Thus, briefly, may be outlined the more important Indian thoroughfares which led from the seaboard into the central interior of the continent. It is impossible to more than suggest here the great part these trails and the roads that were built over them played in the development of the land. They were the routes of the explorers of the West. Walker, Gist, Boone, Croghan, Clark, Washington, owed what they knew of the interior of the continent to these trails of the Indian. The missionaries knew them all; Post, Heckewelder, Zeisberger, Jones, wore out their lives plodding over them even as did the brave "Black Robes" on the "roads of iron" in the country of the lakes to the north.
"Whither is the paleface going?" asked an old Seneca chieftain of Zeisberger.
"To the Allegheny river," he replied.
"Why does the paleface travel such unknown roads? This is no road for white people, and no white man has come this trail before."
"Seneca," said Zeisberger, sternly, "the business I am on is different from that of other white men, and the roads I travel
