Paths of the Mound-Building Indians and Great Game Animals

Nothing is more typical of a civilization than its roads. The traveler enters the city of Nazareth on a Roman road which has been used, perhaps, since the Christian era dawned. Every line is typical of Rome; every block of stone speaks of Roman power and Roman will. And ancient roads come down from the Roman standard in a descending scale even as the civilizations which built them. The main thoroughfare from the shore of the Yellow Sea to the capital of Korea, used by millions for millenniums, has never been more than the bridle path it is today--fit emblem of a people without a hope in the world, an apathetic, hermit nation.

Every road has a story and the burden of every story is a need. The greater the need, the better the road and the longer and more important the story. Go back even to primeval America. The bear's food was all about him, in forest and bush. He made no roads for he needed none, save a path into the valley. But the moose and deer and buffalo required new feeding-grounds, fresh salt licks and change of climate, and the great roads they broke open across the watersheds declare nothing if not a need.

The ancient Indian confederacies which tilled the soil of this continent and built great mounds for defense and worship--so great, indeed, that the people have even been known as "mound-builders"--undoubtedly first traveled the highest highways of America. Some of them may have known the water-ways better than any of the land-ways--for their signal stations were erected on the shores of many of our important rivers--but the location of their heaviest seats of population was where we find the richest lands and the heaviest populations today, and that is in what may be called the interior of the continent, or along the smaller rivers. Such stupendous works as Fort Ancient and Fort Hill are located beside very inferior streams, and between such works as these, placed without any seeming regard for the larger water-ways, these mound-building Indians must have had great thoroughfares along the summits of the watersheds. About these earthworks they constructed great, graded roadways, commensurate with the size of the works of which they were a necessary part, but so far as we know these early peoples built no roads between their forts or between their villages. They made no thoroughfares.

It was for the great game animals to mark out what became known as the first thoroughfares of America. The plunging buffalo, keen of instinct, and nothing if not a utilitarian, broke great roads across the continent on the summits of the watersheds, beside which the first Indian trails were but traces through the forests. Heavy, fleet of foot, capable of covering scores of miles a day, the buffalo tore his roads from one feeding-ground to another, and from north to south, on the high grounds; here his roads were swept clear of débris in summer, and of snow in winter. They mounted the heights and descended from them on the longest slopes, and crossed each stream on the bars at the mouths of its lesser tributaries.

Evidence remains today to show what great thoroughfares these buffalo roads were, for on the summit of many of the greater watersheds may be seen the remains of the old courses, and there the hoofprints of centuries of travel may yet be read. If the summit should be bare of trees, the very contour of the ground may suggest the old-time, deeply-trod roadway; where a forest lies over the summit a remarkably significant open aisle in the woods speaks yet more plainly of the ancient highway, where only shrubs and little trees are found in the center of the track.

It is very wonderful that the buffalo's instinct should have found the very best courses across a continent upon whose thousand rivers such great black forests were thickly strung. Yet it did, as the tripod of the white man has proved; and until the problem of aërial navigation is solved, human intercourse will move largely on paths first marked by the buffalo. It is interesting that he found the strategic passage-ways through the mountains, so that the first explorers came into the West through gaps where were found broad buffalo roads; it is also interesting that the buffalo marked out the most practical portage paths between the heads of our rivers--paths that are closely followed today, for instance, by the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio railways through the Alleghanies, the Chesapeake and Ohio through the Blue Ridge, the Cleveland Terminal and Valley railway between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers and the Wabash railway between the Maumee and Wabash rivers. In one instance (that of the Cuyahoga-Tuscarawas portage) the route of the ancient portage--most plainly to be discovered because it was for so long a time the boundary of the United States that lands on the west of it were surveyed by a different system from those on the east--is crossed by a modern road seven times in a distance of eight miles.

But the greater marvel is that these early pathfinders chose routes, even in the roughest districts, which the tripod of the white man cannot improve upon. A rare instance of this is the course of the Baltimore and Ohio railway between Grafton and Parkersburg in West Virginia. That this is one of the roughest rides our palatial trains of today make is well known to all who have passed that way, and that so fine a road could be put through such a rough country is one of the marvels of engineering science. But leave the train, say, at the little hamlet of Petroleum, West Virginia, and find on the hill the famous old-time thoroughfare of the buffalo, Indian, and pioneer and follow that narrow "thread of soil" westward to the Ohio river. You will find that the railway has followed it steadily throughout its course and when it came to a more difficult point than usual, where the railway is compelled to tunnel at the strategic point of least elevation, in two instances the trail runs exactly over the tunnel. This occurs at both "Eaton's" tunnel, and "Gorham's" tunnel (or "No. 6").

