HISTORIC AMERICAN HIGHAVAYS — ROSE 505 



As settlers began to stream into the Great Lakes region by way of 

 the Erie Canal there arose a need for a more direct route for emi- 

 grants from the East and South. An overland connection was 

 established across the narrow land bridge of Indiana which separated 

 Lake Michigan from the Ohio River valley. This route, called the 

 Michigan Road, after the name of the lake, was laid out along the 

 shortest practical route between the two water thoroughfares. The 

 location of the northern leg of this road had been established un- 

 wittingly by the French Canadian Pierre Frieschutz Navarre, when, 

 as an agent of the American Fur Co., he built his trading cabin on 

 the east bank of the St. Joseph River. The native trappers trans- 

 ported packs of beaver pelts across the portage trail leading from 

 the Kankakee River and then floated their wares in canoes across 

 the St. Joseph River to Navarre's cabin (pi. 7, fig. 1). Around this 

 location as a nucleus grew the present city of South Bend, Ind. 

 Settlers, called "movers," left the eastern States and floated down 

 the Ohio River to begin their northward journey into Indiana over 

 the Michigan Road. Over the same road emigrants swarmed from 

 the southern States of Kentucky, Virginia, and the Carolinas. 



The growth of the new commonwealths in the Northwest was 

 balanced in some degree by the new States formed in the South- 

 west from the territory acquired by the Louisiana Purchase. The 

 mouth of the Mississippi River had grown in commercial impor- 

 tance to such an extent that by 1827 there came a demand for a 

 great mail road, which was intended to branch from the National 

 Pike, leading westward from Cumberland, Md. From Zanesville, 

 Ohio, the new road was to pass through Maysville and Lexington 

 in Kentucky, Nashville in Tennessee, to Florence in Alabama, and 

 thence to New Orleans in Louisiana. The Maysville Pike section 

 of this road became a national household word when Federal aid 

 for its construction was vetoed by President Andrew Jackson on 

 May 27, 1830. With this action as a precedent, private corpora- 

 tions were forced to take over the financing of the main public 

 roads. This legislation was influential in placing the subsequent 

 construction of the railroads in the hands of private corporations. 

 The accompanying illustration (pi. 7, fig. 2) of a tollhouse and an 

 oval-shaped stagecoach, typical of the period, on the Maysville 

 Pike, shows the tollgate-keeper refusing to accept in payment some 

 of the worthless Spanish coins in circulation at the time. 



Now a mechanical rival arose to challenge the right of the 

 horseway and the waterway to serve the growing Nation's trans- 

 portation. On August 28, 1830, an open car, filled with the directors 

 of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and their friends, was hitched 

 to Peter Cooper's diminutive Tom Thumb locomotive. This new 



