Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 2).djvu/144

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136
INDIAN THOROUGHFARES

ringing axes which herald the coming of the flower of Ireland's slums.

But if the army was an army of degenerates, its general was one of a thousand! Who else would have hewed such a road against such odds, with the listlessness of the colonies, whose salvation he was, and the chicanery of disreputable contractors combining to make his expedition a failure from the very beginning? You may walk over Braddock's Road from where it left the Potomac to the pool of blood where it stopped, and that rough track—its tremendous gorges which the rains of a century have not effaced, its great furrows through the open, its wide pathway through the forest—is a monument to the sheer grit and determination of the man for whom it is named and who was buried somewhere in it.

Even in the open country west of Braddock's Run the old road may be followed easily to the orchard where Braddock died, breathing those last brave words. Here Washington, it is supposed, read the service over the remains which were then buried in the very center of the road in order that