CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
When the first Europeans visited the Central West two sorts of land thoroughfares were found by which the forests could be threaded: paths of the aborigines and paths of the great game animals such as the buffalo. These paths were familiarly known for half a century as Indian Roads and Buffalo Roads. That these two kinds of thoroughfares were easily distinguishable one from the other and that both were ways of common passage through the land will be made plain later.
Many varying theories regarding the coming of the buffalo into the central and eastern portions of this continent have been devised, but of one thing we are sure, namely that, among all the relics exhumed from the mounds of the pre-Columbian mound-building Indians, very few bones of the buffalo have been found. Bones of other animals are frequently, even commonly, brought to light, but the remarkable fact remains that almost no buffalo bones are discovered. Considering that the buffalo was the most useful animal possible to aboriginal tribes like those in prehistoric America, there is but one conclusion to be reached, and that is that the mound-building Indians had but little acquaintance with the buffalo.
For this reason it has seemed altogether best to treat the routes of the mound-building Indians first, and the routes of the great game animals, which were known as Buffalo Roads, second—on the theory that the buffalo came into the Central West sometime between the mound-building era and the arrival of the first European explorers.[91]
CHAPTER II
RANGE AND HABITS OF THE BUFFALO
The range of the buffalo or bison in the United States formerly extended from Great Slave Lake on the north to the northeastern provinces of Mexico on the south—from 62° latitude to 25°. Its westward range extended beyond the Rocky mountains and embraced quite a large area, remains having recently been discovered as far west as the Blue mountains in Oregon; farther south, herds roamed over the region occupied by the Great Salt Lake basin and grazed westward as far as the Sierra Nevada mountains. East of the Rocky mountains the feeding-grounds embraced all the area drained by the Ohio river and its tributaries, extending southward beyond the Rio Grande and northward to the Great Lakes as far as the eastern extremity of Lake Erie. The southeastern range probably did not extend beyond the Tennessee river, and only in the upper portions of North and South Carolina did it extend beyond the Alleghanies.