Paths of the Mound-Building Indians and Great Game Animals

by Archer Butler Hulbert

Assuming, then, that the mound-building people lived (in these states more particularly noticed) on the lesser “inland” streams where the later Indians were found, there is no question but that they moved about the country more or less as the Indians themselves did. Although the former people were more nearly a stationary people, yet we know that they hunted, and it is not reasonable to believe that they did not have commercial intercourse. In fact, from the contents of their mounds, we know they did. We also know that the various tribes made war upon one another, or at least were made war upon by some enemy.

All this necessitated highways of travel. Any one who has studied the West during Indian occupancy does not need to be asked to remember that travel in the earliest days in the interior was by land as well as by water. Those making long journeys at propitious seasons, such as the Iroquois who went southward in war parties, the Moravians being transferred to Ohio from Pennsylvania, pioneers en route down the Ohio river to Kentucky, the Wyandots on their memorable hegira to the Detroit river, used the waterways. But the main mode of travel for explorers, war parties, pioneer armies and missionaries seems to have been by the paths which threaded the forests.[9]

Of the hundreds of Indian forays into Virginia and Kentucky there is perhaps not one, even those moving down the Scioto and up the Licking, that used water transportation. In their hunting trips the canoe was useless except for transporting game and peltry to the nearest posts, and this was done often on the little Indian ponies.

For long months the lesser streams were ice-bound in the winter; in the summer, for equally long periods, they must have been nearly dry, as in the present era of slack-water navigation the larger of them are frequently very low. Even travel on the Ohio in low-water months was exasperatingly slow. One pilgrim to Ohio spent ninety days en route from Killingly, Connecticut, to Marietta, Ohio—thirty-one of them being spent in getting from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, down the Monongahela and Ohio to Marietta! The journey from Connecticut in a cart drawn by oxen to the Monongahela took but twice the time needed to come down the rivers to Marietta on a “Kentucky” flatboat![10] With high-water, and going down stream, a hundred miles a day could be covered.[11]

That the first pioneers into the interior of Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana preferred land routes to water is plain to the most casual reader of the history of the pioneer period. Such great entrepots as Wellsburg, Ohio, Limestone, Kentucky, and Madison, Indiana (all on the Ohio), attest the fact that the travel to the interior was by land routes and not by the smaller rivers.

And so, throughout historic times, one rule has held true in the region now under survey: that the lesser streams have never been used to any large degree as routes of travel by the white race, or by the red race before them. It is thus reasonable to believe that the earliest people, who so largely inhabited the interior valleys, found land travel more sure and expeditious than water travel on the little streams. A great many mound-building people lived by these smaller streams where so many of their works now stand. That they had ways of getting about the country goes without saying. In some instances the earth and stone with which they worked was brought from a distance. This could not have been accomplished by any means by water. We know they fought great battles; it is exceedingly doubtful and all against the lesson taught in times that are historic, that these armies traveled water routes. True, there were watch “towers” along the river banks, and the rivers of real size were undoubtedly the routes of armies—but it has been the opinion of some archæologists that their enemies came from the north. There are no rivers flowing from the interior of Ohio, for instance, to Lake Erie that are even now when dammed of a size sufficient to warrant us the belief that great armies passed over them.[12] We cannot imagine a hostile army of power great enough to have necessitated the building of such a work as Fort Ancient ever coming to it on the little river on which it stands.

Speaking of the mound-building Indians, MacLean remarks: “In order to warn the settlements [of mound-builders], where such a band should approach, it was found necessary to have ... signal stations. Judging by the primitive methods employed, these wars must have continued for ages. If the settlements along the two Miamis and Scioto were overrun at the same time before they had become weakened, it would have required such an army as only a civilized or semi-civilized nation could send into the field. It is plausible to assume that a predatory warfare was carried on at first, and on account of this the many fortifications were gradually built. During a warfare such as this, the regular parties of miners would go to the mines, for the roads could be kept open, even should an enemy cross the well-beaten paths.”[13] Here a scholar of reputation gives the strongest kind of evidence in a belief that overland routes of travel were in existence and were employed in prehistoric times—by incidentally referring to them while discussing another question. It is difficult to think of any possible alternative. The verdict of history is all against another.

Assuming, then, that overland routes of travel were used by this earliest of American races of which we have any real knowledge, it is to the purpose of our study to consider where such routes were laid.

The one law which has governed land travel throughout history is the law of least resistance, or least elevation. “An easy trail to high ground” is a colloquial expression common in the Far West, but there has been a time when it was as common to Pennsylvania and Ohio as it is common today along the great stretches of the Platte. The watersheds have been the highways and highestways of the world’s travel. The farther back we go in our history, the more conclusive does the evidence become that the first ways were the highestways. Our first roads were ridge roads and their day is not altogether past in many parts of the land. These first roads were “run,” or built, along the general alignment of the first pioneer roads, which, in turn, were nothing more than “blazed” paths of the Indian and buffalo. A single glance at one of the maps of the Central West of Revolutionary times, for instance, will show how closely the first routes clung to the heights of the watersheds. And for good reason: here the ground suffered least from erosion; here the forests were thinnest; here a pathway would be swept clear of snow in winter and of leaves in summer by the swift, clean brooms of the winds. For the Indians, too, the high lands were points of vantage both in hunting and in times of war.

In every state there were strategic heights of land, generally running westward; in Ohio, for example, the strategic watershed was that between the heads of the lake rivers and the heads of those flowing southward into the Ohio. Across this divide ran the Great Trail toward Detroit and the lake country. In western Virginia a strategic watershed was that formed between the heads of streams flowing northward into the Ohio and southward into the Kanawha. And in a remarkable degree the strategic points of a century and a half ago are the strategic points today, a fact attested by the courses of the more important trunk railway lines. The steady rise and importance of such a city as Akron, Ohio, is due to a strategic situation at the junction of both an important portage path and of a great watershed highway.