.... The path, _scarcely two feet wide_, and travelled by horses in single file, roamed over hill and dale, through mountain defile, over craggy steeps, beneath impending rocks, and around points of dizzy heights, where one false step might hurl horse and rider into the abyss below. To prevent such accidents, the bulky baggage was removed in pa.s.sing the dangerous defiles, to secure the horse from being thrown from his scanty foothold.... The horses, with their packs, were marched along in single file, the foremost led by the leader of the caravan, while each successive horse was tethered to the pack-saddle of the horse before him. A driver followed behind, to keep an eye upon the proper adjustment of the packs." The Pennsylvania historian Rupp informs us that in the Revolutionary period "five hundred pack-horses had been at one time in Carlisle [Pennsylvania], going thence to s.h.i.+ppensburg, Fort Loudon, and further westward, loaded with merchandise, also salt, iron, &c. The pack-horses used to carry bars of iron on their backs, crooked over and around their bodies; barrels or kegs were hung on each side of these. Colonel Snyder, of Chambersburg, in a conversation with the writer in August, 1845, said that he cleared many a day from $6 to $8 in crooking or bending iron and shoeing horses for western carriers at the time he was carrying on a blacksmith shop in the town of Chambersburg. The pack-horses were generally led in divisions of 12 or 15 horses, carrying about two hundred weight each ...; when the bridle road pa.s.sed along declivities or over hills, the path was in some places washed out so deep that the packs or burdens came in contact with the ground or other impending obstacles, and were frequently displaced."

Though we have been specifically noticing the Alleghenies we have at the same time described typical conditions that apply everywhere. The widened trail was the same in New England as in Kentucky or Pennsylvania--in fact the same, at one time, in old England as in New England. Travelers between Glasgow and London as late as 1739 found no turnpike till within a hundred miles of the metropolis. Elsewhere they traversed narrow causeways with an unmade, soft road on each side.

Strings of pack-horses were occasionally pa.s.sed, thirty or forty in a train. The foremost horse carried a bell so that travelers in advance would be warned to step aside and make room. The widened pack-horse routes were the main traveled ways of Scotland until a comparatively recent period. "When Lord Herward was sent, in 1760, from Ayrs.h.i.+re to the college at Edinburgh, the road was in such a state that servants were frequently sent forward with poles to sound the depths of the mosses and bogs which lay in their way. The mail was regularly dispatched between Edinburgh and London, on horseback, and went in the course of five or six days." In the sixteenth century carts without springs could not be taken into the country from London; it took Queen Henrietta four days to traverse Watling Street to Dover. Of one of Queen Elizabeth's journeys it is said: "It was marvelous for ease and expedition, for such is the perfect evenness of the new highway that Her Majesty left the coach only once, while the hinds and the folk of baser sort lifted it on their poles!" A traveler in an English coach of 1663 said: "This travel hath soe indisposed mee, yt I am resolved never to ride up againe in ye coatch."

Thus the widened trail or bridle-path, as it was commonly known in some parts, was the universal predecessor of the highway. It needs to be observed, however, that winter travel in regions where much snow fell greatly influenced land travel. The buffalo and Indian did not travel in the winter, but white men in early days found it perhaps easier to make a journey on sleds in the snow than at any other time. In such seasons the bridle-paths were, of course, largely followed, especially in the forests; yet in the open, with the snow a foot and more in depth, many short cuts were made along the zig-zag paths and in numerous instances these short cuts became the regular routes thereafter for all time. An interesting instance is found in the "Narrative of Andrew J.

