Historic Highways of America/Volume 1/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
THE COMPARATIVE METHOD OF STUDY
THE latest explorations of the mounds erected by those first Americans, known best as the mound-building Indians, have revolutionized our conceptions of the earliest race of which we know in America. Very many notions, founded upon the authority of the earlier archæologists, seem now to be either partly or wholly incorrect. Many assumptions as to the population of this country during the mound-building era, the degree of the civilization, and the perfection of the arts, have not been substantiated by the more accurate studies which have been made in the past decade.
The most important reason why so little progress has been made in unraveling the mystery of the mounds that abound in central North America is that "the authors who have written upon the subject of American archæology have proceeded upon certain assumptions which virtually closed the door against a free and unbiased investigation."[1] Of these assumptions, the one most detrimental to the advance of the study of archæology is that which has affirmed that "mound-builders" and American Indians were two distinct races; thus all conclusions reached concerning the "mound-builders" which were founded upon the earliest knowledge we have of the American Indian were denied to archæology. But the evidence of latest explorations and investigations makes it positive that the "mound-builders" were not a race distinct and apart from the race we know as American Indians: "The links directly connecting the Indians and mound-builders are so numerous and well established that archæologists are justified in accepting the theory that they are one and the same people."[2]
This fact having been placed beyond the realm of speculation, a great mass of testimony furnished by the study of the American Indians is to be admitted in settlement of the question raised concerning the history of the mound-builders in America.
First, this testimony will be found to set aside once and for all the exaggerated statements as to the high grade of civilization reached by these first Americans. It does not appear that the mound-building Indians occupied a higher plane than that reached by the Indians as first known by Europeans. One of the most exaggerated notions of these Indians is that which ascribes to them very perfect ideas of measurement; the alleged mathematical accuracy of certain of their monumental works having been cited repeatedly as a sign of their advanced stage of civilization. It has even been affirmed that their mathematical accuracy could hardly be excelled by the most skillful engineers of our day.
Recent explorations have dispelled this entertaining theory: "The statement so often made that many of these monuments have been constructed with such mathematical accuracy as to indicate not only a unit of measure, but also the use of instruments, is found upon a reëxamination to be without any basis, unless the near approach of some three or four circles and as many squares of Ohio to mathematical correctness be sufficient to warrant this opinion. As a very general and in fact almost universal rule the figures are more or less irregular, and indicate nothing higher in art than an Indian could form with his eye and by pacing."[3]
The fanciful theory of a great teeming population during the mound-building era is equally without foundation. Even the size and extent of the mounds do not imply a great population. An authority of reputation gives figures from which it can be shown that four thousand men, each transporting an equivalent of one wagon-load of earth and stone a day, could have erected all the mounds in the state of Ohio (which contains a greater number than any other in the Union) in one generation.[4]
When it is realized that the art for which the earliest Indians have been most extolled was not, in reality, in advance of that known by the ordinary Indian, and that the population of the country in the mound-building era cannot be shown to have exceeded the population found when the first white men visited the Indian races, it is easy to see in the erection of the mounds, the burial of dead, the rude implements common to both, the poor trinkets used for ornamentation, the houses each built, the weapons each employed, a vast deal of additional testimony proving that the "Mound-builder" and Indian were of one race.
Thus the true historical method must be to compare what is definitely known of the earliest Indians with the relics and memorials which are surely those of the mound-building era in order to reach undoubted facts concerning the prehistoric Indians. This applies equally to customs, weapons, edifices, ornaments, and what is of present moment to our study: highways of travel.
However, a complete detailed study of the highways of the early Indians according to this method will not be indulged in for certain respectable reasons; there are very few undoubted routes of the mound-building Indians, and a detailed comparative study of these and later Indian routes would become, under the circumstances, too speculative to be of genuine historical value. Our purpose, then, will be, merely to give the reasons for believing that the earliest Indians had great overland routes of travel; that, though they lived largely in the river valleys, their migrations were by land and not by water—in short, that these first Americans undoubtedly marked out the first highways of America used by man, as the large game animal, the buffalo, marked out the first great highways used by animal life.
These highways were the highestways because their general alignment was on the greater watersheds: and our study may be better described perhaps by a subtitle—a study in highestways.