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 Cumberland 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 Washington 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 passed 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 passed 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 association with some of their neighbors, for starting the little caravan. A master driver was to be selected from among them, who was to be assisted 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 passing 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 Shippensburg, 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 passed 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 passed, 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 Ayrshire 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 Canal 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 Canal, 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 Canal commissioners for delays and increased expenses in the work on the canal 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 Hampshire, 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 passed in the Massachusetts 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 passengers, 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 townships 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 passengers 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 passed between New York and Philadelphia.
It may be said, loosely, that the widened trail became a road when wheeled vehicles began to pass 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 crushing through a board. Every step was retarded 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 space 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.