HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
VOLUME 1
HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
VOLUME 1
Paths of the Mound-Building Indians
and Great Game Animals
BY
ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT
_With Maps and Illustrations_
[Illustration]
THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
CLEVELAND, OHIO
1902
COPYRIGHT, 1902
BY
THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO
MY FATHER
THIS SERIES OF VOLUMES
IS AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED
"_Je n'aurais point aux Dieux demandé d'autre père._"
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 11
GENERAL INTRODUCTION 17
PART I
I. THE COMPARATIVE METHOD OF STUDY 37
II. DISTRIBUTION OF MOUND-BUILDING INDIANS 43
III. EARLY TRAVEL IN THE INTERIOR 53
IV. HIGHLAND LOCATION OF ARCHÆOLOGICAL REMAINS 68
V. WATERSHED MIGRATIONS 94
PART II
I. INTRODUCTORY 101
II. RANGE AND HABITS OF THE BUFFALO 103
III. EARLY USE OF BUFFALO ROADS 110
IV. CONTINENTAL THOROUGHFARES 128
ILLUSTRATIONS
I. ARCHÆOLOGIC MAP OF WISCONSIN
(showing interior location of remains) 48
II. ARCHÆOLOGIC MAP OF OHIO
(showing interior location of remains) 52
III. ARCHÆOLOGIC MAP OF ILLINOIS AND INDIANA
(showing interior location of remains) 55
IV. EARLY HIGHWAYS ON THE WATERSHEDS OF OHIO 78
PREFACE
Beginning with the first highways of America, the first monograph of the
series will consider the routes of the mound-building Indians and the
trails of the large game animals, particularly the buffalo, as having
set the course of landward travel in America on the watersheds of the
interior of the continent. The second monograph will treat of the Indian
thoroughfares of America; the third, fourth, and fifth, the three roads
built westward during the old French War, Washington's Road (Nemacolin's
Path), Braddock's Road, and the Old Glade (Forbes's) Road. The sixth
monograph will be a study of Boone's Wilderness Road to Kentucky; the
seventh and eighth, a study of the principal portage paths of the
interior of the continent and of the military roads built in the
Mississippi basin during the era of conquest; Vol. IX. will take up the
historic water-ways which most influenced westward conquest and
immigration; the famed Cumberland Road, or Old National Road, "which
more than any other material structure in the land served to harmonize
and strengthen, if not to save, the Union," will be the subject of the
tenth monograph. Two volumes will be given to the study of the pioneer
roads of America, and two to the consideration of the history of the
great American canals.
The history of America in the later part of the pioneer period, between
1810 and 1840, centers about the roads and canals which were to that day
what our trunk railway lines are to us today. The "life of the road" was
the life of the nation, and a study of the traffic on those first
highways of land and water, and of the customs and experiences of the
early travelers over them brings back with freshening interest the story
of our own "Middle Age." Horace Bushnell well said: "If you wish to know
whether society is stagnant, learning scholastic, religion a dead
formality, you may learn something by going into universities and
libraries; something also by the work that is doing on cathedrals and
churches, or in them; but quite as much by looking at the roads. For if
there is any motion in society, the Road, which is the symbol of motion,
will indicate the fact. When there is activity, or enlargement, or a
liberalizing spirit of any kind, then there is intercourse and travel,
and these require roads. So if there is any kind of advancement going
on, if new ideas are abroad and new hopes rising, then you will see it
by the roads that are building. Nothing makes an inroad without making a
road. All creative action, whether in government, industry, thought, or
religion, creates roads." The days when our first roads and our great
canals were building, were days when "new ideas were abroad and new
hopes rising." The four volumes of our series treating of pioneer roads
and the great canals will be a record of those ideas and hopes and the
mighty part they played in the social development of America. The final
volume will treat of the practical side of the road question. An index
will conclude the series.
HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Nothing is more typical of a civilization than its roads. The traveler
enters the city of Nazareth on a Roman road which has been used,
perhaps, since the Christian era dawned. Every line is typical of Rome;
every block of stone speaks of Roman power and Roman will. And ancient
roads come down from the Roman standard in a descending scale even as
the civilizations which built them. The main thoroughfare from the shore
of the Yellow Sea to the capital of Korea, used by millions for
millenniums, has never been more than the bridle path it is today--fit
emblem of a people without a hope in the world, an apathetic, hermit
nation.
