For thousands of years, Native Americans traveled through this rugged region by dugout canoe and along an extensive network of footpaths, and white settlers later followed and expanded those woodland routes. Until the late 1800s, rivers served as the region's main transportation highways, with lumbermen floating millions of logs to mills and markets on the West Branch of the Susquehanna and, during the mid-1800s, the West Branch Canal carrying people and goods upriver and downriver. Although Lycoming County's first railroad tracks were laid in 1839, railroads did not make a major impact until the 1860s, when they helped end water-based transportation by reaching remote parts of the Lumber Heritage Region, hauling coal, logs, lumber, tanning bark, charcoal, and crude oil, and bringing settlers and goods to growing communities. By the 1930s, automobiles began to overtake rail travel, paved roads gradually replaced dirt roads, and some former railroad routes later became recreation trails such as the Pine Creek and Lycoming Creek Rail Trails, while other railway grades disappeared beneath forest growth. In the early 1700s, explorers and missionaries traveling through north-central Pennsylvania often stopped at the Delaware Indian village of Otstonwakin, east of present-day Williamsport, to meet Madam Montour, who was born in 1667 to a French father and an Algonquian mother, spoke five languages including English, Algonquin, and Iroquois, served as an interpreter in tribal negotiations, and was joined in that work by her son Andrew; Montoursville bears their name.