_AN INDIAN TRAIL_
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It was a strange coincidence. A farmer living near by employed an Indian
from the school at Carlisle, and now that the work of the summer was
over, this taciturn youth walked daily over a hill to a school-house
more than a mile away, and the path leading to it was an Indian trail.
Not long since I met the lad on this very path returning from school,
and when he passed I stood by an old oak and watched him until lost
among the trees, walking where centuries ago his people had walked when
going from the mountain village and rock shelters along an inland creek
to the distant town by the river.
As you looked about from the old oak there was no public road or house
in sight; nothing but trees and bushes, huge rocks, and one curious
jutting ledge that tradition holds is a veritable relic of prehistoric
time,—a place where council fires were lit and midnight meetings held.
Whether tradition is true or not, the place was a fitting one whereat to
tarry and fall a-thinking. Happy, indeed, could the old oak have spoken.
Many a public road of recent date has been built on the line of an old
trail, as many a town and even city have replaced Indian villages; but
take the long-settled regions generally, the ancient landmarks are all
gone, and a stray potsherd or flint arrow-point in the fields is all
that is left to recall the days of the dusky aborigines.
Only in the rough, rocky, irreclaimable hills are we likely now to be
successful, if such traces as a trail are sought for.
It was so here. Bald-top Hill is of little use to the white man except
for the firewood that grows upon its sides and the scattered game that
still linger in its thickets. As seen from the nearest road, not far
off, there is nothing now to suggest that an Indian ever clambered about
it. The undergrowth hides every trace of the surface; but after the
leaves drop and a light snow has fallen, a curious white line can be
traced from the base of the summit; this is the old trail.
It is a narrow path, but for so long a time had it been used by the
Indians that, when once pointed out, it can still be followed without
difficulty. It leads now from one little intervale to another: from
farmer A to farmer B; but originally it was part of their long highway
leading from Philadelphia to Easton, perhaps. It matters not. Enough to
know that then, as now, there were towns almost wherever there was land
fit for dwellings, and paths that led from one to the other. It is clear
that the Indians knew the whole country well. The routes they finally
chose resulted from long experience, and were as direct as the nature of
the ground made possible.
The study of trails opens up to us a broader view of ancient Indian life
than we are apt to entertain.
We find the sites of villages on the banks of the rivers and larger
inflowing streams; travel by canoes was universal. No locality was so
favorable as the open valley, and here the greater number of Indians
doubtless dwelt. But the river and its fertile shores could not yield
all that this people needed: they had to draw from the resources of the
hills behind them. They soon marked the whole region with a net-work of
trails leading to the various points whence they drew the necessities of
life. The conditions of the present day are laid down on essentially the
same lines as then.
An Indian town was not a temporary tent site, or mere cluster of
wigwams, here to-day and miles away to-morrow; nor did these people
depend solely upon the chase. Beside the trail over which I recently
passed was a great clearing that had been an orchard. We can yet find
many a barren spot that is rightly known to the people of to-day as an
Indian field. So persistently were their cornfields cropped that at last
the soil was absolutely exhausted, and has not yet recovered its
fertility.
There was systematic bartering, too, as the red pipe-stone or catlinite
from Minnesota and obsidian from the more distant Northwest, found on
the Atlantic coast, as well as ocean shells picked up in the far
interior, all testify. There was also periodical journeying in autumn
from inland to the sea-coast to gather supplies of oysters, clams, and
other “sea food,” which were dried by smoking and then “strung as beads
and carried as great coils of rope” back to the hills to be consumed
during the winter.
Many small colonies, too, passed the winters on the coast in the shelter
of the great pine forests that extended to the very ocean beach. It was
no hap-hazard threading of a wilderness to reach these distant points.
The paths were well defined, well used. For how long we can only
conjecture, but the vast accumulations of shells on the coast, often now
beneath the water, point to a time so distant that the country wore a
different aspect from what it now does; a time when the land rose far
higher above the tide and extended seaward where now the ocean rolls
resistlessly.
Returning inland, let us trace another of these old-time paths from the
river-shore whereon the Indians had long dwelt, over hill and dale until
we reach a valley hemmed in by low, rolling hills.
It is a pretty spot still, although marred by the white man’s work; but
why was it the goal of many a weary journey?
Here is found the coveted jasper, varied in hue as autumn leaves or a
summer sunset. The quick eye of some wandering hunter, it may be, found
a chance fragment, and, looking closer, saw that the ground on which he
stood was filled with it; or a freshet may have washed the soil from an
outcropping of the mineral. Who can tell? It must suffice to know that
the discovery was made in time, and a new industry arose. No other
material so admirably met the Indian’s need for arrow-points, for the
blades of spears, for knives, drills, scrapers, and the whole range of
tools and weapons in daily use.
So it came that mining camps were established. To this day, in these
lonely hills, we can trace out the great pits the Indians dug, find the
tools with which they toiled, and even the ashes of their camp-fires,
where they slept by night. So deeply did the Indian work the land
wheresoever he toiled that even the paths that led from the mines to the
distant village have not been wholly blotted out.
The story of the jasper mines has yet to be told, and it may be long
before the full details are learned concerning the various processes
through which the mineral passed before it came into use as a finished
product. Much vain speculation has been indulged in; the fancied method
of reducing a thick blade to a thin one has been elaborately described,
although never carried out by any human being; in short, the impossible
has been boldly asserted as a fact beyond question.
The Indian’s history can be read but in small part from the handiwork
that he has left behind.
One phase of it, in the valley of the Delaware, is more clearly told
than all else,—the advance from a primitive to a more cultured status.
There were centuries during which jasper was known only as
river-pebbles, and its discovery in abundance had an influence upon
Indians akin to that upon Europe’s stone-age people when they discovered
the use of metals. At least here in the valley of the Delaware this is
true.
It is vain to ask for the beginning of man’s career in this region; what
we find but hints at it. But he came when there were no trails over the
hills, no path but the icy river’s edge; only as the centuries rolled by
was the country developed to the extent of knowing every nook and corner
of the land, and highways and by-ways became common, like the roads that
now reach out in every direction.
A “trail,” then, has a wealth of meaning, and those who made it were no
“mere savages,” as we so glibly speak of the Indians, thanks to the
average school-books.
The haughty Delawares had fields and orchards; they had permanent towns;
they mined such minerals as were valuable to them; they had weapons of
many patterns; they were jewellers in a crude way, and finished many a
stone ornament in a manner that still excites admiration. They were
travellers and tradesmen as well as hunters and warriors.
Although my day’s search for relics of these people had yielded but a
few arrow-points, potsherds, and a stone axe, when I saw the Indian on
his way from school, walking in the very path his people had made long
centuries ago, the story of their ancient sojourn here came vividly to
mind in the dim light of an autumn afternoon, when a golden mist wrapped
the hills and veiled the valleys beyond, and I had a glimpse of
pre-Columbian America.
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