"As soon as you thrust the plow into the earth," said one adventurer who had left the East for the wilder lands of the West, "it teems with worms and useless weeds. Agriculture increases population to an unnatural extent." For such men there was still a vast world without weeds, where the soil was virgin, where one might be uncrowded by the touch of home-building man. Let the farmers have Ohio and Kentucky; there was still a West.
There was, in the first place, then, the West of the fur trade, the trade that had come down through so many vicissitudes, legacy of Louis the Grand Monarch and his covetous intriguers. For generations the coureurs du bois, wild peddlers of the woods, had traced the ultimate waterways of the far Northwest, sometimes absent for one, two, or more years from the place they loosely called home, sometimes never returning at all from the savagery that offered so great a fascination, often too strong even for men reared in the lap of luxury and refinement.
Steam was but an infant, after all, in spite of the little steamboat triumphs of the day. The waters offered roadway for the steamboats, and water transportation by steam was much less expensive than transportation by railway; but the head of navigation by steamboats was only the point of departure of a wilder and cruder transportation. Beyond the natural reach of the canot du Nord, the lesser craft of the natives, the smaller birch-barks, took up the trail, and passed even farther up into the unknown countries; and beyond the head of the ultimate thread of the waters the pack-horse, or the travois and the dog, took up the burden of the day, until the trails were lost in the forest, and the traveler carried his pack on his own back.[21]
It is a curious fact, and one perhaps not commonly known, that the Indian sign of the "cutthroat" (the forefinger drawn across the throat), which is the universal name for "Sioux" among all other American tribes, is, in all likelihood, a misnomer. The Sioux were dog Indians of old, before they got horses from the West, and they worked the dog as a draft animal, with a collar about the neck, just as it is now worked over much of the sub-arctic country. The sign of the two fingers across the neck once indicated "dog" as plainly as the single finger across the neck now signifies "cutthroat." Not only did the native and early white wanderers of the wilderness use the dog as a draft animal, but they packed him as they later packed the horse in the wagonless lands of the West.