Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 12).djvu/33

 raphical positions were found by the buffalo and Indian, and white men have followed them there unwaveringly with turnpike and railway.

When Washington crossed the North Branch of the Potomac on the 26th of October, 1784 at "McCullochs crossing," he was on the track of what should be, a generation later, the Virginian highway across the Appalachian system into the Ohio Basin. Oddly enough Virginia had done everything, it may truthfully be said, toward building Braddock's Road to the Ohio in 1755, and, in 1758, had done as much as any colony toward building Forbes's Road. All told, Virginia had accomplished more in the way of road-building into the old Central West by 1760 than all other colonies put together. Yet, as it turned out, not one inch of either of these great thoroughfares lay in Virginia territory when independence was secured and the individual states began their struggle for existence in those "critical" after-hours. These buffalo paths through her western mountains were her only routes; they coursed through what was largely an