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16 bering, and, in two decades, could hardly have been recognized as the infant which, in 1787, looked forward to a precarious and doubtful future. The boy has grown into the man in the century, but the changes of the last half century are not, perhaps, so marked as those of the first, when a wilderness was suddenly transformed into a number of imperial commonwealths.

When this West was in its teens and began suddenly outstripping itself, to the marvel of the world, one of the momentous factors in its progress was the building of a great national road, from the Potomac River to the Mississippi River, by the United States Government—a highway seven hundred miles in length, at a cost of seven millions of treasure. This ribbon of road, winding its way through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, toward the Mississippi, was one of the most important steps in that movement of national expansion which followed the conquest of the West. It is probably impossible for us to realize fully what it meant to this West when that vanguard of surveyors came down the western slopes of