is equally remote with that of the eastern hemisphere. The date
approximately assigned thus far to the American Palæolithic era is,
geologically speaking, recent; and on that very account adapts itself to
other favoured assumptions, such as the supposed Eskimo pedigree derived
from the race of Europe’s Reindeer period. This chimes in with the old
idea of the American antiquary that the _Skrælings_ referred to in the
Eric Saga were Eskimo, as is far from improbable, though the assumption
rests on no definite evidence. Dr. Abbott accordingly reproduces the
statement of Professor Dawkins, in confirmation of the revived belief.
“We are without a clue to the ethnology of the river-drift man, who most
probably is as completely extinct at the present time as the woolly
rhinoceros or the cave-bear; but the discoveries of the last twenty
years have tended to confirm the identification of the cave-man with the
Eskimo.” Such a fanciful hypothesis once accepted as fact, its
application to American ethnology is easy; and so Dr. Abbott proceeds to
appeal unhesitatingly to evidence sufficient “to warrant the assertion
that the palæolithic man on the one hand, and the makers of the
argillite spear points on the other, stand in the relationship of
ancestor and descendant; and if the latter, as is probable, is in turn
the ancestor of the modern Eskimo: then does it not follow that the
River-drift and Cave-man of Europe, supposing the relationship of the
latter to the Eskimo to be correct, bear the same close relationship to
each other as do the American representatives of these earliest of
people?”[60]
Such an appeal to European archæology can scarcely fail to suggest some
very striking contrasts thereby involved. As the thoughtful student
dwells on all the phenomena of change and geological revolution which he
has to encounter in seeking to assign to the man of the European Drift
his place in vanished centuries, his mind is lost in amazement at the
vista of that long-forgotten past. Yet inadequate as the intermediate
steps may appear, there are progressive stages. Amid all the
overwhelming sense of the vastness of the period embraced in the changes
which he reviews, the mind rests from time to time at well-defined
stations, in tracking the way backward, through ages of historical
antiquity, into the night of time, and so to that dim dawn of mechanical
skill and rational industry in which the first tool-makers plied their
ingenious arts. But, so far as yet appears, it is wholly otherwise
throughout the whole western continent, from the Gulf of Mexico
northward to the pole. North America has indeed a Copper age of its own
very markedly defined; for the shores and islands of Lake Superior are
rich in pure native copper, available for industrial resources without
even the most rudimentary knowledge of metallurgic arts. But the tools
and personal ornaments fashioned out of this more workable material are
little, if at all, in advance of the implements of stone; and, with this
exception, the primitive industry of North America manifests wondrously
slight traces of progression through all the ages now assigned to man’s
presence on the continent.
The means available for forming some just estimate of the character of
native American art are now abundant. In the National Museum at
Washington; the Peabody Museum at Cambridge, Mass.; the Peabody Academy
at Salem; the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia; the American
Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Mass.; and in various Historical
Societies and University Museums throughout the States; the student of
American archæology has the means of obtaining a comprehensive view of
the native arts. At the Centennial Exposition of Philadelphia in 1876,
the various States vied with one another in producing an adequate
representation of the antiquities specially characteristic of their own
localities; and numerous valuable reports, of the Smithsonian
Institution, the United States Geographical Surveys, the Geological
Survey of Canada, and the Geological Surveys of various States, have
furnished data for determining the prehistoric chroniclings of the
northern continent.
One of the latest publications of this class is Dr. Abbott’s own volume,
entitled _Primitive Industry: or Illustrations of the Handiwork in
Stone, Bone, and Clay of the native Races of the Northern Atlantic
Seaboard of America_. It is a most instructive epitome of North American
archæology. Notwithstanding the limits set in the title, works in metal
as well as in stone are included; and what are the results? Twenty-one
out of its twenty-three chapters are devoted to the detailed
illustrations of stone and flint axes, celts, hammers, chisels,
scrapers, drills, knives, etc. Fish-hooks, fish-spears, awls or bodkins,
and other implements of bone, pottery, pipes both in stone and clay, and
personal ornaments, receive the like detailed illustration; but nearly
all are in the rudest stage of rudimentary art. An advance upon this is
seen in the pottery of some southern states. That of the Mound-Builders
appears to have shown both more artistic design and better finish. The
carving in bone, ivory, and slate-stone of various western tribes, as
well as of the extinct Mound-Builders, was also of a higher character.
