Archer Butler Hulbert

“ And come what may, this zig-zag pathway through Powell’s Valley and Cumberland Gap can never be effaced—never forgotten. The footsteps of the tens of thousands who have passed over it, exhausted though each pilgrim may have been, have left a trace that a thousand years cannot eradicate. And so long as the print of those weary feet can be seen in dark Powell’s Valley, on Cumberland Gap, and beside Yellow and Rockcastle Creeks, so long will there be a memorial left to perpetuate the heroism of the first Kentuckians—and the memory of what the Middle West owes to Virginia and her neighbors. ”

“ Never did the success of a campaign in the history of war depend more on the sagacity, bravery, and personal knowledge of a single commanding officer. This daring Swiss was everywhere and everything. He knew that the enemy, though they retired before him even as he approached Fort Ligonier, were watching every movement of the coming army. He knew they were cognizant of his weakness, the debility of his men, the lack of provision, the paucity of scouts and spies. He knew, and so did the silent, lurking spies of the enemy, that Braddock’s slain outnumbered his whole force. ”

“ You are moving, now, with the thin line of scarlet uniformed Virginians; you are standing in the hastily constructed earthen fort; if it rains, you look up to the dim outlines of the wooded hills as the tireless young Washington did when his ignorant interpreter betrayed him to the intriguing French commander; you march with Braddock's thin red line to that charnel ground beyond the bloody ford—you stand at Braddock's grave while the army wagons hurry over it to obliterate its sight from savage eyes. ”

“ Had they not awakened to the task of shattering that chain it is doubtful if the expansion of the colonies could ever have meant what it has to the western world. Could Virginia have borne a son in the western wilderness, Kentucky by name, if France had held the Ohio Valley? Could North Carolina have given birth to a Tennessee if France had made good her claim to the Mississippi? Could New England and New York and Pennsylvania have produced the fruits the nineteenth century saw blossom in the Old Northwest if France had maintained her hold within that mighty empire? ”

“ Born in a home almost by the wayside of the old Bay Path, I feel deeply the inexplicable charm which attaches itself to these old paths or trails. I have ridden hundreds of miles on these various Indian paths and I ever love to trace the roadway where it is now the broad travelled road, and where it turns aside in an overgrown and narrow lane which is today almost as neglected and wild as the old path. ”

“ Between the French and English colonies lay this black forest stretching from Maine through New York and Pennsylvania and Virginia to the Gulf of Mexico. It seemed, to the French, the silliest dream imaginable for the English to plan to pierce this forest and conquer New France. To reach any of the French forts a long passage by half-known courses through an inhospitable wilderness was necessary; and the French knew by a century of experience what a Herculean task it was to carry troops and stores over the inland water and land ways of primeval America. ”

“ The French had come down the rivers from the Great Lakes to seize the Ohio Valley; the colonists had pushed slowly across the Alleghanies to occupy the same splendid land. Nothing but war could have settled such a bitter quarrel; and, as the Clark boy now looked for the first time upon the relics of those small but savage battles, his heart no doubt warmed to his Virginian patriots who had saved the West to America. How little did the lad know that there was another savage war to be fought for this Ohio Valley, and that he himself was to be its hero! ”

“ No work in America before its time began to compare in magnitude with grubbing that sixty-foot aisle from Lake Erie to the Hudson and the digging of a forty-foot canal in its center.
Since necessity is the mother of invention, it is not strange that here in the New York woods should have been perfected some strange machinery—great tugging monsters which should bodily haul down immense trees with a crash and pluck out green stumps with single groan. ”

“ When this West was in its teens and began suddenly outstripping itself, to the marvel of the world, one of the momentous factors in its progress was the building of a great national road, from the Potomac River to the Mississippi River, by the United States Government—a highway seven hundred miles in length, at a cost of seven millions of treasure. This ribbon of road, winding its way through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, toward the Mississippi, was one of the most important steps in that movement of national expansion which followed the conquest of the West. ”

“ Of all streams the majestic Ohio, alone, moves on much as of old; and, though many islands have passed from sight, there is hardly a mile in all her course which does not recall, in name, the days when that river was the great highway through the hunting-ground of the Iroquois and of the race of "men who wore hats" who came upon its tide to found the empires which today exist along its sweeping shores. And yet the Ohio is soon to undergo great changes which will materially alter its aspect. ”

“ Such fairy-like sounds are not to be explained. Their appeal is to the imagination only. They are so faint, so far away, that they almost escape the ear, as the lunar bow and the fluted tints of the American Fall almost escape the eye. And yet we need not fear to lose them, for they are as real as the deep bass of the cataracts.
Whether it be the resounding waterfall producing this wondrous harmony of the floods, or the most charming choral of the Rapids, the music of Niagara on the mind properly adjusted and attuned must create a most profound impression of repose. ”

“ How the nation believed it knew the man! How much reputation he had gained, while those by his side lost all of theirs! What a hero—of many defeats! What a man to fight England to a standstill after many a wary, difficult retreat and dearly fought battle-field! Aye—but he had been to school with Gates and Mercer and Gladwin, Lewis and Boone, and Stephen, on Braddock’s twelve-foot swath of a road in the Alleghanies!
It was more than a century ago that George Washington died at Mount Vernon. ”

