Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 7).djvu/164

 ical story, "or near October 30th, as near as I remember, in the afternoon we came upon a party of nearly or quite a hundred Frenchmen rolling logs into a ravine in the bottom of a deep gulf, and digging into the steep sides of the gulf for a road, apparently, at a point that I now (1826) know to have been on the south border of the village of Westfield We came upon this party very suddenly and unexpectedly, for we had supposed that the whole matter of a carrying place had been transferred to Erie As it was we escaped and witnessed the completion of the road from Lake Erie to Lake Chautauqua. on the third or fourth day the whole party embarked in their boats and moved eastward."

Passing west of Presque Isle, the first stream offering another passage way to the Ohio was the Cuyahoga River. Ascending this stream about twenty-five miles, an eight-mile portage, almost within the city limits of Akron, Ohio, offered the traveler a passage way to the Tuscarawas branch of