Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/332

 road is very rugged and difficult over the mountains; and we were often led to comment upon the arduous enterprize of the unfortunate General Braddock, by whom it was cut. Obliged to make a pass for his army and waggons, "through unfrequented woods and dangerous defiles over mountains deemed impassable," the toil and fatigue of his pioneers and soldiers must have been indescribably great. But it was here that his precursor, the youthful, gathered some of his earliest laurels.

the whole of this journey there are but a few scattered habitations, of a very ordinary appearance. The lands, except in the vallies, are of an indifferent quality, and offer but little encouragement to the cultivator.

Alleghany mountains, which we had now passed, consist of several nearly parallel ridges, rising in remote parts of {25} New-York and New-Jersey, and running a southwesterly course till they are lost in the flat lands of West-Florida. They have not a continued top, but are rather a row or chain of distinct hills. There are frequent and large vallies disjoining the several eminences; some of them so deep as to admit a passage for the rivers which empty themselves into the Atlantic Ocean on the East, and into the Gulph of Mexico on the South. It is only