the western wilderness, I visited a group of Chippewa lodges on the
south-west shore of Lake Superior, where they still maintained many of
their genuine habits. Their aged chief, Buffalo, was a fine specimen of
the uncorrupted savage, dressed in native attire, and wearing the collar
of grizzly bear’s claws as proof of his triumph over the fiercest object
of the chase. Their weapons were partly of iron, derived from the
traders. But they had also their stone-tipped arrows; and one Indian was
an object of interest to a group of Indian boys as he busied himself in
fashioning a water-worn pebble into an edged tool. He held an oval
pebble between the finger and thumb, and used it with quick strokes as a
hammer. But he was only engaged on the first rough process, and I did
not see the completion of his work. No doubt, the leisure of all was
turned more or less to account in supplying themselves with their
ordinary weapons and missiles. But Catlin’s free intercourse with the
wild western tribes familiarised him with the regular sources of general
supply. “The best flakes,” he said, “outside of the homemade, were a
subject of commerce, and came from certain localities where the chert of
the best quality was quarried in sheets or blocks, as it occurs in
almost continuous seams in the intercalated limestones of the coal
measures. These seams are mostly cracked or broken into blocks that show
the nature of the cross fracture, which is taken advantage of by the
operators, who seemed to have reduced the art of flaking to almost an
absolute science, with division of labour; one set of men being expert
in quarrying and selecting the stone, others in preparing the blocks for
the flakers.”[38] But suitable and specially prized material were
sometimes sought on different sites, and disseminated from them by the
primitive trader. Along eastern Labrador and in Newfoundland arrow heads
are mostly fashioned out of a peculiar light-gray translucent quartzite.
Dr. Bell informs me that near Chimo, south of Ungava Bay, is a spot
resorted to by the Indians from time immemorial for this favourite
material; and arrows made of it are not uncommon even in Nova Scotia.
Among the tribes remote from the sea coast, where no exposed rock
furnished available material for the manufacture of their stone
implements, the chief source of supply was the larger pebbles of the
river beds. From these the most suitable stones were carefully selected,
and often carried great distances. Those most easily worked into flakes
for small arrow heads are chalcedony, jasper, agate, and quartz; and the
finer specimens of such weapons are now greatly prized by collectors.
The coast tribes both of the Atlantic and the Pacific found similar
sources of supply of the stones best suited for their implements in the
rolled gravel of the beach, and this appears to have been the most
frequent resort of the Micmacs and other tribes of the Canadian Maritime
Provinces.
I have already referred to information derived from Dr. G. M. Dawson and
Dr. Robert Bell, to both of whom I have been indebted for interesting
results of their own personal observations as members of the Canadian
Geological Survey. Collectors are familiar with the elongated flat
stones, with two or more holes bored through them, variously styled
gorgets, implements for fashioning sinew into cord, etc. They are made
of a grayish-green clay slate, with dark streaks; and the same material
is used in the manufacture of personal ornaments, ceremonial objects,
and occasionally for smooth spear heads and knives. Relics fashioned of
this peculiar clay slate are found throughout Ontario, from Lakes Huron
and Erie to the Ottawa valley. A somewhat similar stone occurs in situ
at various points, but Dr. Bell believes he has satisfactorily
identified the ancient quarry at the outlet of Lake Temagamic, nearly
100 miles north of Lake Nipissing. No clay slate procured from any other
locality corresponds so exactly to the favourite material. The site is
accessible by more than one canoe route; and quantities of the rock from
different beds lie broken up in blocks of a size ready for
transportation. Dr. Bell found on the shore of Lake Temissaming a large
unfinished spear head, chipped out of this clay slate, and ready for
grinding. When the region is settled and the land cleared, sites will
probably be discovered where the aboriginal exporters reduced the rough
blocks to forms convenient for transport.
Dr. Bell has described to me specimens of narrow and somewhat long spear
points, of local manufacture, made from smoky chert found on or near the
Athabaska, in Mackenzie river basin; and an arrow head of brown flint
from the mouth of Churchill river, Hudson Bay. The flint implements of
Rainy river and Lake of the Woods are of brownish flint and chert, such
as are found in the drift all over the region to the south-westward of
Hudson Bay; and are mostly derived from the Devonian rocks. Worn pebbles
of this kind occur in the drift as far south as Lake Superior. A branch
of Kinogami river is called by the Indians Flint river (_Pewona sipi_)
from the abundance of the favourite material they find in the river
gravel and shingle. The finest flint implements of Canada are those of
the north shore of Lake Huron, made from material corresponding to a
very fine-grained quartzite, approximating to chalcedony, found among
the Huronian rocks of that region.
