Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 1).djvu/106

102 mound-building Indians, very few bones of the buffalo have been found. Bones of other animals are frequently, even commonly, brought to light, but the remarkable fact remains that almost no buffalo bones are discovered. Considering that the buffalo was the most useful animal possible to aboriginal tribes like those in prehistoric America, there is but one conclusion to be reached, and that is that the mound-building Indians had but little acquaintance with the buffalo.

For this reason it has seemed altogether best to treat the routes of the mound-building Indians first, and the routes of the great game animals, which were known as Buffalo Roads, second—on the theory that the buffalo came into the Central West sometime between the mound-building era and the arrival of the first European explorers.