Vieau, Sr.:" "This path between Green Bay [Wisconsin] and Milwaukee was originally an Indian trail, and very crooked; but the whites would straighten it by cutting across lots each winter with their jumpers [rude boxes on runners], wearing bare streaks through the thin covering [of snow], to be followed in the summer by foot and horseback travel along the shortened path."[4]

This form of traveling was, of course, unknown save only where snow fell and remained upon the ground for a considerable time. Throughout New York State travel on snow was common and in the central portion of the state, where there was much wet ground in the olden time, it was easier to move heavy freight in the winter than in summer when the soft ground was treacherous. Even as late as the building of the Erie Ca.n.a.l in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century--long after the building of the Genesee Road--freight was hauled in the winter in preference to summer. In the annual report of the comissioners of the Erie Ca.n.a.l, dated January 25, 1819, we read that the roads were so wretched between Utica and Syracuse in the summer season that contractors who needed to lay up a supply of tools, provisions, etc., for their men, at interior points, purchased them in the winter before and sent the loads onward to their destinations in sleighs.[5] One of the reasons given by the Erie Ca.n.a.l commissioners for delays and increased expenses in the work on the ca.n.a.l in 1819, in their report delivered to the legislature February 18, 1820, was that the absence of snow in central New York in the winter of 1818-19 prevented the handling of heavy freight on solid roads; "no hard snow path could be found."[6]

The soft roads of the summer time were useless so far as heavy loads of lumber, stone, lime, and tools were concerned. No winter picture of early America is so vivid as that presented by the eccentric Evans of New Hamps.h.i.+re, who, dressed in his Esquimau suit, made a midwinter pilgrimage throughout the country lying south of the Great Lakes from Albany to Detroit in 1818.[7] His experiences in moving across the Middle West with the blinding storms, the mountainous drifts of snow, the great icy cascades, the hurrying rivers, buried out of sight in their banks of ice and snow, and the far scattered little settlements lost to the world, helps one realize what traveling in winter meant in the days of the pioneer.

The real work of opening roads in America began, of course, on the bridle-paths in the Atlantic slope. In 1639 a measure was pa.s.sed in the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony reading: "Whereas the highways in this jurisdiction have not been laid out with such conveniency for travellers as were fit, nor as was intended by this court, but that in some places they are felt too straight, and in other places travelers are forced to go far about, it is therefore, ordered, that all highways shall be laid out before the next general court, so as may be with most ease and safety for travelers; and for this end every town shall choose two or three men, who shall join with two or three of the next town, and these shall have power to lay out the highways in each town where they may be most convenient; and those which are so deputed shall have power to lay out the highways where they may be most convenient, notwithstanding any man's propriety, or any corne ground, so as it occasion not the pulling down of any man's house, or laying open any garden or orchard; and in common [public] grounds, or where the soil is wet or miry, they shall lay out the ways the wider, as six, or eight, or ten rods, or more in common grounds." With the establishment of the government in the province of New York in 1664 the following regulation for road-making was established, which also obtained in Pennsylvania until William Penn's reign began: "In all public works for the safety and defence of the government, or the necessary conveniencies of bridges, highways, and common pa.s.sengers, the governor or deputy governor and council shall send warrents to any justice, and the justices to the constable of the next town, or any other town within that jurisdiction, to send so many laborers and artificers as the warrent shall direct, which the constable and two others or more of the overseers shall forthwith execute, and the constable and overseers shall have power to give such wages as they shall judge the work to deserve, provided that no ordinary laborer shall be compelled to work from home above one week together. No man shall be compelled to do any public work or service unless the press [impressment] be grounded upon some known law of this government, or an act of the governor and council signifying the necessity thereof, in both which cases a reasonable allowance shall be made." A later amendment indicates the rudeness of these early roads: "The highways to be cleared as followeth, viz., the way to be made clear of standing and lying trees, at least ten feet broad; all stumps and shrubs to be cut close by the ground. The trees marked yearly on both sides--sufficient bridges to be made and kept over all marshy, swampy, and difficult dirty places, and whatever else shall be thought more necessary about the highways aforesaid."

In Pennsylvania, under Penn, the grand jury laid out the roads, and the courts appointed overseers and fence-viewers, but in 1692 the towns.h.i.+ps were given the control of the roads. Eight years later the county roads were put in the hands of the county justices, and king's highways in the hands of the governor and his council. Each county was ordered to erect railed bridges at its expense over rivers, and to appoint its own overseers and fence-viewers.

