tion of his short-lived post of Astoria at the mouth of the
Columbia. This occupation greatly aided our claim to the Oregon country
as against the British traders, who had reached the region by way of the
northern arm of the Columbia.

In Wisconsin, at least, the traders' posts, placed at the carrying
places around falls and rapids, pointed out the water powers of the
State. The portages between rivers became canals, or called out canal
schemes that influenced the early development of the State. When
Washington, at the close of his military service, inspected the Mohawk
valley and the portages between the headwaters of the Potomac and the
Ohio, as the channels "of conveyance of the extensive and valuable
trade of a rising empire,"[253] he stood between two eras--the era with
which he was personally familiar, when these routes had been followed by
the trader with the savage tribes,[254] and the era which he foresaw,
when American settlement passed along the same ways to the fertile West
and called into being the great trunk-lines of the present day.[255] The
trails became the early roads. An old Indian trader relates that "the
path between Green Bay and Milwaukee was originally an Indian trail, and
very crooked, but the whites would straighten it by cutting across lots
each winter with their jumpers, wearing bare streaks through the thin
covering, to be followed in the summer by foot and horseback travel
along the shortened path."[256] The process was typical of a greater
one. Along the lines that nature had drawn the Indians traded and
warred; along their trails and in their birch canoes the trader passed,
bringing a new and a transforming life. These slender lines of eastern
influence stretched throughout all our vast and intricate water-system,
even to the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, and the Arctic seas, and these
lines were in turn followed by agricultural and by manufacturing
civilization.

In a speech upon the Pacific Railway delivered in the United States
Senate in 1850, Senator Benton used these words: "There is an idea
become current of late ... that none but a man of science, bred in a
school, can lay off a road. That is a mistake. There is a class of
topographical engineers older than the schools, and more unerring than
the mathematics. They are the wild animals--buffalo, elk, deer,
antelope, bears, which traverse the forest, not by compass, but by an
instinct which leads them always the right way--to the lo