The main objective being some other settlement or some neighboring native haunt, the route was directed toward the easiest crossing of streams, either at a wading place or some shallow point in a watercourse where AND MONOGRAPH S 30 INDIAN PATHS stepping-stones, except in times of flood, enabled the traveler to cross dry-foot. The swampy tracts bordering on streams, with which the area of the city abounded, were avoided by detours to some point near the head of their water-supply, where a footway could be maintained, probably by trampling rushes under foot year after year above the soft ground, thus gradually building up a dry pathway.

This is well illustrated by the course of the Shore path through the one-time village of Eastchester on its way to Pelham and the Sound shore. Here the path came over from the Williamsbridge crossing of the Bronx to the hillside overlooking the Hutchinson river, and descended to the margin of its marshy borders which afforded no practicable place of crossing. Turning, therefore, abruptly northward, the path skirted the marsh, rising in grade until it reached the line of the later Boston post-road.