It can be believed there was little tree-cutting on these first pioneer roads. Save in the laurel regions of the Allegheny and Cumberland 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 principal 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 Canal in central New York, both offer illustrations 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 Canal 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 butt 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 massy 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 passage-way was impassable, 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 altitude. 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 Washington a deal of trouble in trying to prevent the avaricious country people from treacherously feeding the British invaders.
These roads out from Philadelphia, for instance, were used by wagons longer distances each year. Beginning back at the middle of the eighteenth century it may be said that the wagon roads grew longer and the pack-horse routes or bridle-paths grew shorter each year. The freight was brought from the seaboard cities in wagons to the end of the wagon roads and there transferred to the pack-saddles. Referring to this era we have already quoted a passage in which it is said that five hundred pack-horses have been seen at one time at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. For a longer period than was perhaps true elsewhere, Carlisle was the end of the wagon road westward. A dozen bridle-paths converged here. Here all freight was transferred to the strings of patient ponies. Loudon, Pennsylvania, was another peculiar borderland depot later on. It will be remembered that when Richard Henderson and party advanced to Kentucky in 1775 they were able to use wagons as far as Captain Joseph Martin’s “station” in Powell’s Valley. At that point all freight had to be transferred to the backs of ponies for the climb over the Cumberlands. In the days of Marcus Whitman, who opened the first road across the Rocky Mountains, Fort Laramie, Wyoming, was the terminus of wagon travel in the far West. Thus pioneer roads unfolded, as it were, joint by joint, the rapidity depending on the volume of traffic, increase of population, and topography.
Old Conestoga Freighter
The first improvement on these greater routes, after the necessary widening, was to enable wagons to avoid high ground. Here and there wagons pushed on beyond the established limit, and, finding the way not more desperate than much of the preceding “road,” had gone on and on, until at last wagons came down the western slopes of the Alleghenies, and wagon traffic began to be considered possible—much to the chagrin of the cursing pack-horse men. No sooner was this fact accomplished than some attention was paid to the road. The wagons could not go everywhere the ponies or even the heavy carts had gone. They could not climb the steep knolls and remain on the rocky ridges. The lower grounds were, therefore, pursued and the wet grounds were made passable by “corduroying”—laying logs closely together to form a solid roadbed. So far as I can learn this work was done by everybody in particular and nobody in general. Those who were in charge of wagons were, of course, the most interested in keeping them from sinking out of sight in the mud-holes. When possible, such places were skirted; when high or impassable ground prevented this, the way was “corduroyed.”