Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 2).djvu/55

Rh pause a moment in their struggle with mountain grades beside our modern watering-places; but should a water tank once be found destroyed when we have reached it, necessitating a long delay until assistance arrived, it would be more keenly realized what water is worth to engine, beast, and man on high lands—and here the long thoroughfares of the Indian lay. A good, never-failing spring in the old West was known to a continent, and a geographer would more readily have been forgiven the omission of a range of mountains than the omission of a single spring from his map. Journeys were always made from "water" to "water." "Go on to the next water," was Washington's command to his scoundrel guide on the return from Fort La Bœuf. And the "next water" was ever the eagerly sought goal of a million early toilers on the first pathways of America. As may hereafter appear, springs of water determined not a little the distribution of population in certain portions of the country, even as originally they determined the course of the Indian thoroughfares.