Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 1).djvu/86

82 and 40 feet high 2¼ miles west of Rockfish Gap Tunnel" (Augusta county, Virginia).

Some of these cairns do not, in all probability, date back to the mound-building era, but the mounds and other archæological works probably do, giving the best reasons for believing that the earliest of Americans found the strategic paths of least resistance across our great divides.

But not only in the mountain passes have our tripods placed their stern stamp of approval upon the ingenuity of the earliest pathfinders of America. In a host of instances our highways and railroads follow for many miles the general line of the routes of the buffalo and Indian on the high ground. This is particularly true of our roads of secondary importance, county roads, which in hundreds of instances follow the alignment of a pioneer road which was laid out on an Indian trail.

No one can examine the maps and diagrams of the archæological works of central North America with this truth in mind