When the land was once discovered, its conquest was directed along the very paths on which these explorers came. To the armies which conquered the West the Indian thoroughfares were indispensable. Washington followed narrow Indian trails while on his mission to the French on the Allegheny in 1753; in the year following he widened Nemacolin's Path across the mountains over which he hauled his swivels to Fort Necessity. Braddock followed the same rough path in the succeeding year, making a great gorge of a road which, after a century and a half, we can follow as plainly as a new-made furrow behind a plow--even to the ford and charnel-ground where the thin red line was swept away in that torrent of lurking flame. Three years later, prejudiced against Virginia's Braddock Road, the dying but indomitable Forbes--truly, as the Indians called him, a Head of Iron--mowed another swath of a road westward through Carlisle and Bedford to Fort Duquesne, that Pennsylvania herself might have a road through her own province to the Ohio river. Braddock's Road paused abruptly on the brink of a bloody ravine seven miles from Pittsburg; but the home-stretch of the road built by this Head of Iron is the beautiful Forbes Avenue of today. The Great Trail of the West was the highway between Pittsburg and Detroit, and its story is the bloody story of the Revolutionary War in the West. For centuries this path had been a famed thoroughfare, throwing its great sinuous lengths over the watersheds from the lakes to the "Forks of the Ohio." Over this track the brave Swiss Bouquet led the first English army that crossed the Ohio river, making a tri-track road to the Muskingum valley and bringing to a triumphal close Pontiac's bloody rebellion. The old Iroquois trail up the Mohawk valley and across the great watershed of New York to the Niagara river was a famous Revolutionary highway and afterward became one of the important pioneer routes. On the Great Trail to Detroit Lachlan McIntosh erected the first fort built by the thirteen colonies west of the Ohio, Fort Laurens on the Muskingum near Great Crossings, where Bouquet had thrown his army across the river in 1764. Indeed, throughout that whole half-century of conflict in the Central West the lines of conquest were the lines of the earlier routes of travel. Washington, Braddock, Forbes, Bouquet, Lewis, Shirley, Sullivan, Clark, Brodhead, Crawford, Irvine, McIntosh, Harmar, St. Clair, Wayne, and Harrison followed these old highways and fought their battles on and beside them. These campaigns were not made by water but by land. Had they been made by rivers, the courses of their routes would have been frequently described and mapped as having an important bearing on the history of each campaign. Because they were made by land over routes which have never received attention from historians the real ground-work of these campaigns has been entirely omitted. Each would be