The road is very rugged and difficult over the mountains; and we were often led to comment upon the arduous enterprize of the unfortunate General Braddock, by whom it was cut. Obliged to make a pass for his army and waggons, "through unfrequented woods and dangerous defiles over mountains deemed impassable,"[1] the toil and fatigue of his pioneers and soldiers must have been indescribably great. But it was here that his precursor, the youthful Washington, gathered some of his earliest laurels.[2]
During the whole of this journey there are but a few scattered habitations, of a very ordinary appearance. The lands, except in the vallies, are of an indifferent quality, and offer but little encouragement to the cultivator.
The Alleghany mountains, which we had now passed, consist of several nearly parallel ridges, rising in remote parts of {25} New-York and New-Jersey, and running a southwesterly course till they are lost in the flat lands of West-Florida. They have not a continued top, but are rather a row or chain of distinct hills. There are frequent and large vallies disjoining the several eminences; some of them so deep as to admit a passage for the rivers which empty themselves into the Atlantic Ocean on the East, and into the Gulph of Mexico on the South. It is only
- ↑ See Gen. Braddock's letter to Sir T. Robinson, June 5th, 1755.—Harris.
- ↑ Harris's allusions to the various roads are confusing and misleading. The road (Pennsylvania State) which he left to the north, passing through Ligonier and Greensburg, followed in the main the route cut (1758) for Forbes's army. Braddock's Road lay much to the south of this, going out from Fort Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac. The question of the availability of these two roads was a point at issue during Forbes's campaign. See Hulbert, Historic Highways of America (Cleveland, 1903), vols. iv, v. Harris took neither Forbes's Road, nor Braddock's (later the line of the Cumberland National Road), but what was locally known as the "Old Glade Road," a branch of Forbes's Road, leaving the latter four miles beyond Bedford, and crossing to the Youghiogheny through Somerset and Mount Pleasant.—Ed.
