When Celoron de Blainville was sent to the Allegheny in 1749, by the Governor of New France, his message was that "the Governor of Canada desired his children on Ohio to turn away the English Traders from amongst them and discharge them from ever coming to trade there again, or on any of the Branches." He sent away all the traders whom he found, giving them letters addressed to their respective governors denying England's right to trade in the West.To offset this move, within two years Pennsylvania sent goods to the value of nine hundred pounds in order to hold the Indians constant.The Governor had already ordered the traders to sell whiskey to the Indians at "5 Bucks" per cask and had told the Indians, through his agent Conrad Weiser, that if any trader refused to sell the liquor at that price they might "take it from him and drink it for nothing." There was but one way for the French to meet such competition.Without delay they fortified the Allegheny and began to coerce the natives.Driving away the carpenters of the Ohio Company from the present site of Pittsburgh, they built Fort Duquesne.The beginning of the Old French War ended what we may call the first era of the pack-horse trade.
The capture of Fort Duquesne by the English army under General Forbes in 1758 and the final conquest of New France two years later removed the French barrier and opened the way to expansion beyond the Alleghanies.Thereafter settlements in the Monongahela country grew apace.Pittsburgh, Uniontown, Morgantown, Brownsville, Ligonier, Greensburg, Connellsville--we give the modern names--became centers of a great migration which was halted only for a season by Pontiac's Rebellion, the aftermath of the French War, and was resumed immediately on the suppression of that Indian rising.The pack-horse trade now entered its final and most important era.The earlier period was one in which the trade was confined chiefly to the Indians; the later phase was concerned with supplying the needs of the white man in his rapidly developing frontier settlements.Formerly the principal articles of merchandise for the western trade were guns, ammunition, knives, kettles, and tools for their repair, blankets, tobacco, hatchets, and liquor.In the new era every known product of the East found a market in the thriving communities of the upper Ohio.As time went on the West began to send to the East, in addition to skins and pelts, whiskey that brought a dollar a gallon.Each pony could carry sixteen gallons and every drop could be sold for real money.On the return trip the pack-horses carried back chiefly salt and iron.
Doddridge's "Notes", one of the chief sources of our information, gives this lively picture:
"In the fall of the year, after seeding time, every family formed an association with some of their neighbors, for starting the little caravan.A master driver was to be selected from among them, who was to be assisted by one or more young men and sometimes a boy or two.The horses were fitted out with packsaddles, to the latter part of which was fastened a pair of hobbles made of hickory withes,--a bell and collar ornamented their necks.The bags provided for the conveyance of the salt were filled with bread, jerk, boiled ham, and cheese furnished a provision for the drivers.At night, after feeding, the horses, whether put in pasture or turned out into the woods, were hobbled and the bells were opened.The barter for salt and iron was made first at Baltimore; Frederick, Hagerstown, Oldtown, and Fort Cumberland, in succession, became the places of exchange.Each horse carried two bushels of alum salt, weighing eighty-four pounds to the bushel.This, to be sure, was not a heavy load for the horses, but it was enough, considering the scanty subsistence allowed them on the journey.The common price of a bushel of alum salt, at an early period, was a good cow and a calf.
Thus, with the English flag afloat at Fort Pitt, as Duquesne was renamed after its capture, a new day dawned for the great region to the West.Beyond the Alleghanies and as far as the Rockies, a new science of transportation was now to be learned--the art of finding the dividing ridge.Here the first routes, like the "Great Trail" from Pittsburgh to Detroit, struck out with an assurance that is in marvelous agreement with the findings of the surveyors of a later day.The railways, when they came, found the valleys and penetrated with their tunnels the watersheds from the heads of the streams of one drainage area to the streams of another.Thus on the Pennsylvania, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Southern, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and other railroads, important tunnels are to be found lying immediately under the Red Man's trail which clung to the long ascending slope and held persistently to the dividing ridges.
Even this necessarily brief survey shows plainly how that preeminently American institution, the ridge road, came about.
East and west, it was the legitimate and natural successor to the ancient trail.With the coming of the wagon, whose rattle was heard among the hills as early as Braddock's campaign, the process of lowering these paths from the heights was inevitably begun, and it was to the riverways that men first looked for a solution of the difficult problems of inland commerce.Eventually the paths of inland commerce constituted a vast network of canals, roads, and railway lines in those very valleys to which Washington had called the nation's attention in 1784.