“ They are as essential to purity of mind and soul as to healthfulness of body. Out beyond the confines of the city, with its dust and dirt and filth, morally and physically, these are to be found, and good roads help to find them. What peace and inspiration may come from flowers and music, brooks and waterfalls! How the mountains pointing heavenward, yesterday battling with storms, today bathed with sunshine, bid you stand firm, walk erect, look upward, cherish hope, and for light and guidance to call upon the Creator of all light and of all wisdom! ”

“ You may walk over Braddock's Road from where it left the Potomac to the pool of blood where it stopped, and that rough track—its tremendous gorges which the rains of a century have not effaced, its great furrows through the open, its wide pathway through the forest—is a monument to the sheer grit and determination of the man for whom it is named and who was buried somewhere in it. ”

“ Beside this all-night march from Great Meadows to Washington’s Spring, Wolf’s ascent to the Plains of Abraham at Quebec, was a past-time. The climb up from Wolf’s Cove (all romantic accounts and pictures to the contrary notwithstanding) was an exceedingly easy march up a valley that hardly deserved to be called steep. A child can run along Wolfe’s path at any point from top to bottom. A man in full daylight today, can walk over Washington’s five mile course to Laurel Hill in half the time the little army needed on that black night. ”

“ When the railheads of these eager Atlantic promoters were laid down at Buffalo on Lake Erie and at Pittsburgh on the Ohio they looked out on a new world. The centaurs of the Western rivers were no less things of the far past than the tinkling bells borne by the ancient ponies of the pack-horse trade. The sons of this new West had their eyes riveted on the commerce of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. With road, canal, steamboat, and railway, they were renewing the struggle of their fathers but for prizes greater than their fathers ever knew. ”

“ If the ordinary trail was a Road of Iron, what of the portage path—which so often led over cliffs and mountain spurs in going around a waterfall or rapid? But these were not the most difficult portages. There were many carrying places which, uniting heads of streams or lakes, ran over high mountains, through the most impenetrable fastnesses—paths fit only for mountain goats. Yet up these rough steeps the missionaries of the Cross, soldiers, and traders forced their way, slipping, sliding, seizing now and again at any object which would offer assistance. ”

“ The traveler enters the city of Nazareth on a Roman road which has been used, perhaps, since the Christian era dawned. Every line is typical of Rome; every block of stone speaks of Roman power and Roman will. And ancient roads come down from the Roman standard in a descending scale even as the civilizations which built them. The main thoroughfare from the shore of the Yellow Sea to the capital of Korea, used by millions for millenniums, has never been more than the bridle path it is today—fit emblem of a people without a hope in the world, an apathetic, hermit nation. ”

“ It is much the same delight as that felt in traversing a winding woodland road, intensified many fold. The incessant change of scenery, the continued surprises, the objects passed unseen yet not unguessed, those half-seen through a leafy vista amid the shimmering green; the pathway just in front very plain, but twenty feet beyond as absolutely hidden from your eyes as though it were a thousand miles away—such is the romance of following a trail. One’s mind keeps as active as when looking at Niagara, and it [Pg 17] is lulled by the lapsing of those leaves as if by the roar of that cataract. ”

“ In those fifty years a Tennessee, a Kentucky, an Ohio, and an Indiana and Illinois had sprung up out of an unknown wilderness as if a magician's wand had touched, one by one, the falling petals of its buckeye blossoms. Thus, New France had been acquired by a great kingdom, but the power of assimilation lay in the genius of the common people of England's seaboard colonies for home-building and land-clearing. Soon the era of brutal individualism passed from the Middle West and the old Northwest ”

“ Washington wrote the governor, "to express some surprise, that we alone should be so tenacious of our liberty as not to invest a power, where interest and policy so unanswerably demand it. . . Do we not know, that every nation under the sun finds its account therein, and that, without it, no order or regularity can be observed? Why then should it be expected from us, who are all young and inexperienced, to govern and keep up a proper spirit of discipline without laws, when the best and most experienced can scarcely do it with them?" ”

“ One cannot go a single mile over it without becoming deeply impressed with the evidence of the age and the individuality of the old Cumberland Road. There is nothing like it in the United States. Leaping the Ohio at Wheeling, the Cumberland Road throws itself across Ohio and Indiana, straight as an arrow, like an ancient elevated pathway of the gods, chopping hills in twain at a blow, traversing the lowlands on high grades like a railroad bed, vaulting river and stream on massive bridges of unparalleled size. ”

“ The tense, smooth slant of water at the margin of the American fall is not deep enough to be green. In the sunshine it is a clear amber, and when shadowed, a brown that is darker, yet just as pure. But wherever the Canadian fall is visible its green crest is conspicuous. Far down-stream, nearly two miles away, where the railroad-bridge crosses the gorge, it shows like a little emerald strung on a narrow band of pearl. ”

