Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 1).djvu/29

Rh "Whither is the paleface going?" asked an old Seneca chieftain of the indomitable Zeisberger; "why does the paleface travel such unknown roads? This is no road for white people and no white man has come this trail before."

"We reached home very late at night," wrote a brave Jesuit, "after considerable trouble—for the paths were only about half a foot wide where the snow would sustain one, and if you turned ever so little to the right or left you were in it half way up to your thighs."

When the land was once discovered, its conquest was directed along the very paths on which these explorers came. To the armies which conquered the West the Indian thoroughfares were indispensable. Washington followed narrow Indian trails while on his mission to the French on the Allegheny in 1753; in the year following he widened Nemacolin's Path across the mountains over which he hauled his swivels to Fort Necessity. Braddock followed the same rough path in the succeeding year, making a great gorge of a road which, after a century and a half, we can