Historic Highways of America, Vol. 1

Paths of the Mound-Building Indians and Great Game Animals

Nothing is more typical of a civilization than its roads. The traveler enters the city of Nazareth on a Roman road which has been used, perhaps, since the Christian era dawned. Every line is typical of Rome; every block of stone speaks of Roman power and Roman will. And ancient roads come down from the Roman standard in a descending scale even as the civilizations which built them. The main thoroughfare from the shore of the Yellow Sea to the capital of Korea, used by millions for millenniums, has never been more than the bridle path it is todayfit emblem of a people without a hope in the world, an apathetic, hermit nation. Every road has a story and the burden of every story is a need. The greater the need, the better the road and the longer and more important the story. Go back[Pg 18] even to primeval America. The bears food was all about him, in forest and bush. He made no roads for he needed none, save a path into the valley. But the moose and deer and buffalo required new feeding-grounds, fresh salt licks and change of climate, and the great roads they broke open across the watersheds declare nothing if not a need. The ancient Indian confederacies which tilled the soil of this continent and built great mounds for defense and worshipso great, indeed, that the people have even been known as mound-buildersundoubtedly first traveled the highest highways of America. Some of them may have known the water-ways better than any of the land-waysfor their signal stations were erected on the shores of many of our important riversbut the location of their heaviest seats of population was where we find the richest lands and the heaviest populations today, and that is in what may be called the interior of the continent, or along the smaller rivers. Such stupendous works as Fort Ancient and Fort Hill are located beside very inferior streams, and[Pg 19] between such works as these, placed without any seeming regard for the larger water-ways, these mound-building Indians must have had great thoroughfares along the summits of the watersheds. About these earthworks they constructed great, graded roadways, commensurate with the size of the works of which they were a necessary part, but so far as we know these early peoples built no roads between their forts or between their villages. They made no thoroughfares. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 40873
Author: Hulbert, Archer Butler
Release Date: Sep 27, 2012
Format: eBook
Language: English