But taking them at their highest, they cannot compare in practical skill
or variety of application with the industrial arts of Europe’s Neolithic
age; and we look in vain for any traces of higher progress. For well
nigh four centuries, this continent has been familiar to European
explorers and settlers. During some considerable portion of that time,
by means of agricultural operations, and all the incidents consequent on
urban settlement, its virgin soil has been turned up over
ever-increasing areas. For nearly forty years I have myself watched,
with the curious interest of one previously familiar with the minute
incidents of archæological research in Britain, the urban excavations,
railway cuttings, and other undesigned explorations of Canadian soil.
Within the same period, both in Canada and the United States, extensive
canal, railway, and road-works have afforded abundant opportunities for
research; and a widespread interest in American antiquities has tended
to confer an even exaggerated importance on every novel discovery. And
with what result? Dr. Abbott, in crowning such explorations with his
interesting and valuable discovery of the turtle-back celts and other
implements of the Delaware gravel, has epitomised the prehistoric record
of the northern continent. The further back we date the presence of man
in America, the more marvellous must his unprogressive condition appear.
Whatever may be the ampler disclosures relative to the palæolithic or
primeval race, it does not seem probable that this northern continent
will now yield any antiquities suggestive of an extinct era of native
art and civilisation. Here we cannot hope to find a buried Ilium, or
Tadmor in the Wilderness. Everywhere the explorer wanders, and the
agriculturist follows, turning up the soil, or digging deeper as he
drains and builds; but only to disturb the grave of the savage hunter.
The Mound-Builders of its great river-valleys have indeed left there
their enduring earthworks, wrought at times in regular geometrical
configuration on a gigantic scale, strangely suggestive of some
overruling and informing mind guiding the hand of the earthworker. But
their mounds and earthworks disclose only implements of bone and flint
or stone, with here and there an equally rude tool of hammered native
copper. The crudest metallurgy of Europe’s Copper age was unknown to
their builders. The art of Tubal-cain, the primitive worker in brass and
iron, had not dawned on the mind of any native artificer. Only the
ingeniously carved tobacco pipe, or the better-fashioned pottery, gives
the slightest hint of even such progress beyond the first infantile
stage of the tool-maker as is shown in the artistic carvings of the
cave-men contemporary with the mammoth and the reindeer of post-glacial
France.
The civilisation of Central and Southern America is a wholly distinct
thing; and, as I think, not without some suggestive traces of Asiatic
origin; but the attempts to connect it with that of ancient Egypt,
suggested mainly by the hieroglyphic sculpturing on their columns and
temples, find their confutation the moment we attempt to compare the
Egyptian calendar with that either of Mexico or Peru. Traces of worship
of the sun, the earliest of all forms of natural religion, have
undoubtedly been recovered among widely scattered tribes of North
America; but there is no evidence that it was accompanied with any
definite mensuration of the solar year, or the construction of a
calendar. The changes of the seasons sufficed for the division of the
year, not only into summer and winter, but into the diverse aspects of
the seasons from month to month; as is shown in the names given to the
“moons” in various native vocabularies. It was otherwise on the southern
continent, and among the civilised nations of Central America. But the
interblending of the science of astronomy with the religious rites of
the State produced the wonted results; and this was peculiarly the case
in Peru, with its equatorial site for the temple of the Sun-God; and his
seeming literal presence on his altar at recurrent festivals. There
accordingly, even as in ancient Egypt, the divine honours paid to the
heavenly bodies was an impediment to the progress of astronomical
observation. Eclipses were regarded with the same superstitious dread as
among the rudest savage nations; and the conservatism of an established
national creed must have proved peculiarly unfavourable to astronomical
science. The impediments to Galileo’s observations were trifling
compared with those which must have beset the Inca priest who ventured
to question the diurnal revolution of the sun round the earth, or to
solve the awful mystery of an eclipse by so simple an explanation as the
interposition of the moon between the sun and the earth. The Mexican
Calendar Stone, which embodies evidence of greater knowledge, was
believed by Humboldt to indicate unmistakable relations to the ancient
science of South-Eastern Asia. It is of more importance here to note the
shortness of the Mexican cycle, and the small amount of error in their
deviation from true solar time, as compared with the European calendar
at the time when the Spaniards first intruded on Montezuma’s rule. That
the Spaniards were ten days in error, as compared with the Aztec
reckoning, only demonstrates the length of time during which error had
been accumulating in the reformed Julian calendar of Europe; and so
tends to confirm the idea that the civilisation of the Mexicans was of
no very great antiquity.
