Beginning with the first highways of America, the first monograph of the series will consider the routes of the mound-building Indians and the trails of the large game animals, particularly the buffalo, as having set the course of landward travel in America on the watersheds of the interior of the continent. The second monograph will treat of the Indian thoroughfares of America; the third, fourth, and fifth, the three roads built westward during the old French War, Washington’s Road (Nemacolin’s

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, h

The latest explorations of the mounds erected by those first Americans, known best as the mound-building Indians, have revolutionized our conceptions of the earliest race of which we know in America. Very many notions, founded upon the authority of the earlier archæologists, seem now to be either partly or wholly incorrect. Many assumptions as to the population of this country during the mound-building era, the degree of the civilization, and the perfection of the arts, have not been substantiat

The mounds of these first Americans of which we know are found between Oregon and the Wyoming valley, in Pennsylvania, and Onondaga county in New York; they extend from Manitoba in Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The great seat of empire was in the drainage area of the Mississippi river; on this river and its tributaries were the heaviest mound-building populations. Few mounds are found east of the Alleghany mountains. In the Catalogue of Prehistoric Works East of the Rocky Mountains , issued by t

It has been noted that a considerable portion of archæological remains in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin are inland—or away from the largest river valleys. The lands on the lesser streams were occupied in some instances for the entire distance to the springs. For instance, in Ohio and Kentucky we find only a fraction of the ancient works on the shores of the Ohio river—either mounds or forts. In Ohio the largest collections are found in the interior counties mentioned, as is the case in

In examining the standard work on the exploration of the American mounds, the Twelfth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, by Dr. Cyrus Thomas, it is plain that the mound-building Indians were well acquainted with the watersheds and high lands in the regions which they occupied. As a general rule it can be said that they cultivated the lowlands and built their forts and mounds upon the adjacent heights; but, so widespread are their works over the counties whic

A few descriptions of the local roadways of the mound-building Indians have been cited; reasons for believing that they used the watersheds, to a greater or less degree, as highways for passage from one part of the country to another, have been described. Let us look at the matter of their migrations. That these people did migrate there is no doubt among archæologists. The many kinds of archælogical remains now found indicate that they were divided into many different tribes, and the great dista

When the first Europeans visited the Central West two sorts of land thoroughfares were found by which the forests could be threaded: paths of the aborigines and paths of the great game animals such as the buffalo. These paths were familiarly known for half a century as Indian Roads and Buffalo Roads. That these two kinds of thoroughfares were easily distinguishable one from the other and that both were ways of common passage through the land will be made plain later. Many varying theories regard

The range of the buffalo or bison in the United States formerly extended from Great Slave Lake on the north to the northeastern provinces of Mexico on the south—from 62° latitude to 25°. Its westward range extended beyond the Rocky mountains and embraced quite a large area, remains having recently been discovered as far west as the Blue mountains in Oregon; farther south, herds roamed over the region occupied by the Great Salt Lake basin and grazed westward as far as the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The first explorers that entered the interior of the American continent were dependent upon the buffalo and Indian for ways of getting about. Few of the early white men who came westward journeyed on the rivers, as the journals of Gist and Walker attest, and to the trails of the buffalo and Indian they owed their success in bringing to the seaboard the first accounts of the interior of the continent. From Gist, Walker, and Boone the world learned the most it knew of the trans-Alleghany country p

Turning from a particular region, where, because of the close proximity of licks and feeding-grounds, the buffalo made local roads, it becomes of interest to look at the country at large and note the great continental routes. For an animal credited with but little instinct, the buffalo found the paths of least resistance with remarkable accuracy. [122] Undoubtedly the migrations of the buffalo caused the opening of the great overland trails upon which the first white men came into the West. The