Every road has a story and the burden of every story is a need. The
greater the need, the better the road and the longer and more important
the story. Go back even to primeval America. The bear's food was all
about him, in forest and bush. He made no roads for he needed none, save
a path into the valley. But the moose and deer and buffalo required new
feeding-grounds, fresh salt licks and change of climate, and the great
roads they broke open across the watersheds declare nothing if not a
need.
The ancient Indian confederacies which tilled the soil of this continent
and built great mounds for defense and worship--so great, indeed, that
the people have even been known as "mound-builders"--undoubtedly first
traveled the highest highways of America. Some of them may have known
the water-ways better than any of the land-ways--for their signal
stations were erected on the shores of many of our important rivers--but
the location of their heaviest seats of population was where we find the
richest lands and the heaviest populations today, and that is in what
may be called the interior of the continent, or along the smaller
rivers. Such stupendous works as Fort Ancient and Fort Hill are located
beside very inferior streams, and between such works as these, placed
without any seeming regard for the larger water-ways, these
mound-building Indians must have had great thoroughfares along the
summits of the watersheds. About these earthworks they constructed
great, graded roadways, commensurate with the size of the works of which
they were a necessary part, but so far as we know these early peoples
built no roads between their forts or between their villages. They made
no thoroughfares.
It was for the great game animals to mark out what became known as the
first thoroughfares of America. The plunging buffalo, keen of instinct,
and nothing if not a utilitarian, broke great roads across the continent
on the summits of the watersheds, beside which the first Indian trails
were but traces through the forests. Heavy, fleet of foot, capable of
covering scores of miles a day, the buffalo tore his roads from one
feeding-ground to another, and from north to south, on the high grounds;
here his roads were swept clear of débris in summer, and of snow in
winter. They mounted the heights and descended from them on the longest
slopes, and crossed each stream on the bars at the mouths of its lesser
tributaries.
Evidence remains today to show what great thoroughfares these buffalo
roads were, for on the summit of many of the greater watersheds may be
seen the remains of the old courses, and there the hoofprints of
centuries of travel may yet be read. If the summit should be bare of
trees, the very contour of the ground may suggest the old-time,
deeply-trod roadway; where a forest lies over the summit a remarkably
significant open aisle in the woods speaks yet more plainly of the
ancient highway, where only shrubs and little trees are found in the
center of the track.
It is very wonderful that the buffalo's instinct should have found the
very best courses across a continent upon whose thousand rivers such
great black forests were thickly strung. Yet it did, as the tripod of
the white man has proved; and until the problem of aërial navigation is
solved, human intercourse will move largely on paths first marked by the
buffalo. It is interesting that he found the strategic passage-ways
through the mountains, so that the first explorers came into the West
through gaps where were found broad buffalo roads; it is also
interesting that the buffalo marked out the most practical portage paths
between the heads of our rivers--paths that are closely followed today,
for instance, by the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio railways
through the Alleghanies, the Chesapeake and Ohio through the Blue Ridge,
the Cleveland Terminal and Valley railway between the Cuyahoga and
Tuscarawas rivers and the Wabash railway between the Maumee and Wabash
rivers. In one instance (that of the Cuyahoga-Tuscarawas portage) the
route of the ancient portage--most plainly to be discovered because it
was for so long a time the boundary of the United States that lands on
the west of it were surveyed by a different system from those on the
east--is crossed by a modern road seven times in a distance of eight
miles.
But the greater marvel is that these early pathfinders chose routes,
even in the roughest districts, which the tripod of the white man
cannot improve upon. A rare instance of this is the course of the
Baltimore and Ohio railway between Grafton and Parkersburg in West
Virginia. That this is one of the roughest rides our palatial trains of
today make is well known to all who have passed that way, and that so
fine a road could be put through such a rough country is one of the
marvels of engineering science. But leave the train, say, at the little
hamlet of Petroleum, West Virginia, and find on the hill the famous
old-time thoroughfare of the buffalo, Indian, and pioneer and follow
that narrow "thread of soil" westward to the Ohio river. You will find
that the railway has followed it steadily throughout its course and when
it came to a more difficult point than usual, where the railway is
compelled to tunnel at the strategic point of least elevation, in two
instances the trail runs _exactly over the tunnel_. This occurs at both
"Eaton's" tunnel, and "Gorham's" tunnel (or "No. 6").
