Westward from the Susquehanna, in what we shall know in a later chapter as the Great Valley, are some comfortable old towns bearing the names of Carlisle, Shippensburg, and Chambersburg. The pike passes through these and on to the old town of Bedford. Then it enters a high, rough strip of land that was covered with forest long after Philadelphia had become a city and the farmers about Lancaster had built their great houses and barns. At the other end of this wilderness was Pittsburg. The road from Bedford to Pittsburg was cut through the woods in 1758, in the time of the French and Indian wars, and is sometimes called Forbes’s road, from the general who directed the making of it. It was used in the time of the Revolution, and many forts were built to guard it. [Illustration: FIG. 25. OLD ROAD HOUSE, ONE MILE WEST OF CHAMBERSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA] This roadway was so important that the Pennsylvania government, a few years after the Revolutionary War, took it in hand and improved it. Thus there was a line of travel over the older highway to Lancaster and Bedford, and thence over the newer road to Pittsburg. The whole road led from the seaboard to the Ohio river and was often called the Pittsburg pike. We have now learned of two great, well-trodden routes from east to west,--the route of the Hudson and the Mohawk through New York, and the route through the southern parts of Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to Pittsburg. In laying out such roads the pioneers almost always followed trails that the Indians had made. For long generations the red men had followed the same paths, beating them smooth and deep in the forest earth. The white men widened the trail by using pack horses, loading the beasts well with all sorts of things. The next step was to cut away trees, take out the stones, and make roads for wagons. Carrying by pack horses, however, had become a great business, and the horse owners were very angry when the wagons began to take away their trade. In 1830 a Pennsylvania citizen, then nearly a hundred years old, told of seeing the first wagon reach Carlisle, and he remembered how furious the “packers” were because they feared that they would lose their business. It did not occur to them that they could harness their horses into teams, buy strong wagons, and be ready to make money in the new way instead of the old. The horse owners were quite as angry about stagecoaches, and they sometimes destroyed the coaches and injured the passengers to vent their spite. Moreover, as people often like an excuse for doing wrong, and for harboring mean feelings, these men said that the stage business was bad for the cloth makers and tailors, because people could ride in coaches without spoiling their fine clothes, whereas when they rode on horseback they soon ruined them and had to buy new ones. Almost any excuse will serve those to whom no way seems good except their own.