tering the highways; but the affair was so managed as
to meet with nothing but ridicule, and in trying to force a hearing
from Congress Mr. Coxey and some of his followers were arrested for
trespassing on the Capitol grounds, and were sentenced to several weeks
in jail. This ended the latest crusade for good roads from Ohio; but
there is no Ohio idea more fixed than that we ought to have good roads,
and this was by no means the first time that Ohio men had asked the
nation to lend a hand in making them. The first time they succeeded as
signally as they failed the last time; but that was very long ago, and
it may surprise some of my readers to know that we have a National Road
crossing our whole state, which is still the best road in it.

Almost as soon as the Western people had broken into the backwoods it
became their necessity to break out again, to find and to make roads
between them and the civilization they had left. The ways of the
different emigrations in reaching Ohio were: for the New Engenders,
through New York state to Lake Erie, and westwardly along the shore
of that water; for the Pennsylvanians, through their own state to the
headwaters of the Ohio, and then down the river and inwardly from it;
for the Virginians, Marylanders, and Carolinians, the valley of the
Shenandoah and the mountain gaps to Kentucky, and so into Southwestern
Ohio. At first the white men came by the _streets_, as the pioneers
called the trails that the buffalo and deer had made; but they soon cut
traces through the woods, and later these traces became wagon roads. Of
course they used the rivers wherever they could and traveled by canoe,
by flatboat, by keelboat, and by ark; and there grew up on the rivers a
wild life which had its adventures and heroes like the Indian warfare.
The most famous of the boatmen was Mike Fink, who drank hard and fought
hard, and was a miraculous shot with his rifle. He was captain of a
keelboat, which was the craft mostly used in ascending the river. The
flatboats were broken up and sold as lumber when they had drifted down
to their points of destination on the lower rivers, but the keelboat
could make a return trip by dint of pushing with a long pole on the
shore side and rowing on the other; sometimes even sails were used, and
then the keelboat sped up stream at the rate of fifty miles instead of
twelve miles a day.

But these means of traffic and travel soon ceased to suffice. Then the
Ohio people felt