With the deterioration of the civilization to which the mound-building
Indians belonged, the art of road-building became lost--for the great
need had passed away. The later Indians built no such roads as did
their ancestors, nor did they improve such routes on the highways as
they found or made. But they collected _poll_-taxes from travelers along
them, setting an example to generations of county commissioners who
collect taxes for roads they do not improve.
That the later Indians used the paths made by the buffalo they hunted is
beyond question. Warring Indian nations lured each other into ambush by
stamping a buffalo hoof upon the soft ground in their trail. And when,
later, Daniel Boone hewed his path through Cumberland Gap toward
Kentucky, he plainly says that he left the Indian road on Rockcastle
river and marked out the remainder of his way over a buffalo trace.
The great Indian trails, covering the land as with a network, and
leading by the straightest practicable courses to all strategic points,
became of momentous importance to the white man when he turned his
attention to the interior of the continent. When the Indian learned the
value of his furs, a great tide of trade set eastward over a thousand
rivers and woodland trails. On these same rivers, but more frequently
on the trails, white traders ventured westward with their bright
wares--and the western land became known among a much larger coterie
than before. The tales of the traders, together with dreams of
commercial exploitation led to the first careful exploration of the
interior of the continent by such men as Walker, Gist, Boone, and
Carver, to whom these narrow "roads of iron," as the Jesuit missionaries
in the north called the rough Indian trails, were shining paths to an El
Dorado. The first two great roads built westward were opened under the
direction of trading companies: the road from the Potomac to the Ohio by
Captain Cresap, for the first Ohio Company, and the road from Virginia
to Kentucky by Daniel Boone, for the Transylvania Company. And these
were at first only blazed and widened Indian thoroughfares which had
been used from times prehistoric.
The missionaries, too, were great explorers, and they knew the Indian
thoroughfares perhaps better even than the traders; at least they knew
some that white men had never traveled before them.
"Whither is the paleface going?" asked an old Seneca chieftain of the
indomitable Zeisberger; "why does the paleface travel such unknown
roads? This is no road for white people and no white man has come this
trail before."
"We reached home very late at night," wrote a brave Jesuit, "after
considerable trouble--for the paths were only about half a foot wide
where the snow would sustain one, and if you turned ever so little to
the right or left you were in it half way up to your thighs."
When the land was once discovered, its conquest was directed along the
very paths on which these explorers came. To the armies which conquered
the West the Indian thoroughfares were indispensable. Washington
followed narrow Indian trails while on his mission to the French on the
Allegheny in 1753; in the year following he widened Nemacolin's Path
across the mountains over which he hauled his swivels to Fort Necessity.
Braddock followed the same rough path in the succeeding year, making a
great gorge of a road which, after a century and a half, we can follow
as plainly as a new-made furrow behind a plow--even to the ford and
charnel-ground where the thin red line was swept away in that torrent of
lurking flame. Three years later, prejudiced against Virginia's Braddock
Road, the dying but indomitable Forbes--truly, as the Indians called
him, a Head of Iron--mowed another swath of a road westward through
Carlisle and Bedford to Fort Duquesne, that Pennsylvania herself might
have a road through her own province to the Ohio river. Braddock's Road
paused abruptly on the brink of a bloody ravine seven miles from
Pittsburg; but the home-stretch of the road built by this Head of Iron
is the beautiful Forbes Avenue of today.
The Great Trail of the West was the highway between Pittsburg and
Detroit, and its story is the bloody story of the Revolutionary War in
the West. For centuries this path had been a famed thoroughfare,
throwing its great sinuous lengths over the watersheds from the lakes to
the "Forks of the Ohio." Over this track the brave Swiss Bouquet led the
first English army that crossed the Ohio river, making a tri-track road
to the Muskingum valley and bringing to a triumphal close Pontiac's
bloody rebellion. The old Iroquois trail up the Mohawk valley and across
the great watershed of New York to the Niagara river was a famous
Revolutionary highway and afterward became one of the important pioneer
routes. On the Great Trail to Detroit Lachlan McIntosh erected the first
fort built by the thirteen colonies west of the Ohio, Fort Laurens on
the Muskingum near Great Crossings, where Bouquet had thrown his army
across the river in 1764. Indeed, throughout that whole half-century of
conflict in the Central West the lines of conquest were the lines of the
earlier routes of travel. Washington, Braddock, Forbes, Bouquet, Lewis,
Shirley, Sullivan, Clark, Brodhead, Crawford, Irvine, McIntosh, Harmar,
St. Clair, Wayne, and Harrison followed these old highways and fought
their battles on and beside them. These campaigns were not made by water
but by land. Had they been made by rivers, the courses of their routes
would have been frequently described and mapped as having an important
bearing on the history of each campaign. Because they were made by land
over routes which have never received attention from historians the real
ground-work of these campaigns has been entirely omitted. Each would be
far better understood in every way if its route were clearly defined. A
thorough understanding of our history is impossible without a knowledge
of these highways of trade and war and the strategic points they covered
and connected.
