Archer Butler Hulbert

“ From Canandaigua lake a branch ran northwest to the head of Irondequoit bay, then to the Genesee falls, and along the lake ridge to the Niagara river at Lewiston. This was the grand line of communication between the Five Nations, and the ultimate destination of every other trail in the present state of New York. Along its silent course the swiftest runners of the Iroquois bore their messages of peace or war with a speed and physical endurance incredible. ”

“ It is a fair question whether our western civilization is more wonderful for the rapidity with which new things under the sun are discovered, or for the rapidity with which it can forget men and things today which were indispensable yesterday. The era of the Cumberland Road was succeeded in half a century by that of the railway, and a great thoroughfare, which was the pride and mainstay of a civilization, has almost passed from human recollection. ”

“ The trail of the Indian, though often blocked by fallen trees and tangles of vine, ever offered a course through the heart of the continent. Like the buffalo trails they clung to high ground, mounting the hills on the long ascending ridges. Here, as was true of the routes of the earlier Indians and buffaloes, the paths found the driest courses, for from the ridges the water was most quickly shed; the hilltops, too, were wind-swept of snow in winter and of brush and leaves in summer, and suffered least from the annual forest fires ”

“ You may walk over Braddock's Road from where it left the Potomac to the pool of blood where it stopped, and that rough track—its tremendous gorges which the rains of a century have not effaced, its great furrows through the open, its wide pathway through the forest—is a monument to the sheer grit and determination of the man for whom it is named and who was buried somewhere in it. ”

“ Living almost entirely on the generosity of the forest and stream, the later Indian needed thoroughfares only for hunting and for war. The little trail to the hunting-ground and the track which led to the enemy's country, were, when history dawned, his only thoroughfare. It answered all his needs, and he did nothing to improve it. If it became impenetrable because of the wind-strewn wreck of the forests, or by the action of the floods, he merely sought out another pathway and broke it open by continual use. ”

“ Those who once pushed their horses down the Warriors' Path or went whooping down the Scioto or Mahoning are now hunting the souls of the moose and the beaver in the Land of the Souls, "walking on the souls of their snowshoes on the soul of the snow." ”

“ We have gone up the Kittanning gorge two or three miles, repeatedly, and looked upon the ruins of old huts, and the road, which evidently never received the impression of a wagon-wheel, and were forcibly struck with the idea that it must once have been traversed, without knowing at the time that it was the famous Kittanning trail. In some places, where the ground was marshy, close to the run, the path is at least twelve inches deep, and the very stones along the road bear the marks of the iron-shod horses of the Indian traders. ”

“ With hunting-lodges built at convenient points on these thoroughfares, the minor cross-trails were broken to and fro along the watersheds and from the rivers upward and inland.
The war trails were what the name implies—routes to and from the home-lands of hostile confederacies, nations, or tribes. The higher a nation mounts in the plane of civilization the better it is known for its joys; the lower it sinks the more famous it becomes for its hatreds. ”

“ In a moment's time an army of emigrants and pioneers were en route to the West over the great highway, regiment following regiment as the years advanced. Squalid cabins, where the hunter had lived beside the primeval thoroughfare, were pressed into service as taverns. Indian fords, where the water had oft run red with blood in border frays, were spanned with solid bridges. Ancient towns, which had been comparatively unknown to the world, but which were of sufficient commercial magnetism to attract the great road to them, became, on the morrow, cities of consequence in the world. ”

“ To find the beginning and end of these grand trails one might traverse the continent in a fruitless search, for, like the broader roads of the present population, many of which follow the old trail courses, the beaten paths extended from ocean to ocean, from the southern point of Patagonia to the country of the Eskimos, where they were lost in the ever-shifting mantle of snow covering the land of ice—and the trails of the Genesee were but a local division of the mighty complication. ”

“ To one whose imagination is grounded in the annals of these early days, a walk on one of the old-time thoroughfares is a glimpse backward which, for vividness and meaning, will prove of more inspiration than a year spent in any of the best of our museums. By Hutchins's old map, drawn for Colonel Bouquet when he led the first English army that ever crossed the Ohio, I found that this thoroughfare I was shown that day crossed through Fairfield and Perry counties from the Scioto valley where the Shawanese lived. ”

“ This is no road for white people, and no white man has come this trail before."
"Seneca," said Zeisberger, sternly, "the business I am on is different from that of other white men, and the roads I travel are different, too. I am come to bring the Indians great and good words." And nothing bears out more strongly the brave hero's words than the rough map left us of the "roads of iron" beyond the Ohio. ”

“ 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. ”

“ An Indian Trail Becomes a Modern Road
hills, or Braddock's great road which nearly followed the Indian's course, or the Cumberland Road which followed closely the general alignment of Braddock's Road. By any route the journey will be an inspiration which no description can by any means convey. If you follow the Indian path from hilltop to hilltop you will seem to see yet the blazes on the trees made by Cresap's Indians for the Virginian gentlemen who were eager and anxious to try that celebrated test case with France to decide who was master in these western forests. ”

