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 advantage of these river
valleys for descending into the whole Atlantic seaboard and the
valley of the Mississippi. They had in consequence conquered all
the tribes south of them as far even as the Carolinas and
Georgia. All their trails of conquest led across Pennsylvania.

The Germans in their expansion at first seem to have followed up
the Schuylkill Valley and its tributaries, and they hold this
region to the present day. Gradually they crossed the watershed
to the Susquehanna and broke into the region of the famous
limestone soil in Lancaster County, a veritable farmer's paradise