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.
That the later Indians used the paths made by the buffalo they hunted is beyond question. Warring Indian nations lured each other into ambush by stamping a buffalo hoof upon the soft ground in their trail. And when, later, Daniel Boone hewed his path through Cumberland Gap toward Kentucky, he plainly says that he left the Indian road on Rockcastle river and marked out the remainder of his way over a buffalo trace.
The great Indian trails, covering the land as with a network, and leading by the straightest practicable courses to all strategic points, became of momentous importance to the white man when he turned his attention to the interior of the continent. When the Indian learned the value of his furs, a great tide of trade set eastward over a thousand rivers and woodland trails. On these same rivers, but more frequently on the trails, white traders ventured westward with their bright wares--and the western land became known among a much larger coterie than before. The tales of the traders, together with dreams of commercial exploitation led to the first careful exploration of the interior of the continent by such men as Walker, Gist, Boone, and Carver, to whom these narrow "roads of iron," as the Jesuit missionaries in the north called the rough Indian trails, were shining paths to an El Dorado. The first two great roads built westward were opened under the direction of trading companies: the road from the Potomac to the Ohio by Captain Cresap, for the first Ohio Company, and the road from Virginia to Kentucky by Daniel Boone, for the Transylvania Company. And these were at first only blazed and widened Indian thoroughfares which had been used from times prehistoric.
The missionaries, too, were great explorers, and they knew the Indian thoroughfares perhaps better even than the traders; at least they knew some that white men had never traveled before them.