The foremost horse carried a bell so that travelers in advance would be warned to step aside and make room. The widened pack-horse routes were the main traveled ways of Scotland until a comparatively recent period. “When Lord Herward was sent, in 1760, from Ayrshire to the college at Edinburgh, the road was in such a state that servants were frequently sent forward with poles to sound the depths of the mosses and bogs which lay in their way. The mail was regularly dispatched between Edinburgh and London, on horseback, and went in the course of five or six days.” In the sixteenth century carts without springs could not be taken into the country from London; it took Queen Henrietta four days to traverse Watling Street to Dover. Of one of Queen Elizabeth’s journeys it is said: “It was marvelous for ease and expedition, for such is the perfect evenness of the new highway that Her Majesty left the coach only once, while the hinds and the folk of baser sort lifted it on their poles!” A traveler in an English coach of 1663 said: “This travel hath soe indisposed mee, yt I am resolved never to ride up againe in ye coatch.”

Thus the widened trail or bridle-path, as it was commonly known in some parts, was the universal predecessor of the highway. It needs to be observed, however, that winter travel in regions where much snow fell greatly influenced land travel. The buffalo and Indian did not travel in the winter, but white men in early days found it perhaps easier to make a journey on sleds in the snow than at any other time. In such seasons the bridle-paths were, of course, largely followed, especially in the forests; yet in the open, with the snow a foot and more in depth, many short cuts were made along the zig-zag paths and in numerous instances these short cuts became the regular routes thereafter for all time. An interesting instance is found in the “Narrative of Andrew J. Vieau, Sr.:” “This path between Green Bay [Wisconsin] and Milwaukee was originally an Indian trail, and very crooked; but the whites would straighten it by cutting across lots each winter with their jumpers [rude boxes on runners], wearing bare streaks through the thin covering [of snow], to be followed in the summer by foot and horseback travel along the shortened path.”[4]

This form of traveling was, of course, unknown save only where snow fell and remained upon the ground for a considerable time. Throughout New York State travel on snow was common and in the central portion of the state, where there was much wet ground in the olden time, it was easier to move heavy freight in the winter than in summer when the soft ground was treacherous. Even as late as the building of the Erie Canal in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century—long after the building of the Genesee Road—freight was hauled in the winter in preference to summer. In the annual report of the comissioners of the Erie Canal, dated January 25, 1819, we read that the roads were so wretched between Utica and Syracuse in the summer season that contractors who needed to lay up a supply of tools, provisions, etc., for their men, at interior points, purchased them in the winter before and sent the loads onward to their destinations in sleighs.[5] One of the reasons given by the Erie Canal commissioners for delays and increased expenses in the work on the canal in 1819, in their report delivered to the legislature February 18, 1820, was that the absence of snow in central New York in the winter of 1818-19 prevented the handling of heavy freight on solid roads; “no hard snow path could be found.”[6] The soft roads of the summer time were useless so far as heavy loads of lumber, stone, lime, and tools were concerned. No winter picture of early America is so vivid as that presented by the eccentric Evans of New Hampshire, who, dressed in his Esquimau suit, made a midwinter pilgrimage throughout the country lying south of the Great Lakes from Albany to Detroit in 1818.[7] His experiences in moving across the Middle West with the blinding storms, the mountainous drifts of snow, the great icy cascades, the hurrying rivers, buried out of sight in their banks of ice and snow, and the far scattered little settlements lost to the world, helps one realize what traveling in winter meant in the days of the pioneer.

The real work of opening roads in America began, of course, on the bridle-paths in the Atlantic slope. In 1639 a measure was passed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony reading: “Whereas the highways in this jurisdiction have not been laid out with such conveniency for travellers as were fit, nor as was intended by this court, but that in some places they are felt too straight, and in other places travelers are forced to go far about, it is therefore, ordered, that all highways shall be laid out before the next general court, so as may be with most ease and safety for travelers; and for this end every town shall choose two or three men, who shall join with two or three of the next town, and these shall have power to lay out the highways in each town where they may be most convenient; and those which are so deputed shall have power to lay out the highways where they may be most convenient, notwithstanding any man’s propriety, or any corne ground, so as it occasion not the pulling down of any man’s house, or laying open any garden or orchard; and in common [public] grounds, or where the soil is wet or miry, they shall lay out the ways the wider, as six, or eight, or ten rods, or more in common grounds.” With the establishment of the government in the province of New York in 1664 the following regulation for road-making was established, which also obtained in Pennsylvania until William Penn’s reign began: “In all public works for the safety and defence of the government, or the necessary conveniencies of bridges, highways, and common passengers, the governor or deputy governor and council shall send warrents to any justice, and the justices to the constable of the next town, or any other town within that jurisdiction, to send so many laborers and artificers as the warrent shall direct, which the constable and two others or more of the overseers shall forthwith execute, and the constable and overseers shall have power to give such wages as they shall judge the work to deserve, provided that no ordinary laborer shall be compelled to work from home above one week together. No man shall be compelled to do any public work or service unless the press [impressment] be grounded upon some known law of this government, or an act of the governor and council signifying the necessity thereof, in both which cases a reasonable allowance shall be made.” A later amendment indicates the rudeness of these early roads: “The highways to be cleared as followeth, viz., the way to be made clear of standing and lying trees, at least ten feet broad; all stumps and shrubs to be cut close by the ground. The trees marked yearly