Frontier travel directions relied on landmarks rather than roads or maps.
Evidence
I have developed much sagacity in finding a trail, or I should not be able to make use of such directions as these: “Keep along a gulch four or five miles till you get Pike’s Peak on your left, then follow some wheel-marks till you get to some timber, and keep to the north till you come to a creek, where you’ll find a great many elk tracks; then go to your right and cross the creek three times, then you’ll see a red rock to your left,” etc., etc. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 181
Categorization
- STORYSTEM: A narrative could be built around a traveler navigating a pathless territory where instructions are only a chain of natural landmarks — a world where geography itself is the only written record.
- CANDY: “Keep along a gulch till you get Pike’s Peak on your left…” is a delightful, tweetable artifact of how people gave directions before roads existed.
- XREF: connects to: Trails in the Colorado wilderness were often bear-made routes, not human paths. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 80; The Sahara desert functioned as a navigable route network rather than a barrier — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 4308
Broader Connections
- The Sahara desert functioned as a navigable route network rather than a barrier
#exemplifies(0.75) — , The Rod and the Child, 4308