When the red man trespassed upon the peaceful trails of his
enemy, he was, in an American idiom, "on the war-path."
Then in time the European trader went in friendly search of the Indian by
these same paths, and they became the avenues of petty commerce. As street
venders in Paris, so these forest traders or runners went up and down
these sheltered paths, as dark in summer as the narrowest streets, only
they went silently, though they were often heard as distinctly in the
breaking of twigs or in their muffled tread by the alert ears of the
Indians as the musical voices of these venders are heard in the city. And
the places where these traders put down their cheap trinkets before their
dusky patrons grew into trading-posts, prophetic of future cities and
towns.
Such were the paths by which the runners of the woods, the French coureurs
de bois, first emerged--after following the watercourses--upon the western
forest glades and the edges of the prairies and astonished the aboriginal
human owners of those wild highways that had known only the soft feet of
the wolf and fox and bear, the hoofs of the buffalo and deer, and the bare
feet or the moccasins of the Indians (the "silent shoes," as I have seen
such footgear advertised in Boulevard St.
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