Braddock's Road and Three Relative PapersHulbert, Archer Butler
History
Braddock's Road and Three Relative Papers
Hulbert, Archer Butler
Braddock's Campaign, 1755; Roads -- United States; United States Highway 40
come upon this road without pausing, or to write of it without a
tribute."
This is particularly true of Braddock's Road when you find it in the
forests; everything that savage mark tells in the open country is
reëchoed in mightier tones within the shadows of the woods. There the
wide strange track is like nothing of which you ever heard or read. It
looks nothing like a roadway. It is plainly not the track of a tornado,
though its width and straight course in certain places would suggest
this. Yet it is never the same in two places; here, it is a wide
straight aisle covered with rank weeds in the center of the low, wet
course; there, the forests impinge upon it where the ground is drier;
here, it appears like the abandoned bed of a brook, the large stones
removed from its track lying on each side as though strewn there by a
river's torrent; there, it swings quickly at right angles near the open
where the whole width is covered with velvet grass radiant in the
sunshine which can reach it here. In the forests more than elsewhere the
deep furrow of the roadway has remained wet, and for this reason trees
have not come up. At many points the road ran into marshy ground and
here a large number of roundabout courses speak of the desperate
struggles the old teamsters had on this early track a century ago. And
now and then as you pass along, scattered blocks and remnants of stone
chimneys mark the sites of ancient taverns and homesteads.
In the forests it is easy to conjure up the scene when this old track
was opened--for it was cut through a "wooden country," to use an
expression common among the pioneers. Here you can see the long line of
sorry wagons standing in the road when the army is encamped; and though
many of them seem unable to carry their loads one foot further--yet
there is ever the ringing chorus of the axes of six hundred choppers
sounding through the twilight of the hot May evening. It is almost
suffocating in the forests when the wind does not blow, and the army is
unused to the scorching American summer which has come early this year.
The wagon train is very long, and though the van may have halted on
level ground, the line behind stretches down and up the shadowy ravines.
The wagons are blocked in all conceivable positions on the hillsides.
The condition of the horses is pitiful beyond description. If some are
near to the brook or spring, others are far away. Some horses will never
find water tonight. To the right and left the sentinels are lost in the
surrounding gloom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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