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 to bear "the novel burden." Starting at noon, "they rested at night on the top of the mountain, like Noah's Ark on Ararat, and descended the next morning into the Valley of the Mississippi, and sailed for St. Louis." It was fifty years, to the month, since the pioneer promoter of trans-Allegheny communications, Washington, was searching in Dunkard Bottom for a pathway for keel-boats across this great divide. History was again repeated; as in the old days when, in 1758, Forbes's Road through Pennsylvania eclipsed Virginia's highway which Washington championed, Braddock's Road, because it was a more direct route from the heart of colonial life to the Ohio Basin, so now Pennsylvania's waterways, joined by a portage railway of only thirty-eight miles in length, eclipsed any and all other possible water routes to the Ohio Valley by being actually opened to commerce. These repetitions of history illustrate Pennsylvania's keystone position in the United States, so far as the seaboard and the commercial centers