to rule a great province of the British Empire. One great
source of the Quaker power lay in the sympathy of the Germans, who
always voted on their side and kept them in control of the Legislature,
so that it was in reality a case of two-thirds ruling one-third. The
Quakers, it must be admitted, never lost their heads. Unperturbed
through all the conflicts and the jarring of races and sects, they held
their position unimpaired and kept the confidence and support of the
Germans until the Revolution changed everything.

The varied elements of population spread out in ever widening half
circles from Philadelphia as a center. There was nothing in the
character of the region to stop this progress. The country all the way
westward to the Susquehanna was easy hill, dale, and valley, covered
by a magnificent growth of large forest trees--oaks, beeches, poplars,
walnuts, hickories, and ash--which rewarded the labor of felling by
exposing to cultivation a most fruitful soil.

The settlers followed the old Indian trails. The first westward
pioneers seem to have been the Welsh Quakers, who pushed due west from
Philadelphia and marked out the course of the famous Lancaster Road,
afterwards the Lancaster Turnpike. It took the line of least resistance
along the old trail, following ridges until it reached the Susquehanna
at a spot where an Indian trader, named Harris, established himself and
founded a post which subsequently became Harrisburg, the capital of the
State.

For a hundred years the Lancaster Road was the great highway westward,
at first to the mountains, then to the Ohio, and finally to the
Mississippi Valley and the Great West. Immigrants and pioneers from all
the New England and Middle States flocked out that way to the land of
promise in wagons, or horseback, or trudging along on foot. Substantial
taverns grew up along the route; and habitual freighters and stage
drivers, proud of their fine teams of horses, grew into characters of
the road. When the Pennsylvania Railroad was built, it followed the same
line. In fact, most of the lines of railroad in the State follow Indian
trails. The trails for trade and tribal intercourse led east and west.
The warrior trails usually led north and south, for that had long been
the line of strategy and conquest of the tribes. The northern tribes,
or Six Nations, established in the lake region of New York near the
headwaters of the Delaware, the Susquehanna, and the Ohio, had the
adv