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INDIAN THOROUGHFARES

surface of the ground. In 1834, while Dr. S. P. Hildreth was making a professional visit on Dry Ridge, between the Ohio and Little Kanawha, he was shown the old Monongahela trail on which he heard the wolves howling over the carcasses of deer which had recently been killed there. "This path was then pointed out to me," writes Dr. Hildreth, "as 'the old Indian trail,' and was doubtless the same along which Tecumseh and his party had marched."[1]

Of the many old-time trails which can be located today there is perhaps not one which has not left its print plainly on the ground. As a rule, the tracks are very plain in the case of trails which became pioneer routes. On Braddock's Road, for instance, great gorges are still to be found, five feet in depth, plowed by hundreds of pioneer wagons. On a hundred hilltops may be found a slight, gently rounding depression which, on the longer ranges, can be followed for miles. These old thoroughfares are most plain where the forests are still standing on the hilltops, for here,

  1. Hildreth's Sketches of Pioneer History, p. 205.