Along the western coast of the Province of Nova Scotia a high ridge of
trap rock extends, with slight interruption, from Briar Island to Cape
Blomidon. Here the strong tidal rush of the sea undermines the cliff,
and the winter frosts split it up, so that every year the shore is
strewn with broken fragments from the cliff, exposing a variety of
crystalline minerals, such as jasper, agate, etc. The beach gravel is
also interspersed with numerous rounded pebbles derived originally from
the same source. I am indebted to Mr. George Patterson, of New Glasgow,
N.S., for some interesting notes on this subject. The pebbles of this
beach seem to have been one of the chief sources of supply for the
Indian implement-makers of Nova Scotia. Few localities have hitherto
been noticed in the Maritime Provinces marked by any such large
accumulation of chips as would suggest the probability of manufacture
for the purpose of trade; though chips and finished implements
occasionally occur together on the sites of Indian villages or
encampments, suggestive of individual industry and home manufacture. But
Mr. Patterson informs me that one place at Bauchman’s Beach, in the
county of Lunenburg, furnishes abundant traces of an old native
workshop. There, until recently, could be gathered agate, jasper, and
other varieties of the fine-grained crystalline minerals from the trap,
sometimes in nodules, rounded and worn, as they occur at the base of the
ocean-washed cliffs. At times they showed partial traces of working; but
more frequently they were split and broken, bearing the unmistakable
marks of the hammer. Along with those were cores and large quantities of
flakes, or chips, with arrow heads, more or less perfectly formed. At
one time they might have been gathered in large quantities; but recent
inroads of the sea have swept away much of the old beach, and strewed
the products of the Indian stone-workers where they may be stored for
the wonder of men of other centuries. It is curious, indeed, to reflect
on the memorials of ages so diverse from those with which the
palæontologist deals, that are now accumulating in the submarine strata
in process of formation, for the instruction of coming generations,
should our earth last so long. The world will, doubtless, have grown
wiser before that epoch is reached. But it will require some
discrimination, even in so enlightened an age, to read aright the
significance of this mingling of relics of rudest barbarism with all the
products of modern civilisation that are being strewn along the great
ocean highways between the Old and the New World.
A curious illustration of the possible confusion of evidence is shown by
the discovery in 1884 of a large stone lance head of the Eskimo type,
deeply imbedded in the tissues of a whale taken at the whaling station
on Ballast Point, near the harbour of San Diego, California.[39] In the
Museum of the University of Edinburgh is the skeleton of a whale,
stranded in the ancient estuary of the Forth in a prehistoric age, when
the ocean tides reached the site which had been elevated into dry land
long ages before the Roman invaders of Caledonia made their way over it.
Alongside of the buried whale lay a rude deerhorn implement of the old
Caledonian whaler; and had the San Diego whale sunk in deep waters off
the Pacific coast, it would have perpetuated a similar memorial of
rudest savage life, in close proximity, doubtless, to evidences of
modern civilisation. Such, though in less striking form, is the process
of intermingling the arts of the American Stone age with products of
modern skill and refinement, that is now in progress off the Lunenburg
coast of Nova Scotia. The inroads of the sea have not, however, even now
effaced all traces of the old arrow-makers of Bauchman’s Beach.
Specimens of their handiwork may still be gathered along the shore. To
this locality it is obvious that the inland tribes resorted from remote
Indian villages for some of their most indispensable supplies.
Implements of the same materials also occur at sites on the northern
coast; but the larger number found there are made of quartzite, felsite,
or of hard, slaty stone, such as occurs in the metamorphic rocks of the
mountain ranges in the interior of the Province.
