marks of wagon wheels or of the heavy ordinance trains."[1]
A happy interest attaches to an old route like Wayne's, from the very fact that the labor spent in hewing it out and in transporting over it vast quantities of provisions and ammunition was not expended in vain. Wayne's Road, like Forbes's route across the Alleghenies, led to victory; the dark winding tracks of the armies of Braddock and St. Clair possess a romantic element that is fascinating in the extreme, but wholly unsatisfactory. There is an inspiration in following the rough tracks of men who won which is not found in the paths of men who, after struggles perhaps more heroic because facing greater odds, failed. Wayne was a thousand times better equipped for his campaign than was St. Clair. Before his campaign, the savage war was not taken very seriously. Now proper preparations had been made, approximately sufficient stores accumulated, the official personnel sifted down; and as the "Legion of the United States" went swiftly forward in the October sunlight of
- ↑ History of Preble County, Ohio (1881), p. 22.
