Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 2).djvu/85

Rh quainted with its topographical features. To the pale-faced adventurer of the seventeenth century to whom all this vast territory was an unexplored blank, viewing the land from his birchen canoe on Lake Ontario, the bays, rivers and larger creeks presented the only feasible routes by which it could be entered and traversed, yet, once within its borders, the hardy explorer found the country marked by an intricate net-work of foot paths which spread in every direction. These dark wood lanes unknown to civilized man, their soil heretofore pressed only by the feet of Indians and wild beasts, will ever be known in history as the 'trails of the Genesee.' They were the highways and byways of the native inhabitants, the channels of communication between nations, tribes and scattering towns, in which there was a never-ceasing ebb and flow of humanity.

"The origin of these trails and the selection of the routes pursued were natural results of the every-day necessities and inclinations of the nomadic race first inhabiting the land, and time had gradually fashioned the varying interests of succes-