From what has thus been set forth, some general inferences of a
comprehensive character are suggested. It is scarcely open to doubt that
at a very early stage in the development of primitive mechanical art,
the exceptional aptitude of skilled workmen was recognised and brought
into use for the general benefit. Co-operation and some division of
labour in the industrial arts, necessary to meet the universal demand
for tools and weapons, appear also to have been recognised from a very
remote period in the social life of the race. There were the quarriers
for the flint, the obsidian, the shale, the pipestones, the favourite
minerals, and the close-grained igneous rocks, adapted for the variety
of implements in general use. There were also the traders by whom the
raw material was transported to regions where it could only be procured
by barter; as appears to be demonstrated by the repeated discovery, not
only of flint and stone implements, alike in stray examples, and in
well-furnished caches; but also of work-places, remote from any
flint-producing formation, strewn with the chips, flakes, and imperfect
or unfinished implements of the tool-makers. It thus becomes obvious
that the men of the earliest Stone age transported suitable material for
their simple arts from many remote localities, and purchased the
services of the skilled workman with the produce of the chase, or
whatever other equivalent they could offer in exchange. The further
archæological search is extended, the evidence of social co-operation
and systematised industry among the men of the Palæolithic era, as well
as among those of later periods prior to the dawn of metallurgic skill,
becomes more apparent. Nor is it less interesting to note that there was
no more equality among the men of those primitive ages, than in later
civilised stages of social progress. Diversities in capacity and
consequent moral force asserted themselves in the skilled handicraftsmen
of the Palæolithic dawn, much as they do in the most artificial states
of modern society. As a natural concomitant to this, and an invaluable
element of co-operation, the prized flint flakes appear to have
furnished a primitive medium of exchange, more generally available as a
currency of recognised value than any other substitute for coined money.
The principles on which the wealth of nations and the whole social
fabric of human society depend, were thus already in operation ages
before the merchants of Tyre, or the traders of Massala, had learned to
turn to account the mineral resources of the Cassiterides; or that
vaguer and still more remote era before the ancient Atlantis had
vanished from the ken of the civilised dwellers around the Mediterranean
Sea.
-----
[10] _Ancient Stone Implements_, p. 14.
[11] Hoare’s _South Wilts_, p. 195.
[12] _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland_, viii. 137.
[13] _Ibid._ N.S. vii. 356.
[14] _Ibid._ N.S. xii. 436.
[15] _Archæologia_, xiii. 204.
[16] _Archæologia_, xiii. 224, 225; pl. xiv. xv.
[17] _Athenæum_, Dec. 18, 1886.
[18] _U.S. Geological Survey_, 1872, p. 652.
[19] _Primitive Industry_, Figs. 241, 254, 292, 295, etc.
[20] Evans’ _Stone Implements_, Fig. 94.
[21] _Archæologia_, xlii. 72.
[22] _Ibid._ p. 68.
[23] _Ibid._ p. 68.
[24] _British Barrows_, p. 166.
[25] _Palæolithic Man in Eastern and Central North America_, pp. 152,
153.
[26] Vide _Prehistoric Man_, 3rd ed. ii. 132.
[27] _Smithsonian Reports_, Part I. 1885, p. 880.
[28] _Report of the Peabody Museum_, ii. 262.
[29] _Prehistoric Man_, 3d ed. vol. ii. p. 223.
[30] _Tribes of the Extreme North-West_, pp. 81, 82.
[31] _Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge_, 158.
[32] Abbott’s _Primitive Industry_, p. 33.
[33] _Smithsonian Report_, 1872.
[34] _Ibid._ 1868, p. 402.
[35] _Smithsonian Report_, 1877, p. 293.
[36] _Smithsonian Report_, 1885, Part I. p. 873.
[37] _Smithsonian Report_, 1885, Part I. p. 873.
[38] _Smithsonian Report_, Part I. 1885, p. 874.
[39] _Science_, iii. 342.
IV
PRE-ARYAN AMERICAN MAN
THE department of American ethnology, notwithstanding its many
indefatigable workers, is still to a large extent a virgin soil. The
western hemisphere is rich in materials for ethnical study, but there is
urgent demand for diligent labourers to rescue them for future use. On
all hands we see ancient nations passing away. The prairie tribes are
vanishing with the buffalo; the Flathead Indians of diverse types and
stranger tongues; and, more interesting than either, the ingenious
Haidahs of the Queen Charlotte Islands: are all diminishing in numbers,
giving up their distinctive customs, and confusing their mythic and
legendary traditions with foreign admixtures; while some are destined to
speedy extinction.
