It is very wonderful that the buffalo's instinct should have found the very best courses across a continent upon whose thousand rivers such great black forests were thickly strung. Yet it did, as the tripod of the white man has proved; and until the problem of aërial navigation is solved, human intercourse will move largely on paths first marked by the buffalo. It is interesting that he found the strategic passage-ways through the mountains, so that the first explorers came into the West through gaps where were found broad buffalo roads; it is also interesting that the buffalo marked out the most practical portage paths between the heads of our rivers--paths that are closely followed today, for instance, by the Pennsylvania and Baltimore and Ohio railways through the Alleghanies, the Chesapeake and Ohio through the Blue Ridge, the Cleveland Terminal and Valley railway between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers and the Wabash railway between the Maumee and Wabash rivers. In one instance (that of the Cuyahoga-Tuscarawas portage) the route of the ancient portage--most plainly to be discovered because it was for so long a time the boundary of the United States that lands on the west of it were surveyed by a different system from those on the east--is crossed by a modern road seven times in a distance of eight miles. But the greater marvel is that these early pathfinders chose routes, even in the roughest districts, which the tripod of the white man cannot improve upon. A rare instance of this is the course of the Baltimore and Ohio railway between Grafton and Parkersburg in West Virginia. That this is one of the roughest rides our palatial trains of today make is well known to all who have passed that way, and that so fine a road could be put through such a rough country is one of the marvels of engineering science. But leave the train, say, at the little hamlet of Petroleum, West Virginia, and find on the hill the famous old-time thoroughfare of the buffalo, Indian, and pioneer and follow that narrow "thread of soil" westward to the Ohio river. You will find that the railway has followed it steadily throughout its course and when it came to a more difficult point than usual, where the railway is compelled to tunnel at the strategic point of least elevation, in two instances the trail runs _exactly over the tunnel_. This occurs at both "Eaton's" tunnel, and "Gorham's" tunnel (or "No. 6"). With the deterioration of the civilization to which the mound-building Indians belonged, the art of road-building became lost--for the great need had passed away. The later Indians built no such roads as did their ancestors, nor did they improve such routes on the highways as they found or made. But they collected _poll_-taxes from travelers along them, setting an example to generations of county commissioners who collect taxes for roads they do not improve.