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The Paths of Inland Commerce; a chronicle of trail, road, and waterway by Archer Butler Hulbert
page 65 of 145 (44%)
downstream, Charleston and Wheeling were the principal
settlements which Baily first noted. Ebenezer Zane, the founder
of Wheeling, had just opened across Ohio the famous landward
route from the Monongahela country to Kentucky, which it entered
at Limestone, the present Maysville. This famous road, passing
through Zanesville, Lancaster, and Chillicothe, though at that
time safe only for men in parties, was a common route to and from
Kentucky.

On such inland pathways as this, early travelers came to take for
granted a hospitality not to be found on more frequented
thoroughfares. In this hospitality, roughness and good will,
cleanliness and filth, attempts to ape the style of Eastern towns
and habits of the most primitive kind, were singularly blended.
In one instance, the traveler might be cordially assigned by the
landlord to a good position in "the first rush for a chance at
the head of the table"; at the next stopping place he might be
coldly turned away because the proprietor "had the gout" and his
wife the "delicate blue-devils"; farther on, where "soap was
unknown, nothing clean but birds, nothing industrious but pigs,
and nothing happy but squirrels," Daniel Boone's daughter might
be seen in high-heeled shoes, attended by white servants whose
wages were a dollar a week, skirting muddy roads under a
ten-dollar bonnet and a six-dollar parasol. Or, he might emerge
from a lonely forest in Ohio or Indiana and come suddenly upon a
party of neighbors at a dreary tavern, enjoying a corn shucking
or a harvest home. Immediately dubbed "Doctor," "Squire," or
"Colonel" by the hospitable merrymakers, the passer-by would be
informed that he "should drink and lack no good thing." After he
had retired, as likely as not his quarters would be invaded at
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