a generation, a hotbed of their wily emissaries. Through all those years when Burr and others "played fast and loose with conspiracy," the loyalty of the West was far less sure than one can easily believe. The building of the Cumberland Road was, undoubtedly, one of the influences which secured the West to the Union, and the population which at once poured into the Ohio valley undoubtedly saved the western states in embryo from greater perils than those they had known.
This road, conceived in the brains, first of Washington, then of Albert Gallatin, took its inception in 1806, when commissioners to report on the project were appointed by President Jefferson. In 1811, the first contract was let for ten miles of the road west of Cumberland, Maryland, which was its eastern terminus. The road was opened to the Ohio river in 1818.
In a moment's time an army of emigrants and pioneers were en route to the West over the great highway, regiment following regiment as the years advanced. Squalid cabins, where the hunter had lived beside the primeval thoroughfare, were pressed
