Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 1).djvu/22

18 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