The whole evidence supplied by Northern archæology proves that in so far
as it had any civilisation of foreign origin, it must have been derived
from the South, where alike in Central and in Southern America, diverse
races, and a native civilisation replete with elements of progress, have
left behind them many enduring memorials of skill and ingenuity. But the
extremely slight and very partial traces of its influence on any people
of the northern continent would of itself suffice to awaken doubts as to
its long duration. The civilisation of Greece and Rome did indeed
exercise no direct influence on transalpine Europe; but long centuries
before the Romans crossed the Alps, as the disclosures of the lake
villages, the crannoges, the kitchen middens, and the sepulchral mounds
of Central and Northern Europe prove, the nations beyond their ken were
familiar with weaving, and with the ceramic and metallurgic arts; were
far advanced as agriculturists, had domesticated animals, acquired
systems of phonetic writing, and learned the value of a currency of the
precious metals.
Midway between North America with its unredeemed barbarism, and the
southern seats of a native American civilisation, Mexico represents, as
I believe, the first contact of the latter with the former. A gleam of
light was just beginning to dawn on the horizon of the northern
continent. The long night of its Dark Ages was coming to a close, when
the intrusion of the Spaniards abruptly arrested the incipient
civilisation, and began the displacement of its aborigines and the
repetition of the Aryan ethnical revolution, which had already
supplanted the autochthones of prehistoric Europe.
The publication in 1848 of the first volume of the _Smithsonian
Contributions to Knowledge_, devoted to the history and explorations of
the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley, gave a wonderful
stimulus to archæological research in the United States. For a time,
indeed, much credulous zeal was devoted to the search for buried cities,
inscribed records, and the fancied recovery, in more or less modified
form, in northern areas, of the civilisation of the Aztecs; not
unmingled with dreams of Phœnician, Hebrew, Scandinavian, and Welsh
remains. The history of some of its spurious productions is not without
interest; but its true fruits are seen in numerous works which have
since issued from the American press, devoted to an accurate record of
local antiquities. So thoroughly has this already been carried out, that
it may now be affirmed that, to all appearance, the condition of the
Indian tribes to the north of Mexico, as shown in the rude arts of a
Stone age, scarcely at all affected in its character by their use of the
native copper of Lake Superior, represents what prevailed throughout the
whole northern continent in all the centuries—however prolonged,—since
the hunters in the Delaware valley fashioned and employed their
turtle-back celts.
The condition of the nations of North America at the period of its
discovery, at the close of the fifteenth century, may be described as
one of unstable equilibrium; and nothing in its archæological records
points to an older period of any prolonged duration of settled progress.
