Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 11).djvu/64

 horses to the bitter edge of exhaustion to gain his destination ere a freeze would stall him as completely as if his wagon-bed lay on the surface of a "quicksand pit." A heavy load could not be sent over a frozen pioneer road without wrecking the vehicle. Yet in some parts the freight traffic had to go on in the winter, as the hauling of cotton to market in the southern states. Such was the frightful condition of the old roads that four and five yoke of oxen conveyed only a ton of cotton so slowly that motion was almost imperceptible; and in the winter and spring, it has been said, with perhaps some tinge of truthfulness, that one could walk on dead oxen from Jackson to Vicksburg. The Bull-skin Road of pioneer days leading from the Pickaway Plains in Ohio to Detroit was so named from the large number of cattle which died on the long, rough route, their hides, to exaggerate again, lining the way.

In our study of the Ohio River as a highway it was possible to emphasize the fact that the evolution of river craft indicated with great significance the evolution of social conditions in the region under