Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 1).djvu/105

 CHAPTER I

HEN 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 regarding the coming of the buffalo into the central and eastern portions of this continent have been devised, but of one thing we are sure, namely that, among all the relics exhumed from the mounds of the pre-Columbian