The physical geography of the continent presents in many respects such a
contrast to that of Europe, as is seen in the steppes of Northern Asia,
though with great navigable rivers, which only needed the appliances of
modern civilisation to make them for the New World what the Euphrates
and the Tigris were to Southern Asia, and the Nile to Africa, in ancient
centuries. Those vast tablelands, the great steppes of Mongolia and
Independent Tartary, have ever been the haunts of predatory tribes by
whom the civilisation of Southern Asia has been repeatedly overthrown;
and from the same barbarian hive came the Huns who ravaged the Roman
world in its decline. Europe, on the contrary, nursed its youthful
civilisation among detached communities of its southern peninsulas on
the Mediterranean Sea; and in later ages has repeatedly experienced the
advantages of geographical isolation in the valleys of the Alps, in
Norway and Denmark, in Portugal, the Netherlands, and the British
Islands: where nations protected in their youth from predatory hordes,
and sheltered during critical periods of change, have safely passed
through their earlier stages of progress.
All that we know or can surmise of the nations of North America,
presents a total contrast to this. In so far as the mystery of its
prehistoric Mound-Builders has been solved, we see there a people who
had attained to a grade of civilisation not greatly dissimilar to that
of the village communities of New Mexico and Arizona; and who had
settled down in the Ohio valley, perhaps while feudal Europe was still
only emerging from mediæval rudeness, if not at an earlier date. The
great river-valley was occupied by populous urban centres of an
industrious community. Agriculture, though prosecuted only with the
simplest implements, chiefly of wood and stone, must have been practised
on an extensive scale. The primitive arts of the potter were improved;
the copper abounding in the remote region on the shores of Lake Superior
was prized as a rarity; though metallurgy in its practical applications
had scarcely entered on its first stage. The nation was in its infancy;
but it had passed beyond the rude hunter state, and was entering on a
settled life, with all possibilities of progress in the future, when the
fierce nomads of the north swept down on the populous valley, and left
it a desolate waste. If so, it was but a type of the whole native
history of the continent.
From all that can be gleaned, alike from archæological chroniclings,
Indian tradition, and the actual facts of history in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the condition of the whole population of the
northern continent has ever been the same. It might not inaptly be
compared to an ever-recurring springtide, followed by frosts that nipped
the young germ, and rendered the promised fruitage abortive. Throughout
the whole period of French and English colonial history, the influence
of one or two savage but warlike tribes is traceable from the St.
Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico; and the rival nations were exposed to
such constant warfare that it is more than doubtful if the natural
increase of population was latterly equal to the waste of war. Almost
the sole memorials of vanished nations are the names of some of their
mountain ranges and rivers. It is surmised, as already noted, that the
Allighewi, or Tallegwi, to whom the name common to the Alleghany
Mountains and river is traced, were the actual Mound-Builders.[61] If
so, the history of their overthrow is not wholly a matter of surmise.
The traditions of the Delawares told that the Alleghans were a powerful
nation reaching to the eastern shores of the Mississippi, where their
palisaded towns occupied all the choicest sites in the Ohio valley; but
the Wyandots, or Iroquois, including perhaps the Eries, who had
established themselves on the headwaters of the chief rivers that rise
immediately to the south of the great lakes, combined with the
Delawares, or Lenape nation, to crush that ancient people; and the
decimated Alleghans were driven down the Mississippi, and dispersed.