When, in 1846, the artist, Paul Kane, entered on his exploratory travels
among the tribes of the North-West, the Flathead Indians of Oregon and
British Columbia embraced populous settlements of Cowlitz, Chinook,
Newatee, and other nations. Now the researches of the American Bureau of
Ethnology are stimulated by the disclosure that of the Clatsop and
Chinook tribes there are only three survivors who speak the former
language, and only one with a knowledge of the latter. Of the Klaskanes,
in like manner, only one is known to survive; and from a like solitary
representative of the Tuteloes the language of a vanished race has
recently been rescued. With all the native tribes who have been brought
into near relations with the intruding white race their languages and
customs are undergoing important modifications. Other elements of
confusion and erasure are also at work. A large influx of Chinese
complicates the ethnological problem; and it cannot be wisely left to
the efforts of individuals, carried on without concert, and on no
comprehensive or systematic plan, to rescue for future study the
invaluable materials of American ethnology. To the native languages
especially the inquirer into some of the curious problems involved in
the peopling of this continent must look for a key to the mystery.
The intelligent inquirer cannot fail to be rewarded for any time he may
devote to a consideration of the condition and relative status of the
aborigines, north of the Gulf of Mexico, not only as studied from
existing native tribes, or from those known since the discovery of
America in 1492, but in so far as we can determine their earlier
condition with the aid of archæological evidence. The student of the
history of the North American nations cannot indeed altogether overlook
the undoubted fact that Columbus was not the first of European voyagers
within the Christian era to enter on the colonisation of the western
hemisphere; whatever value he may attach to the legends and traditions
of more ancient explorers.
The part played by the Scandinavian stock in European history proves
their abundant aptitude to have been the organisers of a Northland of
their own in the New World. The Northmen lingered behind, in their first
home in the Scandinavian peninsula, while Goth, Longobard, Vandal,
Suevi, Frank, Burgundian, and other tribes from the Baltic first wasted
and then revolutionised the Roman world. But they were nursing a
vigorous youth, which ere long, as pagan Dane, and then as Norman,
stamped a new character on mediæval Europe. Their presence in the New
World rests on indubitable evidence; but the very definiteness of its
character in their inhospitable northern retreat helps to destroy all
faith in any mere conjectural fancies relative to their settlement on
points along the Atlantic seaboard which they are supposed to have
visited.
Runic inscriptions on the Canadian and New England seaboard would, if
genuine, give an entirely novel aspect to our study of Pre-Columbian
American history, with all its possibilities of older intercourse with
the eastern hemisphere. But it is the same whether we seek for traces of
colonisation in the tenth or the fifteenth century, in so far as all
native history is concerned. They equally little suffice to furnish
evidence of relationship, in blood, language, arts or customs, between
any people of the eastern hemisphere and the native American races. We
are indeed invited from time to time to review indications suggestive of
an Asiatic or other old-world source for the American aborigines; and in
nearly every system of ethnical classification they are, with good
reason, ranked as Mongolidæ; but if their pedigree is derived from an
Asiatic stock, the evidence has yet to be marshalled which shall place
on any well-established basis the proofs of direct ethnical affinity
between them and races of the eastern hemisphere. The ethnological
problem is, here as elsewhere, beset by many obscuring elements.
Language, at best, yields only remote analogies, and thus far American
archæology, though studied with unflagging zeal, has been able to render
very partial aid.
