CHAPTER III
EARLY USE OF BUFFALO ROADS
The first explorers that entered the interior of the American continent were dependent upon the buffalo and Indian for ways of getting about. Few of the early white men who came westward journeyed on the rivers, as the journals of Gist and Walker attest, and to the trails of the buffalo and Indian they owed their success in bringing to the seaboard the first accounts of the interior of the continent.
From Gist, Walker, and Boone the world learned the most it knew of the trans-Alleghany country prior to the Revolution. Gist pierced central Ohio and came around homeward through eastern Kentucky which Dr. Walker had explored, and Boone hunted from the Holston to the Kentucky river.
To these men three routes of travel were feasible—Indian thoroughfares, buffalo roads, and the beds of dry streams. It seems that of the two former routes those of the Indian were easily distinguished from those of the buffalo. In Dr. Walker’s Journal (1750) this is made clear from the frequent mention of the several kinds of roads he found. Of the Indian thoroughfares he writes as follows:
“April 14th. We kept down the Creek 5 miles Chiefly along the Indian Road.
“15th. Easter Sunday. Being in bad grounds for our Horses we moved 7 miles along the Indian Road, to Clover Creek.
“18th. Still cloudy. We kept down the Creek to the River along the Indian Road to where it crosses.”[94]