Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 6).djvu/39

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PILGRIMS OF THE WEST
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he became commander-in-chief of the armies of the United States at Cambridge, and but two years after the signing of the Stanwix treaty, he made the difficult journey to the Ohio River and down that river in a canoe to Virginia's new empire on the Great Kanawha, where surveys of bounty lands for his heroes of Fort Necessity were first made. Additional surveys were soon made along the Ohio and Licking Rivers.

Explorers, hunters, squatters, speculators, and bounty-land claimants—this was the heterogeneous population that was surging westward to the land of which Boone wrote. But not all came down the old thoroughfare between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains and through Cumberland Gap. Many followed northward the rough trails which descended the New and Monongahela Rivers, while many went northwesterly over Braddock's overgrown twelve-foot road or along the winding narrow track of Forbes's Road through the Pennsylvania Glades to the little frontier fortress, Fort Pitt. From the time Bouquet relieved this beleaguered garrison until the Stanwix treaty, Pittsburg, as the town was now