Some surviving remnant, such as even a war of extermination spares, may
have been absorbed into the conquering nation, after the fashion
systematically pursued by the Huron-Iroquois in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Nor is this a mere conjecture. Mr. Horatio Hale,
recognising the evident traces in the Cherokee language of a grammar
mainly Huron-Iroquois, while the vocabulary is largely recruited from
some foreign source, thinks it not improbable that the origin of the
Cherokee nation may have been due to a union of the survivors of the old
Mound-Builder stock with some branch of the conquering race; just as in
1649 a fugitive remnant of the Hurons from the Georgian Bay were adopted
into the Seneca nation;[62] and a few years later such of the captive
Eries as escaped torture and the stake were admitted into affiliation
with their conquerors.[63]
The whole region to the east of the Mississippi, from the fifty-second
to the thirty-sixth degree of north latitude, appears to have been
occupied by the two great Indian stocks, the Algonquin-Lenape and the
Iroquois. But Gallatin, who directed special attention to the
determination of the elements of philological affinity between them,
recognised to the south of their region the existence of at least three
essentially distinct languages of extensive use: the Catawba, the
Cherokee, and that which he assumed to include in a common origin, both
the Muskhogee and the Choctaw.[64] But besides those, six
well-ascertained languages of smaller tribes, including those of the
Uchees and the Natchez, appear to demand separate recognition. Their
region differs essentially from those over which the Algonquin and
Iroquois war-parties ranged at will. It is broken up by broad river
channels, and intersected by impenetrable swamps; and has thus afforded
refuge for the remnants of conquered tribes, and for the preservation of
distinct languages among small bands of refugees. The Timucuas were the
ancient occupants of Florida; but they appear to have been displaced by
the Chatta-Muskogee nations; driven forth, as is surmised, from their
homes in the Ohio valley; and the older race is only known now by the
preservation of its language in works of the Spanish missionaries.[65]
When the Ohio valley was first explored it was uninhabited; and in the
latter part of the seventeenth century the whole region extending from
Lake Erie to the Tennessee river was an unpeopled desert. But the
Cherokees were in the occupation of their territory when first visited
by De Soto in 1540; and they are described by Bertram in 1773, with
their great council-house, capable of accommodating several hundreds,
erected on the summit of one of the large mounds, in their town of Cowe,
on the Tanase river, in Florida. But Bertram adds: “This mound on which
the rotunda stands, is of a much ancienter date than the building, and
perhaps was raised for another purpose. The Cherokees themselves are as
ignorant as we are by what people, or for what purpose, these artificial
hills were raised.”[66] It would, indeed, no more occur to those
wanderers into the deserted regions of the Mound-Builders to inquire
into the origin of their mounds, than into that of the Alleghany
Mountains.
If then it is probable that we thus recover some clue to the identity of
the vanished race of the Ohio valley, the very designation of the river
is a memorial of their supplanters. The Ohio is an Iroquois name given
to the river of the Alleghans by that indomitable race of savage
warriors who effectually counteracted the plans of France, under her
greatest monarchs, for the settlement of the New World. Their historian,
the late Hon. L. H. Morgan, remarks of the Iroquois: “They achieved for
themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and acquired a higher
degree of influence, than any other race of Indian lineage except those
of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European colonisation, they stood,
for nearly two centuries, with an unshaken front, against the
devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and
the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border
population. Under their federal system, the Iroquois flourished in
independence, and capable of self-protection, long after the New England
and Virginia races had surrendered their jurisdictions, and fallen into
the condition of dependent nations; and they now stand forth upon the
canvas of Indian history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil
institutions, their sagacity in the administration of the league, and
their courage in its defence.”[67] But to characterise the elements of
combined action among the Six Nation Indians as wise civil institutions;
or to use such terms as league and federal system in the sense in which
they are employed by the historian of the Iroquois; is to suggest
associations that are illusory. With all the romance attached to the
League of the Hodenosauneega, they were to the last mere savages. When
the treaty which initiated the great league was entered into by its two
oldest members, the Mohawks and the Oneidas, the former claimed the name
of Kanienga, or “People of the Flint.” Whatever may have been the
precise idea they attached to the designation, they were, as they
remained to the last, but in their Stone period. Their arts were of the
rudest character, and their wars had no higher aim than the
gratification of an inextinguishable hatred. All that we know of them
only serves to illustrate a condition of life such as may have sufficed
through countless generations to perpetuate the barbarism which
everywhere reveals itself in the traces of man throughout the northern
continent of America. One nation after another perished by the fury of
this race, powerful only to destroy. The Susquehannocks, whose name
still clings to the beautiful river on the banks of which they once
dwelt, are believed to have been of the same lineage as the Alleghans;
but they incurred the wrath of the Iroquois, and perished. At a later
date the Delawares provoked a like vengeance; and the remnant of that
nation quitted for ever the shores of the river which perpetuates their
name. Such in like manner was the fate of the Shawnees, Nanticokes,
Unamis, Minsi, and Illinois. All alike were vanquished, reduced to the
condition of serfs, or driven out and exterminated.