But of vaster interest is the study of the surging armies of pioneers
and the occupation of the great empire conquered by these armies for
them. To the emigrant each tawny trail was a path to a Promised Land.
They came in thousands and hundreds of thousands over the roads of New
York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. And what roads they were! It was
impossible for those pioneer wagons to follow the Indian paths with any
exactness. Even Braddock avoided the steeper hills and yet was compelled
to lower his wagons from some hills with blocks and tackling--many being
demolished at that. And yet to avoid the high ground was inevitably to
run into bogs and swamps which were even worse than the hills. We do not
have roads a mile wide nowadays, but this was not an unheard-of thing in
the days of the pioneer roads. It was preferable to have them a mile
wide rather than a mile deep, which would certainly have been the case
in some places if one track had been used alone. And even with
numberless side tracks, skirting in every direction around the more
dangerous localities, horses were not infrequently drowned, and great
wagons heavy with freight sometimes sank completely out of sight. The
Black Swamp Road through Ohio south of Lake Erie was one of the most
important in the West. It is recorded that on one occasion six horses
were able to draw a two-wheeled vehicle but fifteen miles in three days.
A newspaper of August 31, 1837, affirms that "the road through the Black
Swamp has been much of the season impassable. A couple of horses were
lost in a mud hole last week. The bottom had fallen out. The driver was
unaware of the fact. His horses plunged in and ere they could be
extricated were drowned." It is comforting to think there has been some
improvement in our country highways. Such accounts as this would have a
tendency to influence the most skeptical.
The rivers were also great highways for emigration, particularly such
streams as the Ohio which flowed west. With the building of the great
canals new and more stable methods of travel were at the disposal of
prospective travelers and there was an increase in the great tide of
home-seekers. The smaller inland rivers were not likely so largely used
by these armies of pioneers as some have thought. For instance, in a
history of one of the interior counties of Ohio (which is divided by one
of the best rivers in the West) is a twenty-five page description of the
first immigrants, and of only one does it say: "James Oglesby was a very
early settler ... and is said to have traveled up the Muskingum and
Walhounding rivers in true Indian style in a canoe." And, though the
Ohio river was always a great highway to the West and Southwest, it was
used less perhaps in the early days of the immigration than later. Flat
and keel boats cost money, and money was a scarce article. In summer
the river was very low, and one party of pioneers, at least, spent
one-third of the entire time of journey from Connecticut to Marietta,
Ohio, in coming down the Ohio from near Pittsburg. It took half as long
to come those two hundred miles by river as to come all the way from
Connecticut to the Ohio in a cart drawn by oxen. Moreover, even as late
as the time of the starting of a regular line of steamer packets from
Pittsburg to Cincinnati (1796) the passengers were assured in an
advertisement that, in addition to being provided a place to sleep and
something to eat, they would have each a loophole from which to shoot!
The coming of steam navigation revolutionized river travel as later it
revolutionized land travel.
This series of monographs will treat of the history of America as
portrayed in the evolution of its highways of war and immigration and
commerce. The more important highways, both land and water, will be
specifically treated with reference to the national needs which they
temporarily or permanently satisfied. The study of any highway for
itself alone might prove of indifferent value, even though it were an
Appian Way; but the story of a road, which shows clearly the rise,
nature, and passing of a nation's need for it, is of importance. It is
not of national import that there was a Wilderness Road to Kentucky, but
it is of utmost importance that a road through Cumberland Gap made
possible the early settlement of Kentucky, in that Kentucky held the
Mississippi river for the feeble colonies through days when everything
in the West and the whole future of the American republic lay in a
trembling balance. It is not of great importance that there was a
Nemacolin's Path across the Alleghanies; but if for a moment we can see
the rough trail as the young Major Washington saw it while the vanguard
of the ill-fated Fry's army marched out of Wills Creek toward the Ohio,
or if we can picture that terrible night's march Washington made from
Fort Necessity when Jumonville's scouting party was run at last to cover
by Half King's Indians, we shall know far better than ever the true
story of the first campaign of the war which won America for England,
and realize as never before what a brave, daring youth he was who on
Indian trails learned lessons that fitted him to become a leader of
half-clothed, ill-equipped armies.
