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CHAPTER Vni 
TRAVEL AND TRANSPORTATION, TRADE AND COMMERCE 
The character and extent of a country’s roads mirror with some 
clearness its civilization and prosperity. The Romans, who were 
the greatest road-builders of antiquity, linked together their “ prov- 
inces ” with broad, well-graded highways that excite the admiration 
of our professional civil engineers. In South America, a thousand 
years later, the Peruvians constructed a splendid series of roads in 
the mountainous Andean region to unite the scattered towns and 
villages that acknowledged the rule of the Incas in Cuzco, although, 
unlike the Romans, who possessed wheeled vehicles, they made their 
roads too narrow and steep to meet our present-day needs. Both 
Rome and Peru, however, were the seats of mighty empires that 
could command unlimited resources of man-power for the construc- 
tion of great public works. In Canada the largest political unit was 
the tribe, 1 which was too small numerically, too self-contained, 
and in most jdaces too migratory to demand or require specially built 
highways for communication and transjiort, particularly when there 
were no vehicles save sleds and toboggans to drive over them, and 
no pack animal except the dog. So from east to west, and north to 
south, throughout the whole Dominion, there was not a single mile 
of road before the coming of Europeans, nothing except a few narrow 
trails- that led past rapids and canyons, or through forest, plain, 
or upland from one valley or lake to another, trails that were often 
so overgi'own with brush or lichens that they could hardly be dis- 
tinguished from those of the bison and deei’. War parties, indeerl, 
commonly followed the tracks of these animals, or travelled along 
stream beds where their footsteps left no imprints; and in times of 
peace the natives generally avoided the soft, low ground aiul dense 
undergrowth where twigs and briers scratched their bare limbs ami 
rent their clothing, avoided also the stony ground that cut their feet 
1 Till' TriM|iio;nri Coiifi'itcracy of llic- Five Nations (Mohawk, Oiieiila, OiiondaKa, Cayutia, aiiri 
Seneca) boro the sooii of enipire in its cotiiposil ion, but tlio ,socti never germinated. Each tribe {or 
nation) within the confederacy retained its independence in everyiliing except war, anrl in some ca.se.s 
even in war. In any ca.s(: this Iroquoian Confederacy was post-European, and, therefore, later than 
the period we arc here considering. 
-Seldom more than 18 inchi's wide in the eastern regions. Handbook of American Indians Xorth of 
Mexico, Article; “Trails and Trade Routes"; Bur. Am. Ethn. Bull. 30 (Washington, 1910). 