“ Thus through all Indian and pioneer history one of the chief qualifications of a guide was the ability to know what trails to use at each season, and to be able to estimate the extent of local storms or floods and know what trails would be affected by each. In winter and during times of floods, the hill trails were undoubtedly the routes to be used and watched. In summer, the lowland trails were broken again for the season's travel. Forest fire was another important factor to be counted by one who was to make his way or guide others through the primeval forests of America. ”

“ If the Indian left us little of profit, he certainly left us the memory of countless, immemorial hatreds which perhaps are not equaled in the annals of human history. Nothing points more strikingly to the low plane of civilization which he occupied. ”

“ And, on the day following, as I pursued the course, his words proved true and I suddenly came into a traveled road. The old highway was still in use as far as a farm-house located at a distance from the main highway. It was not blocked up, for many still use the old road as a footpath across the hills. For the explorer of old highways there is perhaps no spot in America which can equal in romance and interest the three great pathways, one built upon the other, which wind through the Alleghanies of northwestern Maryland and southwestern Pennsylvania, from the Potomac to the Ohio river. ”

“ So patriotic and so thoroughly American is the Central West today, that it is also difficult to realize by what a slender thread it hung to the fragile republic east of the mountains, during the two decades succeeding the Revolutionary War. The whole world looked upon the East and West as realms distinct as Italy and France, and for the same geographical reason. ”

“ All night, along the roadway, gypsy fires flickered in the darkness, where wandering minstrels and jugglers crept to show their art, while in the background crowded traders, hucksters, peddlers, soldiery, showmen, and beggars—all picturesque pilgrims on the nation's great highway. ”

“ It is probably impossible for us of today to imagine what springs were worth to the first travelers on these primitive thoroughfares of America. We hardly notice, unless by a complaint, when our trains of today 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 KNOWLEDGE of the Indian thoroughfares of the United States forms a most valuable key to the pioneer history of any and all portions of it. To a larger degree than has ever been realized, the explorers, conquerors, and settlers of any portion of this country were indebted to the narrow trail of the Indian. The explorers were, largely, compelled to travel by land rather than by water, and when they took to their canoes for a plunge down the swift rivers they almost invariably retraced their course on Indian trails in preference to stemming the swift tide which brought them down. ”

“ If there is any evidence that Indians ever made efforts to outwardly mark the course of any of their thoroughfares, it is not to be found in the most trustworthy records of the first white men who entered the Indians' land. Indian hieroglyphics announcing their triumphs in war may yet be seen at low tide on rocks in certain of our rivers, and rough blazes made centuries ago by Frenchmen who first crossed the portages of the West have been brought to light by removing earth from the trunks of old trees along the trail, [6] but the Indian land-thoroughfares were not marked. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In such instances the trails were forced to seek the most practicable courses available. Thus many of them wound for miles through low grounds which were often covered with water or otherwise rendered impassable. In such locations the trails were exceedingly circuitous. The few men who are still to be found who traveled and remember any Indian trail will attest to this fact that in low ground the trail was wont to double back on itself many times, even in a few rods. This in itself is interesting proof that even in low ground the path of the Indian sought the highest ground. ”

“ This was done so completely that even Washington, at a later but happier day, could not identify it.
On the summit of Laurel Hill a county road now follows for a distance the old-time war route. The spot where the former swings away westward may easily be discovered and your route turns again into the silent forests.
Or return once again to historic Cumberland—and before you a great avenue eighty feet in width has supplanted both the road of the Indian and Braddock's ancient highway; "it is a monument of a past age; but like all other monuments, it is interesting as well as venerable. ”

“ As a rule, the tracks are very plain in the case of trails which became pioneer routes. On Braddock's Road, for instance, great gorges are still to be found, five feet in depth, plowed by hundreds of pioneer wagons. On a hundred hilltops may be found a slight, gently rounding depression which, on the longer ranges, can be followed for miles. These old thoroughfares are most plain where the forests are still standing on the hilltops, for here, among the trees, the explorer finds a great aisle which was once the ancient thoroughfare. ”

“ The local trails of the Indians differed from the local traces of the buffalo much as their individual destinations differed. Yet, after white men came among the Indians of the Central West they found them using the great, broad roads which the buffalo made to and from 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These areas were a nation's pride and came first in the catalogue of its riches and power—and, thus, the Happy Hunting-Ground, of wide extent, rich in game, which no ruthless conqueror could wrest away, was the Indian's conception of a blessed life hereafter. ”

“ Before the white man obstructed its channel with dams the Genesee was one continuous rapid from Red creek to the south line of the present Erie canal aqueduct. An Indian ford existed at a shallow place near the immediate line of the present race-dam, between the jail and the weigh-lock, but was never in such general use as the upper ford below Red creek where the river could be more easily crossed by footmen.
"The great trail coming west from Canandaigua on the present route of the Pittsford road divided a few rods east of Allen's creek. ”

“ When day came, we resumed our way through the woods and by mountains, intersected by lakes and very rapid rivers.
"On the twelfth day after the Office of Good Friday, and after having confessed several Savages,—who wished to separate from us, in order to take another road, and make some canoes,—we reached the summit of the mountains, and a small river, on which we found some Beaver lodges; we killed six of these animals. Then we continued our route past three great lakes, in the last of which was an islet; here we slept on the snow, without erecting any cabins. ”