The extensive courses of the buffaloes necessitated the crossing of large streams. This often caused a loss of many of the old and young members of the herds, especially if the stream was swift or swollen. Often, after having successfully battled their way entirely across the stream, a bluff or a miry landing-place beyond proved disastrous. Buffalo herds boldly crossed rivers on the ice. Large numbers have been known to be drowned, when crowding too closely together, by the breaking of the ice beneath their weight. Herds have even been known to cross upon floating ice, when they fell an easy prey to the Indians, and many were drowned. The following incident is related by Colonel Dodge: "Late in the summer of 1867 a herd of probably four thousand buffaloes attempted to cross the South Platte near Plum Creek. The river was rapidly subsiding, being nowhere over a foot or two in depth, and the channels in the bed were filled or filling with loose quicksand. The buffaloes in front were hopelessly stuck. Those immediately behind, urged on by the horns and pressure of those yet further in the rear, trampled over their struggling companions to be themselves engulfed in the devouring sand. This was continued until the bed of the river, nearly half a mile broad, was covered with dead or dying buffaloes. Only a comparative few actually crossed the river, and these were soon driven back by hunters. It was estimated that considerably more than half the herd, or over two thousand buffaloes, paid for this attempt with their lives."[93] CHAPTER III EARLY USE OF BUFFALO ROADS The first explorers that entered the interior of the American continent were dependent upon the buffalo and Indian for ways of getting about. Few of the early white men who came westward journeyed on the rivers, as the journals of Gist and Walker attest, and to the trails of the buffalo and Indian they owed their success in bringing to the seaboard the first accounts of the interior of the continent. From Gist, Walker, and Boone the world learned the most it knew of the trans-Alleghany country prior to the Revolution. Gist pierced central Ohio and came around homeward through eastern Kentucky which Dr. Walker had explored, and Boone hunted from the Holston to the Kentucky river. To these men three routes of travel were feasible--Indian thoroughfares, buffalo roads, and the beds of dry streams. It seems that of the two former routes those of the Indian were easily distinguished from those of the buffalo. In Dr. Walker's _Journal_ (1750) this is made clear from the frequent mention of the several kinds of roads he found. Of the Indian thoroughfares he writes as follows: "April 14th. We kept down the Creek 5 miles Chiefly along the Indian Road. "15th. Easter Sunday. Being in bad grounds for our Horses we moved 7 miles along the Indian Road, to Clover Creek. "18th. Still cloudy. We kept down the Creek to the River along the Indian Road to where it crosses."[94]