less important until it became what it is today, a merely local thoroughfare. For the last two decades in the eighteenth century, the Pennsylvania Road held a preëminent position—days when a good road westward meant everything to the West. But the road could never be again what it was in the savage days of '58, '63 and '75–'82, when it was the one fortified route to the Ohio. The need for Forbes's Road passed when Forts Loudoun, Bedford, Ligonier, and Pitt were demolished. While they were standing, the open pathway between them meant everything to their defenders and to the farmers and woodsmen about them. But it meant almost as much to the fortresses far beyond in the wilderness of the Ohio Valley—Forts McIntosh, Patrick Henry, Harmar, Finney, and Washington. The vast proportion of stores and ammunition for the defenders of the Black Forest of the West passed over Forbes's Road, and its story is linked more closely than we can now realize with the occupation and the winning of the West.
Mr. McMaster has an interesting paragraph on Forbes's Road in pioneer days:
