Historic Highways of America (Complete)

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 bearÕs 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 worshipÑso great, indeed, that the people have even been known as Òmound-buildersÓÑundoubtedly first traveled the highest highways of America. Some of them may have known the water-ways better than any of the land-waysÑfor their signal stations were erected on the shores of many of our important riversÑbut 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 dŽbris 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.