The first aim of these monographs is suggestiveness; there is a vast
deal of geographic-historical work to be done throughout the United
States. There is no more interesting outdoor work for local students
than to trace, each in his own locality, the old land and water
highways, Indian trails, portage paths, pioneer roads or early county or
state roads. Maps should be made showing not only the evolution of
road-making in each county in the entire land, but all springs and licks
of importance should be correctly located and mapped; sites of Indian
villages should be marked; frontier forts and blockhouses should be
platted, including the surrounding defenses, covered ways, springs or
wells, and paths to and fro; traders' huts should all be placed, ancient
boundary lines marked, old hunting-grounds mapped. Those who can assist
students in such explorations are fast passing away. Much can be done
this year that can never be done so well in all the years which will
succeed.
In subsequent monographs the author will endeavor to thank such persons
as have assisted him in their preparation. For the work already
completed and for that yet to be done I am especially indebted to Mr.
Arthur H. Clark, for encouragement and assistance; to the Hon. Rodney
Metcalf Stimson, for the freedom of his splendid collection of Americana
lately presented to Marietta College; and to the patient, devoted
assistance and collaboration of my wife.
A. B. H.
MARIETTA, OHIO, July 1, 1902.
PART I
Paths of Mound-Building Indians
CHAPTER I
THE COMPARATIVE METHOD OF STUDY
The latest explorations of the mounds erected by those first Americans,
known best as the mound-building Indians, have revolutionized our
conceptions of the earliest race of which we know in America. Very many
notions, founded upon the authority of the earlier archæologists, seem
now to be either partly or wholly incorrect. Many assumptions as to the
population of this country during the mound-building era, the degree of
the civilization, and the perfection of the arts, have not been
substantiated by the more accurate studies which have been made in the
past decade.
The most important reason why so little progress has been made in
unraveling the mystery of the mounds that abound in central North
America is that "the authors who have written upon the subject of
American archæology have proceeded upon certain assumptions which
virtually closed the door against a free and unbiased investigation."[1]
Of these assumptions, the one most detrimental to the advance of the
study of archæology is that which has affirmed that "mound-builders" and
American Indians were two distinct races; thus all conclusions reached
concerning the "mound-builders" which were founded upon the earliest
knowledge we have of the American Indian were denied to archæology. But
the evidence of latest explorations and investigations makes it positive
that the "mound-builders" were not a race distinct and apart from the
race we know as American Indians: "The links directly connecting the
Indians and mound-builders are so numerous and well established that
archæologists are justified in accepting the theory that they are one
and the same people."[2]
This fact having been placed beyond the realm of speculation, a great
mass of testimony furnished by the study of the American Indians is to
be admitted in settlement of the question raised concerning the history
of the mound-builders in America.
First, this testimony will be found to set aside once and for all the
exaggerated statements as to the high grade of civilization reached by
these first Americans. It does not appear that the mound-building
Indians occupied a higher plane than that reached by the Indians as
first known by Europeans. One of the most exaggerated notions of these
Indians is that which ascribes to them very perfect ideas of
measurement; the alleged mathematical accuracy of certain of their
monumental works having been cited repeatedly as a sign of their
advanced stage of civilization. It has even been affirmed that their
mathematical accuracy could hardly be excelled by the most skillful
engineers of our day.
Recent explorations have dispelled this entertaining theory: "The
statement so often made that many of these monuments have been
constructed with such mathematical accuracy as to indicate not only a
unit of measure, but also the use of instruments, is found upon a
reëxamination to be without any basis, unless the near approach of some
three or four circles and as many squares of Ohio to mathematical
correctness be sufficient to warrant this opinion. As a very general and
in fact almost universal rule the figures are more or less irregular,
and indicate nothing higher in art than an Indian could form with his
eye and by pacing."[3]
The fanciful theory of a great teeming population during the
mound-building era is equally without foundation. Even the size and
extent of the mounds do not imply a great population. An authority of
reputation gives figures from which it can be shown that four thousand
men, each transporting an equivalent of one wagon-load of earth and
stone a day, could have erected all the mounds in the state of Ohio
(which contains a greater number than any other in the Union) in one
generation.[4]
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.