Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 2).djvu/20

16 the salt licks and feeding-grounds. But it is quite sufficient for us to know that the earliest travelers in the West found Indian trails and buffalo traces and spoke of each as distinct thoroughfares, and easily recognized whether they belonged to one class or another. This is proved by Dr. Walker's references to them in his Journal of 1750.

The trails of the Indian were laid out with reference to the location of several things, among which their enemies and their hunting-grounds were originally of greatest importance. After the advent of the white man into the interior, the trails most used were those which led to the nearest trading-posts and to the forts of white men to whom the Indian became allied in the struggle that eventually broke out, and that continued in one form or another until the Indian was an eliminated factor in the West.

An Indian trail, in the abstract, was a narrow runway through the forest. Animal-like, the Indians always traveled in single file. The trail, while not worn five or six feet into the ground as a buffalo trace was, often lay a foot or two below