With the deterioration of the civilization to which the mound-building Indians belonged, the art of road-building became lost--for the great need had passed away. The later Indians built no such roads as did their ancestors, nor did they improve such routes on the highways as they found or made. But they collected _poll_-taxes from travelers along them, setting an example to generations of county commissioners who collect taxes for roads they do not improve.

That the later Indians used the paths made by the buffalo they hunted is beyond question. Warring Indian nations lured each other into ambush by stamping a buffalo hoof upon the soft ground in their trail. And when, later, Daniel Boone hewed his path through Cumberland Gap toward Kentucky, he plainly says that he left the Indian road on Rockcastle river and marked out the remainder of his way over a buffalo trace.

The great Indian trails, covering the land as with a network, and leading by the straightest practicable courses to all strategic points, became of momentous importance to the white man when he turned his attention to the interior of the continent. When the Indian learned the value of his furs, a great tide of trade set eastward over a thousand rivers and woodland trails. On these same rivers, but more frequently on the trails, white traders ventured westward with their bright wares--and the western land became known among a much larger coterie than before. The tales of the traders, together with dreams of commercial exploitation led to the first careful exploration of the interior of the continent by such men as Walker, Gist, Boone, and Carver, to whom these narrow "roads of iron," as the Jesuit missionaries in the north called the rough Indian trails, were shining paths to an El Dorado. The first two great roads built westward were opened under the direction of trading companies: the road from the Potomac to the Ohio by Captain Cresap, for the first Ohio Company, and the road from Virginia to Kentucky by Daniel Boone, for the Transylvania Company. And these were at first only blazed and widened Indian thoroughfares which had been used from times prehistoric.

The missionaries, too, were great explorers, and they knew the Indian thoroughfares perhaps better even than the traders; at least they knew some that white men had never traveled before them.

"Whither is the paleface going?" asked an old Seneca chieftain of the indomitable Zeisberger; "why does the paleface travel such unknown roads? This is no road for white people and no white man has come this trail before."

"We reached home very late at night," wrote a brave Jesuit, "after considerable trouble--for the paths were only about half a foot wide where the snow would sustain one, and if you turned ever so little to the right or left you were in it half way up to your thighs."

When the land was once discovered, its conquest was directed along the very paths on which these explorers came. To the armies which conquered the West the Indian thoroughfares were indispensable. Washington followed narrow Indian trails while on his mission to the French on the Allegheny in 1753; in the year following he widened Nemacolin's Path across the mountains over which he hauled his swivels to Fort Necessity. Braddock followed the same rough path in the succeeding year, making a great gorge of a road which, after a century and a half, we can follow as plainly as a new-made furrow behind a plow--even to the ford and charnel-ground where the thin red line was swept away in that torrent of lurking flame. Three years later, prejudiced against Virginia's Braddock Road, the dying but indomitable Forbes--truly, as the Indians called him, a Head of Iron--mowed another swath of a road westward through Carlisle and Bedford to Fort Duquesne, that Pennsylvania herself might have a road through her own province to the Ohio river. Braddock's Road paused abruptly on the brink of a bloody ravine seven miles from Pittsburg; but the home-stretch of the road built by this Head of Iron is the beautiful Forbes Avenue of today.

The Great Trail of the West was the highway between Pittsburg and Detroit, and its story is the bloody story of the Revolutionary War in the West. For centuries this path had been a famed thoroughfare, throwing its great sinuous lengths over the watersheds from the lakes to the "Forks of the Ohio." Over this track the brave Swiss Bouquet led the first English army that crossed the Ohio river, making a tri-track road to the Muskingum valley and bringing to a triumphal close Pontiac's bloody rebellion. The old Iroquois trail up the Mohawk valley and across the great watershed of New York to the Niagara river was a famous Revolutionary highway and afterward became one of the important pioneer routes. On the Great Trail to Detroit Lachlan McIntosh erected the first fort built by the thirteen colonies west of the Ohio, Fort Laurens on the Muskingum near Great Crossings, where Bouquet had thrown his army across the river in 1764. Indeed, throughout that whole half-century of conflict in the Central West the lines of conquest were the lines of the earlier routes of travel. Washington, Braddock, Forbes, Bouquet, Lewis, Shirley, Sullivan, Clark, Brodhead, Crawford, Irvine, McIntosh, Harmar, St. Clair, Wayne, and Harrison followed these old highways and fought their battles on and beside them. These campaigns were not made by water but by land. Had they been made by rivers, the courses of their routes would have been frequently described and mapped as having an important bearing on the history of each campaign. Because they were made by land over routes which have never received attention from historians the real ground-work of these campaigns has been entirely omitted. Each would be far better understood in every way if its route were clearly defined. A thorough understanding of our history is impossible without a knowledge of these highways of trade and war and the strategic points they covered and connected.