CHAPTER I
WASHINGTON AND THE WEST
IF you journey today from Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac, across the Alleghanies to Pittsburg on the Ohio, you will follow the most historic highway of America, through scenes as memorable as any on our continent.
You may make this journey on any of the three thoroughfares: by the Cumberland Road, with all its memorials of the gay coaching days "when life was interwoven with white and purple," by Braddock's Road, which was used until the Cumberland Road was opened in 1818, or by Washington's Road, built over the famous Indian trail known during the first half of the eighteenth century as Nemacolin's Path. In certain parts all three courses are identical, the two latter being generally so; and between these three "streams of
