Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 1).djvu/25

Rh interesting that he found the strategic passage-ways through the mountains, so that the first explorers came into the West through gaps where were found broad buffalo roads; it is also interesting that the buffalo marked out the most practical portage paths between the heads of our rivers—paths that are closely followed today, for instance, by the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio railways through the Alleghanies, the Chesapeake and Ohio through the Blue Ridge, the Cleveland Terminal and Valley railway between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers and the Wabash railway between the Maumee and Wabash rivers. In one instance (that of the Cuyahoga-Tuscarawas portage) the route of the ancient portage—most plainly to be discovered because it was for so long a time the boundary of the United States that lands on the west of it were surveyed by a different system from those on the east—is crossed by a modern road seven times in a distance of eight miles.

But the greater marvel is that these early pathfinders chose routes, even in the roughest districts, which the tripod of the white