Here is found the coveted jasper, varied in hue as autumn leaves or a summer sunset. The quick eye of some wandering hunter, it may be, found a chance fragment, and, looking closer, saw that the ground on which he stood was filled with it; or a freshet may have washed the soil from an outcropping of the mineral. Who can tell? It must suffice to know that the discovery was made in time, and a new industry arose. No other material so admirably met the Indian’s need for arrow-points, for the blades of spears, for knives, drills, scrapers, and the whole range of tools and weapons in daily use. So it came that mining camps were established. To this day, in these lonely hills, we can trace out the great pits the Indians dug, find the tools with which they toiled, and even the ashes of their camp-fires, where they slept by night. So deeply did the Indian work the land wheresoever he toiled that even the paths that led from the mines to the distant village have not been wholly blotted out. The story of the jasper mines has yet to be told, and it may be long before the full details are learned concerning the various processes through which the mineral passed before it came into use as a finished product. Much vain speculation has been indulged in; the fancied method of reducing a thick blade to a thin one has been elaborately described, although never carried out by any human being; in short, the impossible has been boldly asserted as a fact beyond question. The Indian’s history can be read but in small part from the handiwork that he has left behind. One phase of it, in the valley of the Delaware, is more clearly told than all else,—the advance from a primitive to a more cultured status. There were centuries during which jasper was known only as river-pebbles, and its discovery in abundance had an influence upon Indians akin to that upon Europe’s stone-age people when they discovered the use of metals. At least here in the valley of the Delaware this is true. It is vain to ask for the beginning of man’s career in this region; what we find but hints at it. But he came when there were no trails over the hills, no path but the icy river’s edge; only as the centuries rolled by was the country developed to the extent of knowing every nook and corner of the land, and highways and by-ways became common, like the roads that now reach out in every direction. A “trail,” then, has a wealth of meaning, and those who made it were no “mere savages,” as we so glibly speak of the Indians, thanks to the average school-books. The haughty Delawares had fields and orchards; they had permanent towns; they mined such minerals as were valuable to them; they had weapons of many patterns; they were jewellers in a crude way, and finished many a stone ornament in a manner that still excites admiration. They were travellers and tradesmen as well as hunters and warriors.