Byler Road was a 140-mile corridor designated by the Alabama state legislature on December 19, 1819, in the state's first legislative action. Beginning at the junction of Shoal Creek and Jackson Military Road in Lauderdale County, 10 miles northeast of Florence, Alabama, and ending at the Warrior River Falls crossing at Tuscaloosa, it became a settled path to new lands, agriculture, transport, and commerce in northwest and west Alabama. The road was not surveyed but followed an ancient Indian road from the Archaic Period about 7,000 years ago, later called the Cherokee Trail, and evidence indicates woodland bison may originally have created the trail as a migration path between mid-Alabama and Mississippi grasslands and salt licks in Tennessee and Kentucky. After the 1814 Creek Treaty of Fort Jackson opened 22 million federally owned acres to settlement, migrants used rivers, roads, and trails to reach the land, which after 1818 was sold at low prices through land offices in Huntsville, Alabama, and Nashville, Tennessee. Because the new state had no treasury funds for road building, its first roads were developed as toll roads with private capital under state oversight through licenses. The road was intended to connect with Jackson Military Road and channel settler traffic from Nashville and points east into Alabama, reflecting a vision strengthened after Andrew Jackson's army, returning from the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, sought a shortcut through northwest Alabama. Among the entrepreneurs associated with the road were Jacob Pruitt, Captain John Welsh Pruitt, John Byler, Captain of the 3rd West Tennessee Mounted Infantry, and William Russell, a major, chief of staff, and road overseer. Land along the route ranged from marginal tracts at $2 per acre to average cotton land at $20 per acre and highly valued cotton land at $50 to $150 per acre; average and highly valued cotton lands were auctioned to the highest bidder, while marginal lands were nominated by buyers, usually purchased with 10 percent down, and paid over four annual installments. The road supported inns or "stands," general stores, barber shops, taverns, wagons, ox carts, stage coaches, plantations, dog-trot homes, one-room log cabins, cotton fields, forest lands, and watershed landscapes, and it linked travelers to Tuscaloosa and North Port, the state capitol, cotton warehouses, inns and taverns, and the University of Alabama. Revolutionary soldiers also settled and traded along the road during pioneer Alabama.