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42 to this method will not be indulged in for certain respectable reasons; there are very few undoubted routes of the mound-building Indians, and a detailed comparative study of these and later Indian routes would become, under the circumstances, too speculative to be of genuine historical value. Our purpose, then, will be, merely to give the reasons for believing that the earliest Indians had great overland routes of travel; that, though they lived largely in the river valleys, their migrations were by land and not by water—in short, that these first Americans undoubtedly marked out the first highways of America used by man, as the large game animal, the buffalo, marked out the first great highways used by animal life.

These highways were the highestways because their general alignment was on the greater watersheds: and our study may be better described perhaps by a subtitle—a study in highestways.