road-side without breaking the shaft, or taking off the wheels, or tumbling it over into the ditch. His troubles over, the traveler found himself at a small hamlet, then known as Pittsburg."[84] Forbes's Road, strictly speaking, began at Bedford, as Braddock's Road began at Cumberland. In these pages the main route from Philadelphia--the Pennsylvania Road--has been considered under the head of Forbes's Road. The eastern extremity of this thoroughfare, or the portion, sixty-six miles in length, between Philadelphia and Lancaster, became the first macadamized road in the United States and demands particular attention in another volume of this series[85]. Nothing could have been more surprising to the writer than to find how remarkably this road held its own in competition with the Braddock or the Cumberland Road south of it. Explain it as you will, nine-tenths of the published accounts left by travelers of the old journey from Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Washington into the Ohio Valley describe this Pennsylvania route. The Cumberland Road was built from Cumberland, Maryland to Wheeling, West Virginia, on the Ohio (1806-1818) at a cost of nearly two million dollars, yet during the entire first half of that century you will find that almost every important writer who passed over the mountains went over the Pennsylvania Road. It is exceedingly difficult to find a graphic picture of a journey over Braddock's Road before 1800; contemporaneous descriptions of a journey over the Cumberland or National Road are not numerous. On the other hand a volume could be filled with descriptions of the old Pennsylvania Road through Bedford and Ligonier. I believe the fame of the Cumberland Road was due rather to the fact of its being a national enterprise--and the first of its kind on the continent--than to any superiority it achieved over competing routes. The idea of the road was grand and it played a mighty part in the advancement of the West; but, such was the nature of its course, that it does not seem to have been the "popular route" from Washington to Pittsburg, the principal port on the Ohio River. The Pennsylvania Road was the most important link between New England and the Ohio Valley in the days when New England was sending the bravest of its sons to become the pioneers of the rising empire in the West. True, Venable has written: "The footsteps of a hundred years Have echoed, since o'er Braddock's Road, Bold Putnam and the Pioneers Led History the way they strode. "On wild Monongahela's stream They launched the Mayflower of the West, A perfect state their civic dream, A new New World their pilgrim quest."