Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 6).djvu/195

 way, clear and open the route, and render a report upon the advisability of making a wagon road. Yet no improvement followed. The narrow path—rough, treacherous, almost impassable—remained the only course. A vivid description of what a journey over it meant in this year, 1779, has been left us by Chief-justice Robertson in an address given at Camp Madison, Franklin County, Kentucky, half a century ago:

"This beneficent enactment [the land law] brought to the country during the fall and winter of that year an unexampled tide of emigrants, who, exchanging all the comforts of their native society and homes for settlements for themselves and their children here, came like pilgrims to a wilderness to be made secure by their arms and habitable by the toil of their lives. Through privations incredible and perils thick, thousands of men, women, and children came in successive caravans, forming continuous streams of human beings, horses, cattle, and other domestic animals, all moving onward along a lonely and houseless path to a wild and cheerless land. Cast