It cannot admit of question that the compass of American
archæology,—including that of the semi-civilised and lettered races of
Central and Southern America,—is greatly circumscribed in comparison
with that of Europe. But the simplicity which results from this has some
compensating elements in its direct adaptation to the study of man, as
he appears on the continent unaffected by the artificialities of a
forced civilisation, and with so little that can lend countenance to any
theory of degeneracy from a higher condition of life. In the modern
alliance between archæology and geology, and the novel views which have
resulted as to the antiquity of man, the characteristic disclosures of
primitive art, alike among ancient and modern races, have given a
significance to familiar phases of savage life undreamt of till very
recently. The student who has by such means formed a definite conception
of primeval art, and realised some idea of the condition and
acquirements of the savage of Europe’s Post-Pliocene era, turns with
renewed interest to living races seemingly perpetuating in arts and
habits of our own day what gave character to the social life of the
prehistoric dawn. This phase of primitive art can still be studied on
more than one continent, and in many an island of the Pacific and the
Indian ocean; but nowhere is the apparent reproduction of such initial
phases of the history of our race presented in so comprehensive an
aspect as on the American continent. There man is to be found in no
degree superior in arts or habits to the Australian savage; while
evidence of ingenious skill and of considerable artistic taste occur
among nomads exposed to the extremest privations of an Arctic climate;
and with no more knowledge of metallurgy than is implied in occasionally
turning to account the malleable native copper, by hammering it into the
desired shape; or, in their intercourse with Arctic voyagers and
Hudson’s Bay trappers, acquiring by barter some few implements and
weapons of European manufacture. The arts of the patient Eskimo,
exercised under the stimulus of their constant struggle for existence
amid all the hardships of a polar climate, have, indeed, not only
suggested comparisons between them and the artistic cave-dwellers of
Central Europe in its prehistoric dawn; but have been assumed to prove
an ethnical affinity, and direct descent, altogether startling when we
fully realise the remote antiquity thereby assigned to those Arctic
nomads, and the unchanging condition ascribed to them through all the
intervening ages of geographical and social revolution.
But whatever may be the value ultimately assigned to the Eskimo
pedigree, a like phenomenon of unprogressive humanity, perpetuating
through countless generations the same rudimentary arts, everywhere
presents itself, and seems to me to constitute the really remarkable
feature in North American ethnology and archæology. We find, not only in
Canada but throughout the whole region northward from the Gulf of
Mexico, diversified illustrations of savage life; but nearly all of them
unaffected by traces of contact with earlier civilisation. From the
northern frontiers of Canada the explorer may travel through widely
diversified regions till he reach the cañons of Mexico and the ruined
cities of Central America; and all that he finds of race and art, of
language or native tradition, is in contrast to the diversities of the
European record of manifold successions of races and of arts. There
within the Arctic circle the Eskimo constructs his lodge of snow, and
successfully maintains the battle for life under conditions which
determine to a large extent the character of his ingenious arts and
manufacture. Immediately to the south are found the nomad tribes of
forest and prairie, with their téepees of buffalo-skin, or their
birch-bark wigwams and canoes: wandering hunter tribes of the great
North-West; type of the red Indian of the whole northern continent. The
Ohio and Mississippi valleys abound with earthworks and other remains of
the vanished race of the Mound-Builders: of old the dwellers there in
fortified towns, agriculturalists, ingenious potters, devoted to the use
of tobacco, expending laborious art on their sculptured pipes, and with
some exceptionally curious skill in practical geometry; yet, they too,
ignorant of almost the very rudiments of metallurgy, and only in the
first stage of the organised life of a settled community. The modifying
influences of circumstances must be recognised in the migratory or
settled habits of different tribes. The Eskimo are of necessity hunters
and fishers, yet they are not, strictly speaking, nomads. In summer they
live in tents, constantly moving from place to place, as the exigencies
of the reindeer-hunting, seal-hunting, or fishing impel them. But they
generally winter in the same place for successive generations, and
manifest as strong an attachment to their native home as the dwellers in
more favoured lands. Their dwelling-houses accommodate from three or
four to ten families; and the same tendency to gather in communities
under one roof is worthy of notice wherever other wandering tribes
settle even temporarily. A drawing, made by me in 1866, of a birch-bark
dwelling which stood among a group of ordinary wigwams on the banks of
the Kaministiquia, shows a lodge of sufficiently large dimensions to
accommodate several families of a band of Chippewas, who had come from
the far West to trade their furs with the Hudson’s Bay factor there. The
Haidahs, the Chinooks, the Nootkas, the Columbian and other Indian
tribes to the west of the Rocky Mountains, all use temporary tents or
huts in their frequent summer wanderings; but their permanent dwellings
are huge structures sufficient to accommodate many families, and
sometimes the whole tribe. They are constructed of logs or split planks,
and in some cases, as among the Haidahs of Queen Charlotte Islands, they
are elaborately decorated with carving and painting.