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.