“ In no case does any state seem to have profited by the experience of any other. New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland each boldly attacked the problem of the improvement of their rivers, the Mohawk, Juniata, and Potomac, without in the least profiting by the experience of the others. It was New York which first broke away from the old ideas, upon which millions of dollars had been squandered, and built her Erie Canal, which soon turned doubt and derision into a vast tumult of applause. Yet it must be remembered that the New York canal had an easy path to follow. ”

“ Greed of the great round dollar has been the commanding passion, and nowhere has it burned more fiercely. All the crimes, treacheries, deceptions, and frauds practiced under the sun have been repeated on the Ohio between Pittsburg and Cairo. Some, perhaps unknown elsewhere, have here been committed. But here, too, that old-time clear love of living for life’s sake only, the thing which makes sailors sing the world over, was deeply felt. In its lower extremities the river reaches practically southern climes while its northern arms reach out into New York and Pennsylvania. ”

“ They remember, and always will remember, the burning words of Washington written more than ten years after the close of the Revolution: "All the difficulties we encounter with the Indians, their hostilities, the murder of helpless women and children along all our frontiers, results from the conduct of the agents of Great Britain in this country." There are today, in hundreds of homes of descendants of the pioneers in Kentucky, memories of the inhuman barbarities of British officers during the Revolution; these will never be forgotten, and will never fail to prejudice generations yet unborn. ”

“ Before him to his left on the hillside his newly-made road crawled eastward into the hills. The Indian trail followed the edge of the forest westward to Laurel Hill, five miles distant, and on to Fort Duquesne.
On this faint opening into the western forest the little army and its youthful commander kept their eyes as the sun dropped behind the hills closing an anxious day and bringing a dreaded night. How large the body of French might have been, not one of the one hundred and fifty men knew. How far away they might be no one could guess. ”

“ Over the heroic and persistent efforts of George Washington, to make a feeble republic strong through unity, there is no obscurity. America won the West from England as England had won it from France—by conquest. Brave men were found who did what neither England nor France did do, settle the wilderness and begin the transformation of it. Large colonies of hardy men and women had gone into the Ohio valley, carrying in their hands the blessed Ordinance and guided by the very star of empire. ”

“ Here the symbol of promise is brought down within one's very reach; above, around, on all sides are to be seen colours rivalling the conception of any artist—whole circles of bows, quarter circles, half circles, here within one's very grasp. The far fabled pot of gold is here a boiling, seething mass of running, shimmering silver. If possible, more glorious than all else, up above, along the sky-line, there appears the shining crest of the American Fall, glimmering in the sunlight like the silvery range of some snow-covered mountains. ”

“ The great presidents which Virginia has given to the nation, whose monuments are all around us, whose remains rest in your midst, whose fame is immortal, drew life and inspiration from rural homes. The typical American today is the American farmer. The city life, with its bustle and stir, its hurry and rush, its feverish anxiety for wealth, position, and rank in society, its fretting over ceremonies and precedents, is breaking down the health and intellect and the morals of its inhabitants. ”

“ It is these portage paths for which we shall look as we proceed westward. As we pass, one by one, these slight roadways across the backbone of the continent, whether they be miles in length or only rods, they must speak to us as almost nothing else can, today, of the thousand dreams of conquest entertained by the first Europeans who traversed them, of the thousand hopes that were rising of a New France richer and more glorious than the old. ”

“ It was a pathless desert; it was a maze 2 of trails, trodden out by deer, buffalo, and Indian. Its great riverways were broad avenues for voyagers and explorers; they were treacherous gorges filled with the plunder of a million floods. It was a rich soil, a land of plenty; the natives were seldom more than a day removed from starvation. Within its broad confines could dwell a great people; but it was as inaccessible as the interior of China. It had a great commercial future; yet its gigantic distances and natural obstructions defied all known means of transportation. ”

“ Many of the heights over which Washington passed on that rough ride look today much as they did a century and a half ago—for a century is a short period in the depths of the Alleghanies. And as you peer into the valley where the once famous Cumberland Road winds along, you will remember that it became the realization of the youthful Virginian's earliest dream; for while moving westward over the Indian path in 1752, Washington was already planning a highway which should bind the East and the West—a dream that so wonderfully came true when the next century was only eighteen years of age. ”

“ Now, we are looking down—from the Indian's point of vantage. Perhaps the red man rarely looked up, save to the sun and stars or the storm cloud, for he lived on the heights and his paths were not only highways, they were the highestways. As you move on, if your mind is keen toward the long ago, the cleared hillsides become wooded again, you see the darkling valley and hear its rivulet; far beyond, the next mountain range appears as it did to other eyes in other days—and soon you are looking through the eyes of the heroes of these valleys, Washington, or his comrades Stephen or Lewis. ”

“ Thus ended this, the spectacular battle of Queenston Heights. In many ways it was typical of so many battles in American military annals; the eagerness of hot-headed militia to hear the guns popping, the daring attack, the heroism of cool, undaunted officers, the loss of enthusiasm as the struggle wore on, the final conflict of regular and militia, the seemingly inexcusable lack of interest on the part of the non-combatants, the flight and surrender—all are typical. ”