Will’s Creek was the last Virginian outpost, where Fort Cumberland was soon erected. Already the Ohio Company had located a store house at this point. Onward the Indian trail wound in and out through the Alleghenies, over the successive ranges known as Wills’, Savage and Meadow Mountains. From the latter it dropped down into Little Meadows. Here in the open ground, covered with rank grasses, the first of the western waters was crossed, a branch of the Youghiogeny River. From “Little Crossings,” as the ford was called, the narrow trail vaulted Negro Mountain and came down upon the upper Youghiogeny, this ford here being named “Big Crossings.” Another climb over Briery Mountain brought the traveller down into Great Meadows, the largest tract of open land in the Alleghenies. By a zig-zag climb of five miles the summit of the last of the Allegheny ranges--Laurel Hill--was reached, where the path turned northward and followed the line of hills, by Christopher Gist’s clearing on what is known as Mount Braddock, toward the lower Youghiogeny, at “Stewart’s Crossing.” Thence the trail ran down the point of land where Pittsburg now lies in its clouds of smoke between the “Forks of the Ohio.” This trace of the buffalo and portage path of the Indian had no name until it took that of a Delaware Indian, Nemacolin, who blazed its course, under the direction of Captain Thomas Cresap, for the Ohio Company. To those who love to look back to beginnings, and read great things in small, this Indian path, with its border of wounded trees, leading across the first great divide into the central west, is worthy of contemplation. Each tree starred whitely by the Indian’s axe spoke of Saxon conquest and commerce, one and inseparable. In every act of the great world-drama now on the boards this little trail with its blazed trees lies in the foreground. And the rise of the curtain shows the lad Washington and his party of seven horsemen, led by the bold guide Christopher Gist, setting out from Will’s Creek on the 15th of November, 1753. The character of the journey is nowhere better described than in Washington’s words when he engaged Gist’s services: “I engaged Mr. _Gist_ to pilot us out.”