For the beginnings of the paths of our inland commerce, we must look far back into the dim prehistoric ages of America.The earliest routes that threaded the continent were the streams and the tracks beaten out by the heavier four-footed animals.The Indian hunter followed the migrations of the animals and the streams that would float his light canoe.Today the main lines of travel and transportation for the most part still cling to these primeval pathways.
In their wanderings, man and beast alike sought the heights, the passes that pierced the mountain chains, and the headwaters of navigable rivers.On the ridges the forest growth was lightest and there was little obstruction from fallen timber; rain and frost caused least damage by erosion; and the winds swept the trails clear of leaves in summer and of snow in winter.Here lay the easiest paths for the heavy, blundering buffalo and the roving elk and moose and deer.Here, high up in the sun, where the outlook was unobstructed and signal fires could be seen from every direction, on the longest watersheds, curving around river and swamp, ran the earliest travel routes of the aboriginal inhabitants and of their successors, the red men of historic times.For their encampments and towns these peoples seem to have preferred the more sheltered ground along the smaller streams;but, when they fared abroad to hunt, to trade, to wage war, to seek new, material for pipe and amulet, they followed in the main the highest ways.
If in imagination one surveys the eastern half of the North American continent from one of the strategic passageways of the Alleghanies, say from Cumberland Gap or from above Kittanning Gorge, the outstanding feature in the picture will be the Appalachian barrier that separates the interior from the Atlantic coast.To the north lie the Adirondacks and the Berkshire Hills, hedging New England in close to the ocean.Two glittering waterways lie east and west of these heights--the Connecticut and the Hudson.Upon the valleys of these two rivers converged the two deeply worn pathways of the Puritan, the Old Bay Path and the Connecticut Path.By way of Westfield River, that silver tributary which joins the Connecticut at Springfield, Massachusetts, the Bay Path surmounted the Berkshire highlands and united old Massachusetts to the upper Hudson Valley near Fort Orange, now Albany.
Here, north of the Catskills, the Appalachian barrier subsides and gives New York a supreme advantage over all the other Atlantic States--a level route to the Great Lakes and the West.
The Mohawk River threads the smiling landscape; beyond lies the "Finger Lake country" and the valley of the Genesee.Through this romantic region ran the Mohawk Trail, sending offshoots to Lake Champlain and the St.Lawrence, to the Susquehanna, and to the Allegheny.A few names have been altered in the course of years--the Bay Path is now the Boston and Albany Railroad, the Mohawk Trail is the New York Central, and Fort Orange is Albany--and thus we may tell in a dozen words the story of three centuries.
Upon Fort Orange converged the score of land and water pathways of the fur trade of our North.These Indian trade routes were slowly widened into colonial roads, notably the Mohawk and Catskill turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into the Erie, Lehigh, Nickel Plate, and New York Central railways.But from the day when the canoe and the keel boat floated their bulky cargoes of pelts or the heavy laden Indian pony trudged the trail, the routes of trade have been little or nothing altered.
Traversing the line of the Alleghanies southward, the eye notes first the break in the wall at the Delaware Water Gap, and then that long arm of the Susquehanna, the Juniata, reaching out through dark Kittanning Gorge to its silver playmate, the dancing Conemaugh.Here amid its leafy aisles ran the brown and red Kittanning Trail, the main route of the Pennsylvania traders from the rich region of York, Lancaster, and Chambersburg.On this general alignment the Broadway Limited flies today toward Pittsburgh and Chicago.A little to the south another important pathway from the same region led, by way of Carlisle, Bedford, and Ligonier, to the Ohio.The "Highland Trail" the Indian traders called it, for it kept well on the watershed dividing the Allegheny tributaries on the north from those of the Monongahela on the south.
Farther to the south the scene shows a change, for the Atlantic plain widens considerably.The Potomac River, the James, the Pedee, and the Savannah flow through valleys much longer than those of the northern rivers.Here in the South commerce was carried on mainly by shallop and pinnace.The trails of the Indian skirted the rivers and offered for trader and explorer passageway to the West, especially to the towns of the Cherokees in the southern Alleghanies or Unakas; but the waterways and the roads over which the hogsheads of tobacco were rolled (hence called "rolling roads") sufficed for the needs of the thin fringes of population settled along the rivers.Trails from Winchester in Virginia and Frederick in Maryland focused on Cumberland at the head of the Potomac.Beyond, to the west, the finger tips of the Potomac interlocked closely with the Monongahela and Youghiogheny, and through this network of mountain and river valley, by the "Shades of Death" and Great Meadows, coiled Nemacolin's Path to the Ohio.Even today this ancient route is in part followed by the Baltimore and Ohio and the Western Maryland Railway.
