Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 2).djvu/141

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AN EXPLORER'S NOTES
133

hills, or Braddock's great road which nearly followed the Indian's course, or the Cumberland Road which followed closely the general alignment of Braddock's Road. By any route the journey will be an inspiration which no description can by any means convey.

If you follow the Indian path from hilltop to hilltop you will seem to see yet the blazes on the trees made by Cresap's Indians for the Virginian gentlemen who were eager and anxious to try that celebrated test case with France to decide who was master in these western forests. For this little path, starred white by the Indian's ax, was more than a mere road westward, much more than a blazed trader's course to the Ohio. It was a path for Saxon commerce, and if for commerce then for conquest, as the quick-witted Frenchmen well knew—and nothing could have brought on that decisive war more quickly than the blazing of that Indian trail and the granting of the one hundred thousand acres to which it led.

You may travel that famous path with the little company of men who set out westward over it in 1752 to spy out the West