d New York,
which was never known before."

The long Philadelphia Road from the Lancaster region into the Valley of
Virginia, by way of Wadkins on the Potomac, was used by German and Irish
traders probably as early as 1700. In 1728 the people of Maryland were
petitioning for a road from the ford of the Monocacy to the home of
Nathan Wickham. Four years later Jost Heydt, leading an immigrant party
southward, broke open a road from the York Barrens toward the Potomac
two miles above Harper's Ferry. This avenue by way of the Berkeley,
Staunton, Watauga, and Greenbrier regions to Tennessee and Kentucky--was
the longest and most important in America during the Revolutionary
period. The Virginia Assembly in 1779 appointed commissioners to view
this route and to report on the advisability of making it a wagon road
all the way to Kentucky. In 1795, efforts were made in Kentucky to
turn the Wilderness Trail into a wagon road, and in this same year the
Kentucky Legislature passed an act making the route from Crab Orchard to
Cumberland Gap a wagon road thirty feet in width.

From Pennsylvania and from Virginia commerce westward bound followed
in the main the army roads hewn out by Braddock and Forbes in their
campaigns against Fort Duquesne. In 1755, Braddock, marching from
Alexandria by way of Fort Cumberland, had opened a passage for his
artillery and wagons to Laurel Hill, near Uniontown, Pennsylvania. His
force included a corps of seamen equipped with block and tackle to raise
and lower his wagons in the steep inclines of the Alleghanies. Three
years later, Forbes, in his careful, dogged campaign, followed a
more northerly route. Advancing from Philadelphia and Carlisle, he
established Fort Bedford and Fort Ligonier as bases of supply and broke
a new road through the interminable forest which clothed the rugged
mountain ranges. From the first there was bitter rivalry between these
two routes, and the young Colonel Washington was roundly criticized by
both Forbes and Bouquet, his second in command, for his partisan
effort to "drive me down," as Forbes phrased it, into the Virginia or
Braddock's Road. This rivalry between the two routes continued when the
destruction of the French power over the roads in the interior threw
open to Pennsylvania and her southern neighbors alike the lucrative
trade of the Ohio country.

From the journals of the time may be caught faint glimpses of the toils
and dangers of travel through these wi