"Exploring the country from the headwaters of Cumberland river to the Ohio, they discovered its main streams, and its variety of soil and surface. By following its trodden roads, or 'traces' as the pioneers called them, which the buffaloes made from their grazing fields and brakes, they [Boone and his brother] found a number of the great 'licks' to which wild animals in countless multitudes commonly resorted in hunt of salt. These buffalo traces are plainly marked out to the present day."[108] One or two references will show how common it was to refer to buffalo "traces" as the main thoroughfares of Kentucky: "Hardly had the plaudits of the pioneers for the women of Bryant's Station died on the stillness of the sultry August air ere summer breezes carried the story of the awful carnage and destruction at the Battle of the Blue Licks, from the valley of the Licking, by the buffalo traces, to the settlements on the Kentucky River."[109] "... It was the 16th of August when Caldwell and McKee, piloted by Simon Girty, assailed the place [Bryant's Station]. They had surrounded it during the previous night. They came like the pestilence that walks in darkness, unexpected and unseen. They had marched along the buffalo traces or stolen through the forests without having given to any one any notice of their intention."[110] The course of one of these famous "traces" is thus described: "From Big Bone Lick buffalo roads led to Blue Licks, and also southwest to Drennon's Lick, in Henry County, thence to the crossing of the Kentucky just below Frankfort. From the valley of the river they then passed to the high ground east of Frankfort by a deeply worn road yet visible, known as the Buffalo Trace, to the Stamping Ground, in Scott County, a town named from the fact that the animals in vast herds would tread or stamp the earth while crowded together and moving around in the effort of those on the outside to get inside and thus secure protection from the flies. Thence they passed by the Great Crossings, so called from its being the place where they crossed Elkhorn, two miles west of Georgetown, and thence eastward to Blue Lick, May's Lick, and across the river into Ohio. Their roads formed in the comparatively level country the routes of the immigrants through the dense forests, impenetrable from the heavy cane, peavines, and other undergrowth. They also determined in many portions of the State not only the lines of travel and transportation, but also of settlement, as particularly shown between Maysville and Frankfort, a distance of about eighty miles, where the settlements were first made along the Buffalo road, and later the turnpike and railroad followed in close proximity to the route surveyed by this sagacious animal, which Mr. Benton said blazed the way for the railroad to the Pacific. The same idea is embodied in the vernacular of the unlettered Kentuckian who said that the then great roadmakers were 'the buffler, the Ingin, and the Ingineer.'"[111]