Our homes and their surroundings are so familiar to us that it is hard for us to realize that our country was not always as it is now. Let us think about it. Have you seen any changes near where you live since you can remember? Have any new houses been built? Do you know of any old buildings that have been torn down in order that larger or better ones might take their places? Have you watched men making a new street or road, or, perhaps, working upon an old road to make it better? If you have, then you can think back to a time when some house that you can see to-day was not there; a time when there were not so many roads nor such good streets as now. Can you think back still further to a time when the house in which you live had not been built? when the street in front of your house had not been made? Can you imagine a time, still further back, when none of the houses in your city or village were standing? when there were no streets at all within sight of the place where you live? Then it will not be so very hard to think of the time, four hundred years ago, when there were no houses of wood, brick, or stone, such as we now see, anywhere in this country; when there was not a carriage road nor a street of any kind in the whole United States. We will try to imagine how this country looked before any white people lived in it, and before the cities and towns and villages and farms and ranches, that are so familiar to us, had been begun.
Four hundred years ago John Cabot sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and saw this country for the first time. As his little vessel moved along the coast, he looked upon bays and mouths of rivers which were very much as they are to-day. The peninsulas, the capes, and the islands were in the same places that they now are. They were, however, almost entirely covered with woods. Here and there were fields of grass, through which blue streams were flowing; but the larger part of what is now New England and the other Atlantic States was covered with thick forests. The trees were large and close together; their branches had never been cut off, and grew close to the ground. Shrubs and bushes filled all the space that was left between the larger trees, and made it almost impossible for any one to pass through. Wild animals had made paths for themselves, but if people had attempted to use these paths they would have been obliged to get down on their hands and knees and crawl through them. The rivers and the smaller streams of water were the best roads in those days; for unless they were shallow or flowed too swiftly down the rapids, boats could quite easily be pushed up stream as well as be carried down by the current.