A region of many trails

 Yesterday’s note on the history of Georgia got me thinking about history in a broader sense, about the footprints that human beings leave on a place.

I think Mark Pifer, one of the local historians, is right about this: The trails that the Native Americans left around Atlanta are the oldest marks made by human beings that you can still see.

This region is full of trails. Native peoples had two large communities to the west — Sandtown and Standing Peachtree and extensive trading networks. East-west trails ran to both settlements, and a lot of the trails seemed to have connected to Stone Mountain, which was both a sacred place and a landmark that was hard to miss.

Major north-south trails aimed at the Shallow Ford in the Chatahoochie.

If you look at the winding thoroughfares in this area, you might be bewildered.

But if you know where the Native American settlements were before the Europeans arrived and know where the rivers can be forded, the routes become logical.

The trails usually followed ridges. If you stay on a ridge, you have to cross fewer creeks and wade fewer swamps. 

When one of the early railroads came through, the engineers followed an existing trail and reported that they didn’t have to make corrections. It was the most efficient route.

Pifer notes what a good naturalist would note: The railroad followed the Native American trails. The Native American trails followed animal tracks. The real trailblazers usually have four legs.

• Source: Mark Pifer, Native Decatur; Decartur, Ga.: Downriver Books, 2018.