Here, then, was indeed an ancient and historic pathway, one not used to-day by any rails of iron, nor followed even by the pack trains of the “adventurers” of to-day. Here was a pass discovered, no man may tell when, by Indians who wandered eastward and westward across the upper Rockies. Perhaps the old trappers also know this trail; though there are not wanting those who believe that less than a double decade ago the valleys at the headwaters of the St. Mary’s Lake still lay untouched by the foot of white man. Here, along this forgotten mountain trail, came the Kootenais with their war parties against the Blackfeet. Here, perhaps, came, from the upper Pacific coast, the first horses used by the plains Indians in the far North. Be that as it may, my companion and I without doubt stood on one of the original or aboriginal pathways; and he had been dull indeed who did not find an interest in that fact and in the surroundings.[47] “Who made the first Indian trails?” I asked of my friend, as we stood at the eastern end of this old pathway. He pointed to similar paths crossing the sides of the ridge near to us, and other little paths leading up the valley along the sides of the mountains. “It was the elk and the deer and the mountain sheep,” said he. “They found the easiest ways to travel; they found the grass and the water.” ----- Footnote 44: All of these maps, by the way, must have been at the disposal of Frémont; yet we do not learn that he believed the east and west course of the Buena Ventura was an impossibility, although Jedediah Smith had long since shown the inaccuracy of this old idea, which later was to cost Frémont so much suffering in the mountains of upper California. Footnote 45: Again, remember this significant date of 1834. Footnote 46: This story of an alleged captivity among the Indians, extending from childhood to young manhood, is by some considered unauthentic. The volume, a curious one, was printed in London, in 1825. Footnote 47: The trail of the white race over the Appalachians was but the trail of the red men. The Sioux Indians, for generations inhabitants of the upper plains country of the West, formerly lived east of the Appalachians. The first settlers of Kentucky and Tennessee simply followed the ancient ways by which the Indians crossed into the valley of the Mississippi. And there, as in the West, the Indians but followed the paths of the wild animals, which clung nearly as possible to the courses of the streams.—V. “The Indians of To-day;” Grinnell. CHAPTER V ACROSS THE WATERS[48]