Before the nineteenth century, travellers who visited Niagara generally went there by way of Montreal and Lake Ontario, returning to the seacoast by Presque Isle (Erie, Pennsylvania) and Pittsburg to Philadelphia or Baltimore. Occasionally an adventurous tourist struck out from Albany into the “Back Woods”. Such an one was Lieutenant John Harriott, an Englishman, who visited whatever parts of the known world he could reach and recorded his journeyings in a book with the suggestive title,--“Struggles Through Life, Exemplified in the Various Travels and Adventures in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America”. In June, 1796, he set out from New York on a “tour to view the back lands”. He chose the land route to Albany, going the one hundred and sixty miles in a “coachee” drawn by two horses. Albany he describes as a town of “upwards of six thousand inhabitants, collected from various parts.... It is the storehouse for the trade to and from Canada and the lakes, therefore likely to flourish and the inhabitants to grow rich.” The next morning he set off at half-past five and travelled forty miles by stage through the fertile country of the German Flats, every now and then being obliged to alight and walk for a mile or two as the wagon floundered through a bit of swampy road, or up a steep grade. Across wet places were bits of log causeways. These were made of trunks of pine and oak trees laid down crossways layer upon layer, regardless of uniformity of size or the comfort of those who might travel over them. This kind of road was called corduroy because it resembled the French cloth of that name. In drier places, the settlers cut down trees on the line of the road. Six or eight oxen yoked to a plough would stir up the soil as deeply as possible, pulling out or displacing stumps or rocks. The cleared surface would then be smoothed over a little and left to be worn hard by travel.