Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 10).djvu/72

72 and the interior population became considerable, the Ohio division of the road became a crowded thoroughfare. An old stage-driver in eastern Ohio remembers when business was such that he and his companion Knights of Rein and Whip never went to bed for twenty nights, and more than a hundred teams might have been met in a score of miles.

When the road was built to Wheeling, its greatest mission was accomplished—the portage path across the mountains was completed to a point where river navigation was almost always available. And yet less than half of the road was finished. It now touched the eastern extremity of the great state whose public lands were being sold in order to pay for its building. Westward lay the growing states of Indiana and Illinois, a per cent of the sale of