ountry run east and west. Intercourse between
the mighty interior west and the sea coast is the great principle of
our commercial prosperity." These are the words of Edward Everett in
advocating the Boston and Albany Railroad. In effect Washington had
uttered those same words half a century earlier when he gave momentum to
an era filled with energetic but unsuccessful efforts to join with the
waters of the West the rivers reaching inland from the Atlantic. The
fact that American engineering science had not in his day reached a
point where it could cope with this problem successfully should in no
wise lessen our admiration for the man who had thus caught the vision of
a nation united and unified by improved methods of transportation.

CHAPTER II. The Red Man's Trail

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