When it is realized that the art for which the earliest Indians have been most extolled was not, in reality, in advance of that known by the ordinary Indian, and that the population of the country in the mound-building era cannot be shown to have exceeded the population found when the first white men visited the Indian races, it is easy to see in the erection of the mounds, the burial of dead, the rude implements common to both, the poor trinkets used for ornamentation, the houses each built, the weapons each employed, a vast deal of additional testimony proving that the “Mound-builder” and Indian were of one race.
Thus the true historical method must be to compare what is definitely known of the earliest Indians with the relics and memorials which are surely those of the mound-building era in order to reach undoubted facts concerning the prehistoric Indians. This applies equally to customs, weapons, edifices, ornaments, and what is of present moment to our study: highways of travel.
However, a complete detailed study of the highways of the early Indians according to this method will not be indulged in for certain respectable reasons; there are very few undoubted routes of the mound-building Indians, and a detailed comparative study of these and later Indian routes would become, under the circumstances, too speculative to be of genuine historical value. Our purpose, then, will be, merely to give the reasons for believing that the earliest Indians had great overland routes of travel; that, though they lived largely in the river valleys, their migrations were by land and not by water—in short, that these first Americans undoubtedly marked out the first highways of America used by man, as the large game animal, the buffalo, marked out the first great highways used by animal life.
These highways were the highestways because their general alignment was on the greater watersheds: and our study may be better described perhaps by a subtitle—a study in highestways.
CHAPTER II
DISTRIBUTION OF MOUND-BUILDING INDIANS
The mounds of these first Americans of which we know are found between Oregon and the Wyoming valley, in Pennsylvania, and Onondaga county in New York; they extend from Manitoba in Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.