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 passed unseen yet not unguessed, those half-seen through a leafy vista amid the shimmering 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 altitude. But when once on the hills, the vista presented varied only with the altitude, 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.
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.
Indian Travail
The first phase of road-making (if it be dignified by such a title) was the broadening of the Indian path by the mere passing of wider loads over it. The beginning of the pack-horse era was announced by the need of greater quantities 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 Massachusetts 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 pass 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 Washington, 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 Washington, 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 Washington pursued was not an Appian Way: “... we started at dawning of day, and passing 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 Washington, 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 shipping 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 impassable 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 passed would become, if left untouched, quite as impassable as the blindest trail in a short time.