For many years the center of western population was in the Ohio Valley, and good steamers were plying the Ohio when the Cumberland Road was first opened. Indeed the road was originally intended for the accommodation of the lower Ohio Valley.[9] Still, as the century grew old and the interior population became considerable, the Ohio division of the road became a crowded thoroughfare. An old stage-driver in eastern Ohio remembers when business was such that he and his companion Knights of Rein and Whip never went to bed for twenty nights, and more than a hundred teams might have been met in a score of miles. When the road was built to Wheeling, its greatest mission was accomplished--the portage path across the mountains was completed to a point where river navigation was almost always available. And yet less than half of the road was finished. It now touched the eastern extremity of the great state whose public lands were being sold in order to pay for its building. Westward lay the growing states of Indiana and Illinois, a per cent of the sale of whose land had already been pledged to the road. Then came another moment when the great work paused and the original ambition of its friends was at hazard. In 1820 Congress appropriated one hundred and forty-one thousand dollars for completing the road from Washington, Pennsylvania to Wheeling. In the same year ten thousand dollars was appropriated for laying out the road between Wheeling, Virginia and a point on the left bank of the Mississippi River, between St. Louis and the mouth of the Illinois River. For four years the fate of the road west of the Ohio hung in the balance, during which time the road was menaced by the specter of unconstitutionality, already mentioned. But on the third day of March, 1825, a bill was passed by Congress appropriating one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for building the road to Zanesville, Ohio, and the extension of the surveys to the permanent seat of government in Missouri, to pass by the seats of government of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.[10] Two years later, one hundred and seventy thousand dollars was appropriated to complete the road to Zanesville, Ohio, and in 1829 an additional appropriation for continuing it westward was made.[11] It has been noted that the Cumberland Road from Cumberland to Wheeling was built on a general alignment of a former thoroughfare of the red men and the pioneers. So with much of the course west of the Ohio. Between Wheeling and Zanesville the Cumberland Road followed the course of the first road made through Ohio, that celebrated route marked out, by way of Lancaster and Chillicothe, to Kentucky, by Colonel Ebenezer Zane, and which bore the name of Zane's Trace. This first road built in Ohio was authorized by an act of Congress passed May 17, 1796.[12] This route through Ohio was a well worn road a quarter of a century before the Cumberland Road was extended across the Ohio River.