When, in the middle of the eighteenth century, intelligent white men were beginning to cross the Allegheny Mountains and enter the Ohio basin, one of the most practicable routes was found to be an old trading path which ran almost directly west from Philadelphia to the present site of Pittsburg. According to the Indians it was the easiest route from the Atlantic slope through the dense laurel wildernesses to the Ohio.[1] The course of this path is best described by the route of the old state road of Pennsylvania to Pittsburg built in the first half-decade succeeding the Revolutionary War. This road passed through Shippensburg, Carlisle, Bedford, Ligonier, and Greensburg; the Old Trading Path passed, in general, through the same points. Comparing this path, which became Forbes's Road, with Nemacolin's path which ran parallel with it, converging on the same point on the Ohio, one might say that the former was the overland path, and the latter, strictly speaking, a portage path. The Old Trading Path offered no portage between streams, as Nemacolin's path did between the Potomac and Monongahela. It kept on higher, dryer ground and crossed no river of importance. This made it the easiest and surest course; in the wintry season, when the Youghiogheny and Monongahela and their tributaries were out of banks, the Old Trading Path must have been by far the safest route to the Ohio; it kept to the high ground between the Monongahela and Allegheny. It was the high ground over which this path ran that the unfortunate Braddock attempted to reach after crossing the Youghiogheny at Stewart's Crossing. The deep ravines drove him back. There is little doubt he would have been successful had he reached this watershed and proceeded to Fort Duquesne upon the Old Trading Path.