In all this varied assortment of population, it is a tribute to the natural leadership of the Tidewater Virginian that he maintained his supremacy and control. From him the county inherits all that is best and most attractive in its social life--the courtesy of its people, the unfailing hospitality, the love of social intercourse, the ardour for outdoor sports, particularly the devotion to horses, dogs and fox-hunting, all of which so definitely distinguish it today and contribute to the outstanding and well-recognized charm of its life. CHAPTER VI ROADS AND BOUNDARIES We have mentioned in the foregoing pages that an unusual feature in the settlement of these Stafford or Prince William backwoods, soon to be known as Loudoun, was not only the diversity of origin of the new population but that it came almost simultaneously from the north and the south and the west as well as from the Tidewater east. As the falls of the Potomac and Rappahannock blocked continuous water transport from the older settlements, the pioneers all were forced to come through the woodland trails and these trails or roads, if they could be then so called, now demand our attention. What one might call the Appian Way of Piedmont, the _longarum regina viarum_ as Statius calls the Roman road, was undoubtedly that aboriginal trail which, perhaps beginning as a buffalo path,[35] was followed habitually by the Indians in their north-south journeys to the earliest knowledge of the whites and appears in the records of the Colony at a very early date. The Carolina Road, as it is best known, became a great highway between the north and the south and if our surmise be correct that, in common with so many of our earliest colonial roads, it owes its origin to a beaten trail made by the heavier animals of the forest, it was probably used by the Manahoacks and their predecessor tribes long before the Susquehannocks frequented it in the latter half of the seventeenth century, not only on their trading journeys between the Dutch of Manhattan and the Carolina Indians, but in their war forays as well. The Iroquois of New York, as we have seen, followed their Susquehannock kindred to Piedmont and in Spotswood's day it was their ordinary and accustomed route. We think we get our first record of it among the Susquehannock "plain paths" noted in the Virginia Act of 1662 and it was sometimes referred to by that name. Later and from about 1686 until at least 1742, that part of the road between Brent Town and the Rappahannock was also known as the "Shenandoah Hunting Path," a name still occasionally heard; but the popular name was the Carolina Road with its no less popular descriptive appellation of "The Rogue's Road" due to the cattle and horse thieves who infested it throughout the eighteenth century. That these gentry misused the road only, rather than were residents of the country it traversed, was always maintained, and