The Paths of Inland Commerce, A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway | Page 8

York a supreme advantage over all the other Atlantic States--a
level route to the Great Lakes and the West. The Mohawk River threads
the smiling landscape; beyond lies the "Finger Lake country" and the
valley of the Genesee. Through this romantic region ran the Mohawk
Trail, sending offshoots to Lake Champlain and the St. Lawrence, to
the Susquehanna, and to the Allegheny. A few names have been altered
in the course of years-- the Bay Path is now the Boston and Albany
Railroad, the Mohawk Trail is the New York Central, and Fort Orange
is Albany--and thus we may tell in a dozen words the story of three
centuries.
Upon Fort Orange converged the score of land and water pathways of
the fur trade of our North. These Indian trade routes were slowly
widened into colonial roads, notably the Mohawk and Catskill
turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into the Erie, Lehigh,
Nickel Plate, and New York Central railways. But from the day when
the canoe and the keel boat floated their bulky cargoes of pelts or the
heavy laden Indian pony trudged the trail, the routes of trade have been
little or nothing altered.
Traversing the line of the Alleghanies southward, the eye notes first the
break in the wall at the Delaware Water Gap, and then that long arm of
the Susquehanna, the Juniata, reaching out through dark Kittanning
Gorge to its silver playmate, the dancing Conemaugh. Here amid its
leafy aisles ran the brown and red Kittanning Trail, the main route of
the Pennsylvania traders from the rich region of York, Lancaster, and
Chambersburg. On this general alignment the Broadway Limited flies
today toward Pittsburgh and Chicago. A little to the south another

important pathway from the same region led, by way of Carlisle,
Bedford, and Ligonier, to the Ohio. The "Highland Trail" the Indian
traders called it, for it kept well on the watershed dividing the
Allegheny tributaries on the north from those of the Monongahela on
the south.
Farther to the south the scene shows a change, for the Atlantic plain
widens considerably. The Potomac River, the James, the Pedee, and the
Savannah flow through valleys much longer than those of the northern
rivers. Here in the South commerce was carried on mainly by shallop
and pinnace. The trails of the Indian skirted the rivers and offered for
trader and explorer passageway to the West, especially to the towns of
the Cherokees in the southern Alleghanies or Unakas; but the
waterways and the roads over which the hogsheads of tobacco were
rolled (hence called "rolling roads") sufficed for the needs of the thin
fringes of population settled along the rivers. Trails from Winchester in
Virginia and Frederick in Maryland focused on Cumberland at the head
of the Potomac. Beyond, to the west, the finger tips of the Potomac
interlocked closely with the Monongahela and Youghiogheny, and
through this network of mountain and river valley, by the "Shades of
Death" and Great Meadows, coiled Nemacolin's Path to the Ohio. Even
today this ancient route is in part followed by the Baltimore and Ohio
and the Western Maryland Railway.
A bird's-eye view of the southern Alleghanies shows that, while the
Atlantic plain of Virginia and the Carolinas widens out, the mountain
chains increase in number, fold on fold, from the Blue Ridge to the
ragged ranges of the Cumberlands. Few trails led across this manifold
barrier. There was a connection at Balcony Falls between the James
River and the Great Kanawha; but as a trade route it was of no such
value to the men of its day as the Chesapeake and Ohio system over the
same course is to us. As in the North, so in the South, trade avoided
obstacles by taking a roundabout, and often the longest route. In order
to double the extremity of the Unakas, for instance, the trails reached
down by the Valley of Virginia and New River to the uplands of the
Tennessee, and here, near Elizabethton, they met the trails leading up
the Broad and the Yadkin rivers from Charleston, South Carolina.
To the west rise the somber heights of Cumberland Gap. Through this
portal ran the famous "Warrior's Path," known to wandering hunters,

the "trail of iron" from Fort Watauga and Fort Chiswell, which Daniel
Boone widened for the settlers of Kentucky. To the southwest lay the
Blue Grass region of Tennessee with its various trails converging on
Nashville from almost every direction. Today the Southern Railway
enters the "Sapphire Country," in which Asheville lies, by practically
the same route as the old Rutherfordton Trail which was used for
generations by red man and pioneer from the Carolina coast. In our
entire region of the Appalachians, from the Berkshire Hills southward,
practically every old-time pathway from the seaboard to