The teamsters, loading their freight wagons at the warehouses along the river front, followed these arrivals with the easy flow of impartial criticism. As men possessing profoundly subtle views on horse flesh, no little detail escaped them. They, too, were a part of the life of that great artery of pioneer existence; and the road and its happenings, were to each one of them, as something intimate and personal. A change of horses or a change of drivers, were matters that could not be lightly banished. The stage road followed in its general direction, over hills and through valleys and across long reaches of level land, what had been an Indian trail at the waning of the eighteenth century, when Andrew Ballard, of Pennsylvania, the first ripple in a vast wave of emigration, pushing manfully out into the wilderness, built his cabin among the hazel-bushes and scrub-oak south of Benson, where he lived for perhaps a year, the only white man in all that region. The next settler, a solitary Jersey man, penetrated some five miles further into the wilderness to the west of Benson, and set up a forge, from which he supplied the Indians with knives and hatchets. Another year elapsed, and Colonel Stephen Landray of Oxen Hill, Westmoreland County, Virginia, surveyor and soldier, with horses, wagons and a few slaves, following the Indian trail, found his way into the country. He wintered with the Jersey axe-maker, after sending his wagons back to Baltimore, loaded with ginseng for the Chinese trade. The fourth settler was a lone Yankee, Jacob Benson, who came down the trail from the lakes. With chain and compass he layout the town, with its large public green, its Main Street, its North Street, and South Street, and its Front and Water Streets, together with one hundred and sixty lots in Section number five, Township eight, Range five, United States Military District. Then, with his town plot in his pocket, he made his way on foot to the nearest land office, eighty-five miles distant, and before a Justice of the Peace, acknowledged this important instrument; whereupon Andrew Ballard, feeling that he had been crowded out of the country, got together his half-breed family and moved over into Indiana, where there was nothing but echoes to answer the crack of his rifle. The country round about Benson was soon parcelled out in what were known as tomahawk rights. The pioneer cut his name with hatchet or hunting knife on some convenient tree, and thus marked his claim. Jacob Benson built his cabin of hewn logs on the south side of the public square and opened a store, selling guns, ammunition, cheap trinkets, and poor whisky to passing whites and Indians, at a fabulous profit to himself.