Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 1).djvu/30

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26
HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA

follow as plainly as a new-made furrow behind a plow—even to the ford and charnel-ground where the thin red line was swept away in that torrent of lurking flame. Three years later, prejudiced against Virginia's Braddock Road, the dying but indomitable Forbes—truly, as the Indians called him, a Head of Iron—mowed another swath of a road westward through Carlisle and Bedford to Fort Duquesne, that Pennsylvania herself might have a road through her own province to the Ohio river. Braddock's Road paused abruptly on the brink of a bloody ravine seven miles from Pittsburg; but the home-stretch of the road built by this Head of Iron is the beautiful Forbes Avenue of today.

The Great Trail of the West was the highway between Pittsburg and Detroit, and its story is the bloody story of the Revolutionary War in the West. For centuries this path had been a famed thoroughfare, throwing its great sinuous lengths over the watersheds from the lakes to the "Forks of the Ohio." Over this track the brave Swiss Bouquet led the first English army that crossed the Ohio river, making a