The buffalo, because of his sagacious selection of the most sure and most direct courses, has influenced the routes of trade and travel of the white race as much, possibly, as he influenced the course of the red-men in earlier days. There is great truth in Thomas Benton's figure when he said that the buffalo blazed the way for the railways to the Pacific. That sagacious animal undoubtedly "blazed"--with his hoofs on the surface of the earth--the course of many of our roads, canals, and railways. That he found the points of least resistance across our great mountain ranges there can be little doubt. It is certain that he discovered Cumberland Gap and his route through that pass in the mountains has been accepted as one of the most important on the continent. It is also obvious that the buffalo found the course from Atlantic waters to the head of the Great Kanawha, and that he opened a way from the Potomac to the Ohio. How important these strategic points are now considered is evident from the fact that a railway crosses the mountains at each of them; the New York Central, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Pennsylvania, and the Chesapeake and Ohio cross the first great divide in the eastern portion of our country on routes selected centuries ago by the plunging buffalo. One of the most interesting of specific examples of a railway following an ancient highway of buffalo and Indian is to be found on the Baltimore and Ohio Southwestern railway line between Grafton and Parkersburg. While searching for the old highway from the Monongahela to the Ohio, an explorer asked an old resident to describe its course. "From Parkersburg," said the informant, "it goes on to Ewing's Station, Turtle Run, and Kanawha Station; it goes over Eaton's Tunnel, follows Dry Ridge into Dodridge county and passes through Martin's Woods, just north of Greenwood, to Center Station where it turns east, crossing Gorham's Tunnel, and goes down Middle Island Creek." "The Indians must have patronized the railroad well," observed the student, "since their trail passes by all the stations and tunnels." "Law, no," broke out the disappointed old man, "they wa'n't no railroad them days, but when they come to build it they follered the trail the hull way." It is nothing less than wonderful that the old highway selected by the instinct of the bison should be found in two instances, in a space of twenty miles, immediately above the railway tunnel.