Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 2).djvu/53

Rh when it was known and mapped by white explorers, two or three great war paths are found, and only two or three. These run from the lake country southward into the lands below the Blue Ridge and Cumberland ranges. Each was known as the Great War Trail and each was doubtless trodden hard through many years by hurrying ochered cohorts burning with a hatred imbibed with their mother's milk. Upon these trails the Iroquois in early days made war on the Cherokees or Catawbas, as, within historic times, the Shawanese and Miamis were known to do. Such maps as those by Filson, Hutchins, and Heckewelder give no "war trails" in all the Indian-inhabited country north of the Ohio save the two or three great war paths southward. Thus, in the earliest days of which we know, the "Warriors' Path" was known throughout the length and breadth of the land and was a highway not to be followed lightly even in times of peace, if indeed there ever was an hour of peace between the southern confederacies and those to the north.

The war path was a deeper, wider, harder