The Genesee Road is presented in chapter four as a legislative creation; the whole history of this famous avenue would be practically a history of central New York. To give the more vivid impression of personal experience a chapter is devoted to a portion of Thomas Bigelow’s Tour to Niagara Falls 1805 over the Genesee Road in its earliest years, when the beautiful cities which now lie like a string of precious gems across this route were just springing into existence. For a chapter on the important “Catskill Turnpike,” which gives much information of road-building in central New York, we are indebted to Francis Whiting Halsey’s The Old New York Frontier.
The final chapter of the volume includes a number of selections from the spicy, brilliant descriptions of pioneer traveling in America which Dickens left in his American Notes, and a few pages describing an early journey on Indian trails in Missouri from Charles Augustus Murray’s Travels in North America.
A. B. H.
Marietta, Ohio, January 26, 1904.