capable of several interpretations. In
general, it meant outlining the course for the new thoroughfare,
clearing away fallen timber, blazing or notching the trees so that the
traveler might not miss the track, and building bridges or laying logs
"over all the marshy, swampy, and difficult dirty places."

The streams proved serious obstacles to early traffic. It has been shown
already that the earliest routes of animal or man sought the watersheds;
the trails therefore usually encountered one stream near its junction
with another. At first, of course, fording was the common method of
crossing water, and the most advantageous fording places were generally
found near the mouths of tributary streams, where bars and islands are
frequently formed and where the water is consequently shallow. When
ferries began to be used, they were usually situated just above or below
the fords; but when the bridge succeeded the ferry, the primitive bridge
builder went back to the old fording place in order to take advantage
of the shallower water, bars, and islands. With the advent of improved
engineering, the character of river banks and currents was more
frequently taken into consideration in choosing a site for a bridge than
was the case in the olden times, but despite this fact the bridges of
today, generally speaking, span the rivers where the deer or the buffalo
splashed his way across centuries ago.

On the broader streams, where fording was impossible and traffic was
perforce carried by ferry, the canoe and the keel boat of the earliest
days gave way in time to the ordinary "flat" or barge. At first the
obligation of the ferryman to the public, though recognized by English
law, was ignored in America by legislators and monopolists alike. Men
obtained the land on both sides of the rivers at the crossing places
and served the public only at their own convenience and at their own
charges. In many cases, to encourage the opening of roads or of ferries,
national and state authorities made grants of land on the same principle
followed in later days in the case of Western railroads. Such, for
instance, was the grant to Ebenezer Zane, at Zanesville, Lancaster, and
Chillicothe in the Northwest Territory. These monopolies sometimes were
extremely profitable: a descendant of the owners of the famous
Ingles ferry across New River, on the Wilderness Road to Kentucky,
is responsible for the statement that in the heyday of travel to the
Southwest t