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