The old taverns were the hearts of the Cumberland Road, and the tavern life was the best gauge to measure the current of business that ebbed and flowed. As the great road became superseded by the railways, the taverns were the first to succumb to the shock. In a very interesting article, a recent writer on "The Rise of the Tide of Life to New England Hilltops,"[72] speaks of the early hill life of New England, and the memorials there left "of the deep and sweeping streams of human history." The author would have found the Cumberland Road and its predecessors an interesting western example of the social phenomena with which he dealt. In New England, as in the Central West, the first traveled courses were on the summits of the watersheds. These routes of the brute were the first ways of men. The tide of life has ebbed from New England hilltops since the beginning. Sufficient is it for the present subject that the Cumberland Road was the most important "stream of human history" from Atlantic tide-water to the headwaters of the streams of the Mississippi. Its old taverns are, after the remnants of the historic roadbed and ponderous bridges, the most interesting "shells and fossils" cast up by this stream. This old route, chosen first by the buffalo and followed by red men and white men, will ever be the course of travel across the mountains. From this rugged path made by the once famous Cumberland Road, the tide of life cannot ebb. Here, a thousand years hence, may course a magnificent boulevard, the American Appian Way, to the commercial, as well as military, key of the eastern slopes of the Mississippi Basin at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. It is important that each fact of history concerning this ancient highway be put on lasting record. CHAPTER VII CONCLUSION