Even the slightest mention of these laws and regulations misrepresents the exact situation. Up to the time of the Revolutionary War it can almost be said that nothing had been done toward what we today know as road-building. Many routes were cleared of "standing and lying trees"

and "stumps and shrubs" were cut "close by the ground"--but this only widened the path of the Indian and was only a faint beginning in road-building. The skiff, batteau, and horse attached to a sleigh or sled in winter, were the only, common means of conveying freight or pa.s.sengers in the colonies at this period. We have spoken of the path across the Alleghenies in 1750 as being but a winding trace; save for the roughness of the territory traversed it was a fair road for its day, seek where the traveler might. In this case, as in so many others, the history of the postal service in the United States affords us most accurate and reliable information concerning our economic development.

In the year mentioned, 1750, the mail between New York and Philadelphia was carried only once a week in summer and twice a month in winter.

Forty years later there were only eighteen hundred odd miles of post roads in the whole United States. At that time (1790) only five mails a week pa.s.sed between New York and Philadelphia.

It may be said, loosely, that the widened trail became a road when wheeled vehicles began to pa.s.s over it. Carts and wagons were common in the Atlantic seaboard states as early and earlier than the Revolution.

It was at the close of that war that wagons began to cross the Alleghenies into the Mississippi Basin. This first road was a road in "the state of nature." Nothing had been done to it but clearing it of trees and stumps.

Yet what a tremendous piece of work was this. It is more or less difficult for us to realize just how densely wooded a country this was from the crest of the Alleghenies to the seaboard on the east, and from the mountains to central Indiana and Kentucky on the west. The pioneers fought their way westward through wood, like a bullet crus.h.i.+ng through a board. Every step was r.e.t.a.r.ded by a live, a dying, or a dead branch. The very trees, as if dreading the savage attack of the white man on the splendid forests of the interior, held out their bony arms and fingers, catching here a jacket and there a foot, in the attempt to stay the invasion of their silent haunts. These forests were very heavy overhead. The boughs were closely matted, in a life-and-death struggle for light and air. The forest vines bound them yet more inextricably together, until it was almost impossible to fell a tree with out first severing the huge arms which were bound fast to its neighbors. This dense overgrowth had an important influence over the pioneer traveler.

It made the s.p.a.ce beneath dark; the gloom of a real forest is never forgotten by the "tenderfoot" lumberman. The dense covering overhead made the forests extremely hot in the dog days of summer; no one can appreciate what "hot weather" means in a forest where the wind cannot descend through the trees save those who know our oldest forests. What made the forests hot in summer, on the other hand, tended to protect them from winter winds in cold weather. Yet, as a rule, there was little pioneer traveling in the Allegheny forests in winter. From May until November came the months of heaviest traffic on the first widened trails through these gloomy, heated forest aisles.

It can be believed there was little tree-cutting on these first pioneer roads. Save in the laurel regions of the Allegheny and c.u.mberland Mountains, where the forest trees were supplanted by these smaller growths, there was little undergrowth; the absence of sunlight occasioned this, and rendered the old forest more easily traversed than one would suppose after reading many accounts of pioneer life. The princ.i.p.al interruption of travelers on the old trails was in the form of fallen trees and dead wood which had been brought to the ground by the storms. With the exception of the live trees which were blown over, these forms of impediment to travel were not especially menacing; the dead branches crumbled before an ax. The trees which were broken down or uprooted by the winds, however, were obstructions difficult to remove, and tended to make pioneer roads crooked, as often perhaps as standing trees. We can form some practical notion of the dangerous nature of falling trees by studying certain of the great improvements which were early projected in these woods. The Allegheny Portage Railway over the mountains of Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, and the Erie Ca.n.a.l in central New York, both offer ill.u.s.trations to the point. The portage track was sent through an unbroken, uninhabited forest wilderness from Hollidaysburg to Johnstown in the twenties. In order to render the inclines safe from falling trees and breaking branches, a swath through the woods was cut one hundred and twenty feet wide.[8] The narrow trellis of the inclines scaled the mountain in the center of this avenue; wide as it was, a tree fifty feet long could have swept it away like paper. The Erie Ca.n.a.l was to be forty feet in width; a clean sixty foot aisle was opened through the forests before the digging could begin.

