Beginning with the first highways of America, the first monograph of the series will consider the routes of the mound-building Indians and the trails of the large game animals, particularly the buffalo, as having set the course of landward travel in America on the watersheds of the interior of the continent. The second monograph will treat of the Indian thoroughfares of America; the third, fourth, and fifth, the three roads built westward during the old French War, Washington’s Road (Nemacolin’s Path), Braddock’s Road, and the Old Glade (Forbes’s) Road. The sixth monograph will be a study of Boone’s Wilderness Road to Kentucky; the seventh and eighth, a study of the principal portage paths of the interior of the continent and of the military roads built in the Mississippi basin during the era of conquest; Vol. IX. will take up the historic water-ways which most influenced westward conquest and immigration; the famed Cumberland Road, or Old National Road, “which more than any other material structure in the land served to harmonize and strengthen, if not to save, the Union,” will be the subject of the tenth monograph. Two volumes will be given to the study of the pioneer roads of America, and two to the consideration of the history of the great American canals.

The history of America in the later part of the pioneer period, between 1810 and 1840, centers about the roads and canals which were to that day what our trunk railway lines are to us today. The “life of the road” was the life of the nation, and a study of the traffic on those first highways of land and water, and of the customs and experiences of the early travelers over them brings back with freshening interest the story of our own “Middle Age.” Horace Bushnell well said: “If you wish to know whether society is stagnant, learning scholastic, religion a dead formality, you may learn something by going into universities and libraries; something also by the work that is doing on cathedrals and churches, or in them; but quite as much by looking at the roads. For if there is any motion in society, the Road, which is the symbol of motion, will indicate the fact. When there is activity, or enlargement, or a liberalizing spirit of any kind, then there is intercourse and travel, and these require roads. So if there is any kind of advancement going on, if new ideas are abroad and new hopes rising, then you will see it by the roads that are building. Nothing makes an inroad without making a road. All creative action, whether in government, industry, thought, or religion, creates roads.” The days when our first roads and our great canals were building, were days when “new ideas were abroad and new hopes rising.” The four volumes of our series treating of pioneer roads and the great canals will be a record of those ideas and hopes and the mighty part they played in the social development of America. The final volume will treat of the practical side of the road question. An index will conclude the series.