the horses, but it was enough, considering the scanty subsistence
allowed them on the journey. The common price of a bushel of alum
salt, at an early period, was a good cow and a calf.

Thus, with the English flag afloat at Fort Pitt, as Duquesne was
renamed after its capture, a new day dawned for the great region
to the West. Beyond the Alleghanies and as far as the Rockies, a
new science of transportation was now to be learned--the art of
finding the dividing ridge. Here the first routes, like the
"Great Trail" from Pittsburgh to Detroit, struck out with an
assurance that is in marvelous agreement with the findings of the
surveyors of a later day. The railways, when they came, found the
valleys and penetrated with their tunnels the watersheds from the
heads of the streams of one drainage area to the streams of
another. Thus on the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio, the
Southern, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and other railroads, important
tunnels are to be found lying immediately under the Red Man's
trail which clung to the long ascending slope and held
persistently to the dividing ridges.

Even this necessarily brief survey shows plainly how that
preeminently American institution, the ridge road, came about.
East and west, it was the legitimate and natural successor to the
ancient trail. With the coming of the wagon, whose rattle was
heard among the hills as early as Braddock's campaign, the
process of lowering these paths from the heights was inevitably
begun, and it was to the riverways that men first looked for a
solution of the difficult problems of inland commerce. Eventually
the paths of inland commerce constituted a vast network of
canals, roads, and railway lines in those very valleys to which