Of course nothing like this could be done for pioneer highways; when the states began to appropriate money for state roads, then the pioneer routes were straightened by cutting some trees. It was all the scattered communities could do before this period to keep the falling trees and branches from blocking the old roads. Travelers wound in and out on one of the many tracks, stumbling, slipping, grinding on the roots, going around great trees that had not been removed, and keeping to the high ground when possible, for there the forest growth was less dense.

The question immediately arises, What sort of vehicle could weather such roads? First in the van came the great clumsy cart, having immensely high and solid wooden wheels. These were obtained either by taking a thin slice from the b.u.t.t of the greatest log that could be found in good condition, or by being built piecemeal by rude carpenters. These great wheels would go safely wherever oxen could draw them, many of their hubs being three feet from the ground. Thus the body of the cart would clear any ordinary brook and river at any ford which horses or oxen could cross. No rocks could severely injure such a ma.s.sy vehicle, at the rate it usually moved, and no mere rut could disturb its stolid dignity. Like the oxen attached to it, the pioneer cart went on its lumbering way despising everything but bogs, great tree boles and precipices. These creaking carts could proceed, therefore, nearly on the ancient bridle-path of the pack-horse age. On the greater routes westward the introduction of wheeled vehicles necessitated some changes; now and then the deep-worn pa.s.sage-way was impa.s.sable, and detours were made which, at a later day, became the main course. Here, where the widened trail climbed a steeper "hog-back" than usual, the cart-drivers made a roundabout road which was used in dry weather. There, where the old trail wound about a marshy piece of ground in all weathers, the cart-drivers would push on in a straight line during dry seasons.

Thus the typical pioneer road even before the day of wagons was a many-track road and should most frequently be called a route--a word we have so frequently used in this series of monographs. Each of the few great historic roads was a route which could have been turned into a three, four, and five track course in very much the same way as railways become double-tracked by uniting a vast number of side-tracks. The most important reason for variation of routes was the wet and dry seasons; in the wet season advantage had to be taken of every practicable alt.i.tude.

The Indian or foot traveler could easily gain the highest eminence at hand; the pack-horse could reach many but not all; the "travail" and cart could reach many, while the later wagon could climb only a few. In dry weather the low ground offered the easiest and quickest route. As a consequence every great route had what might almost be called its "wet"

and "dry" roadways. In one of the early laws quoted we have seen that in wet or miry ground the roads should be laid out "six, eight, or ten rods [wide]," though elsewhere ten or twelve feet was considered a fair width for an early road. As a consequence, even before the day of wagons, the old routes of travel were often very wide, especially in wet places; in wet weather they were broader here than ever. But until the day of wagons the track-beds were not so frequently ruined. Of this it is now time to speak.

By 1785 we may believe the great freight traffic by means of wagons had fully begun across the Alleghenies at many points. It is doubtful if anywhere else in the United States did "wagoning" and "wagoners" become so common or do such a thriving trade as on three or four trans-Allegheny routes between 1785 and 1850. The Atlantic Ocean and the rivers had been the arteries of trade between the colonies from the earliest times. The freight traffic by land in the seaboard states had amounted to little save in local cases, compared with the great industry of "freighting" which, about 1785, arose in Baltimore and Philadelphia and concerned the then Central West. This study, like that of our postal history, throws great light on the subject in hand. Road-building, in the abstract, began at the centers of population and spread slowly with the growth of population. For instance, in Revolutionary days Philadelphia was, as it were, a hub and from it a number of important roads, like spokes, struck out in all directions. Comparatively, these were few in number and exceedingly poor, yet they were enough and sufficiently easy to traverse to give Was.h.i.+ngton a deal of trouble in trying to prevent the avaricious country people from treacherously feeding the British invaders.