Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 2).djvu/101

Rh Road" along the Warriors' Path to Kentucky, over which soon marched the best and bravest army that ever went west—the army of Virginian and Carolinian pioneers which dyed redder a land called "dark and bloody" since even the Indians knew it; and by them the feeble American republic laid its hands on the Mississippi river and held it. Bouquet, a Swiss as wily as any Indian, followed Forbes's rough track in the desperate days of Pontiac's rebellion and extended that road onward into Ohio in the crowning victory he achieved in 1764. Andrew Lewis, who put an end to Dunmore's war and secured the country south of the Ohio to Virginia by his victory at the mouth of the Great Kanawha in 1774, led his men over the "War Trail of Nations" from Virginia.

And after war came the deluge—of pioneers! If these old Indian routes had never been made famous in war they would be forever famous for the part they played in a later time of peace. The hosts of pioneers crowded onward the way the explorers and the armies had gone. They wore a great, deep road through the Mo-