The things we do!

Not all paths have evolved into railroads,
but the railroads have followed practically all of these natural paths--
paths of the coureurs de bois, instinctively searching for mountain
passes, the low portages from valley to valley, the shortest ways and the
easiest grades.
One of America's greatest railroad presidents has noted this significant
difference between the railroads of Europe and those of America, or at any
rate of the Mississippi Valley. In Europe they "took the place of the
pack-animal, the stage-coach, the goods-van that crowded all the highways
between populous centers," whereas in the Mississippi Valley and beyond
they succeeded the pioneer and pathfinder. The railroad outran the settler
and "beckoned him on," just as the coureur de bois outran the slower-going
migrant and beckoned him on to ever new frontiers. The buffalo, the
coureur de bois, the engineer in turn. The railroad, the more modern
coureur de bois and coureur de planche, has not served the new-world
society merely as a connecting-link between communities already developed.


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