The one law which has governed land travel throughout history is the law of least resistance, or least elevation. "An easy trail to high ground" is a colloquial expression common in the Far West, but there has been a time when it was as common to Pennsylvania and Ohio as it is common today along the great stretches of the Platte. The watersheds have been the highways and highestways of the world's travel. The farther back we go in our history, the more conclusive does the evidence become that the first ways were the highestways. Our first roads were ridge roads and their day is not altogether past in many parts of the land. These first roads were "run," or built, along the general alignment of the first pioneer roads, which, in turn, were nothing more than "blazed" paths of the Indian and buffalo. A single glance at one of the maps of the Central West of Revolutionary times, for instance, will show how closely the first routes clung to the heights of the watersheds. And for good reason: here the ground suffered least from erosion; here the forests were thinnest; here a pathway would be swept clear of snow in winter and of leaves in summer by the swift, clean brooms of the winds. For the Indians, too, the high lands were points of vantage both in hunting and in times of war. In every state there were strategic heights of land, generally running westward; in Ohio, for example, the strategic watershed was that between the heads of the lake rivers and the heads of those flowing southward into the Ohio. Across this divide ran the Great Trail toward Detroit and the lake country. In western Virginia a strategic watershed was that formed between the heads of streams flowing northward into the Ohio and southward into the Kanawha. And in a remarkable degree the strategic points of a century and a half ago are the strategic points today, a fact attested by the courses of the more important trunk railway lines. The steady rise and importance of such a city as Akron, Ohio, is due to a strategic situation at the junction of both an important portage path and of a great watershed highway. With all these facts in mind it is not presumptuous then to inquire whether the mound-building Indians did not find the high lands and mark out on them these first highways of America. CHAPTER IV HIGHLAND LOCATION OF ARCHÆOLOGICAL REMAINS