214 INDIAN AMBUSHES. 



most of the important points in the forest, as for in- 

 stance from village to village, and indicated the way 

 to springs, to fords upon rivers, or the best line of 

 portage for goods, round rapids or across a divide, from 

 one lake or river to the next. Some of these trails, 

 we understand, are even now traceable in the oldest 

 settled portions of the country, where the woods have 

 not yet been wholly cleared. Parts of that which was 

 used by the whites, 250 years ago, between Plymouth 

 and Boston, for example, is still clearly discernible. * 

 Almost similar paths conduct the traveller, we may 

 here observe, through nearly every part of Africa ; 

 and African caravans from time immemorial have 

 adopted the Indian file system of single individuals 

 following each other, as the order of their march, even 

 when crossing wide and level plains. So in Hindustan ; 

 native paths lead through the forest and jungle, and 

 through the defiles of the hill country, almost through- 

 out the entire length and breadth of India. In the 

 early days of American settlements it was in the dense 

 bush at the edge of these paths that parties of ambushed 

 savages laid in wait for their prey, and many an 

 unfortunate white has been suddenly " jumped " by the 

 Indians, when he thought danger and death far removed 

 from him. The first intimation of the disaster that 

 reached his friends, was generally the fact of his body 

 being found scalped, and frightfully mutilated, along 

 the side of one of these paths ; in this respect forest 

 Indians have always proved far more dangerous and 

 difficult to deal with than the plains Indians. The 

 densest forest was to them at once a home and a 



* See Narrative and Critical History of America, Edited by Justin 

 Winsor, Librarian of Harvard University, 1889, Vol. i., p. 294. 



