for the most part more strictly nomad. The open character of the
country, with its vast tracts of prairie, and its herds of buffalo and
other game, no doubt helped to encourage a wandering life. The Crees,
the Blackfeet, the Sioux, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Apaches were all of
this class, and with their interminable feuds and perpetual migrations
rendered all settled life impossible. The Mandans, the most civilised
among the tribes of the North-West, abandoned village after village
under the continual attacks of the Sioux, until they disappeared as a
nation; and the little handful of survivors found shelter with another
tribe.
All this was the work of Indians. The Spaniards, indeed, wasted and
destroyed with no less merciless indiscrimination. Not only nations
perished, but a singularly interesting phase of native civilisation was
abruptly arrested in Mexico, Central America, and Peru. The intrusion of
French, Dutch, and English colonists was, no doubt, fatal to the
aborigines whom they supplanted. Nevertheless their record is not one of
indiscriminate massacre. The relations of the French, especially with
the tribes with whom they were brought into immediate contact, were on
the whole kindly and protective. But as we recover the history of the
native tribes whose lands are now occupied by the representatives of
those old colonists, we find the Indians everywhere engaged in the same
exterminating warfare; and whether we look at the earlier maps, or
attempt to reconstruct the traditionary history of older tribes, we
learn only the same tale of aimless strife and extinction. When Cartier
first explored the St. Lawrence in 1535 he found large Indian
settlements at Quebec and on the island of Montreal; but on the return
of the French under Champlain, little more than half a century later,
there were none left to dispute their settlement. At the later date, and
throughout the entire period of French occupation, the country to the
south of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario was occupied by the Iroquois,
or Six Nation Indians, as they were latterly called. Westward of the
river Ottawa the whole region was deserted until near the shores of the
Georgian Bay; though its early explorers found everywhere the traces of
recent occupation by the Wyandot or other tribes, who had withdrawn to
the shores of Lake Huron to escape the fury of their implacable foes.
At the period when the Hurons were first brought under the notice of the
French Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century they were
established along the Georgian Bay and around Lake Simcoe; and in so far
as the wild virtues of the savage warrior are concerned, they fully
equalled the Iroquois by whom they were at length driven out and nearly
exterminated. When Locke visited Paris in 1679 the narratives of the
Jesuit fathers had rendered familiar the unflinching endurance of this
race under the frightful tortures to which they were subjected by their
Iroquois captors; and which they, in turn, not only inflicted on their
captive foes, but on one after another of the missionaries whose devoted
zeal exposed them to their fury. We now read with interest this
reflection noted in Locke’s Journal, in which he recognises in these
savages the common motives of humanity; the same desire to win credit
and reputation, and to avoid shame and disgrace, which animates all men:
“This makes the Hurons and other people of Canada with such constancy
endure inexpressible torments; this makes merchants in one country and
soldiers in another; this puts men upon school divinity in one country
and physics and mathematics in another; this cuts out the dresses for
the women, and makes the fashions for the men, and makes them endure the
inconveniences of all.” The great English philosopher manifestly
entertained no doubt that the latent elements on which all civilisation
depends were equally shared by Indian and European. But the Hurons
perished—all but a little remnant of Christianised half-breeds now
settled on the St. Charles river below Quebec—in their very hour of
contact with European civilisation.
Father Sagard estimated the Huron tribes at the close of their national
history, when they had been greatly reduced in numbers, as still between
thirty and forty thousand. But besides these there lay between them and
the shores of Lake Erie and the Niagara river the Tiontonones and the
Attiwendaronks, and to the south of the Great Lake the Eries, all of the
same stock, and all sharers in the same fate. Tradition points to the
kindling of the council-fire of peace among the Attiwendaronks before
the organisation of the Iroquois confederacy. Father Joseph de la Roche
d’Allyon, who passed through their country when seeking to discover the
source of the Niagara river, speaks of twenty-eight towns and villages
under the rule of its chief Sachem, and of their extensive cultivation
of maize, beans, and tobacco. They had won, moreover, the strange
character of being lovers of peace, and were styled by the French the
Neuters, from the desire they manifested to maintain a friendly
neutrality alike with the Hurons and the Iroquois. Of the Eries we know
less. In the French maps of the seventeenth century the very existence
of the great lake which perpetuates their name was unknown; but the
French fur-traders were aware of a tribe existing to the west of the
Iroquois, whose country abounded with the lynx or wild cat, the fur of
which was specially prized, and they designated it “La Nation du Chat.”
To their artistic skill are ascribed several remains of aboriginal art,
among which a pictorial inscription on Cunningham’s Island is described
as by far the most elaborate work of its class hitherto found on the
continent.[68] From the partial glimpses thus recovered of both nations
we are tempted to ascribe to them an aptitude for civilisation fully
equal to that of which the boasted federal league of the Iroquois gave
evidence. But they perished by the violence of kindred nations before
either the French or English could establish intercourse with them; and
their fate doubtless reveals to us glimpses of history such as must have
found frequent repetition in older centuries throughout the whole North
American continent.
The legend of the peace-pipe, Longfellow’s poetic version of the Red
Indian Edda, founded on traditions of the Iroquois narrated by an
Onondaga chief, represents Gitche Manito, the Master of Life, descending
on the crag of the red pipestone quarry at the Côteau des Prairies, and
calling all the tribes together:—
And they stood there on the meadow
With their weapons and their war gear,
Wildly glaring at each other.
In their faces stern defiance,
In their hearts the feuds of ages,
The hereditary hatred,
The ancestral thirst of vengeance.
So far the picture is true to nature; but no dream of a millennial era
for the Red Man, in which all were thenceforth to live together as
brothers, can have fashioned itself in the mind of Indian seer. The
Sioux, the Crees, and the Blackfeet, still continued to nurse the same
feud of ages, and thirsted for each other’s blood, while European
emigrants crowd in to take possession of their vast prairies, destined
to become the granaries of the world. The buffalo, on which they mainly
depended for their food, and their téepees or tents, have vanished from
their prairies, and will ere long be as extinct as the fossil urus or
mastodon. The Red Man of the North-West exhibits no change from his
precursors of the fifteenth century; and for aught that appears in him
of a capacity for self-development, the forests and prairies of the
American continent may have sheltered hunting and warring tribes of
Indians, just as they have sheltered and pastured its wild herds of
buffaloes, for countless centuries since the continent rose from its
ocean bed.
Only by prolonged hereditary feuds, more insatiable, and therefore more
destructive in their results than the ravages of tigers or wolves, is it
possible to account for such an unprogressive condition of humanity as
the archæological disclosures of the northern continent seem to reveal?
Its numerous rivers and lakes, and its boundless forests and prairies,
afforded inexhaustible resources for the hunter, and both soil and
climate have proved admirably adapted for agriculture. Still more, the
great copper region of Lake Superior provided advantages such as have
existed in few other countries of the known world for developing the
first stages of metallurgic art on which civilisation so largely
depends. Whether brought with them from Asia, or discovered for
themselves, the grand secret of the mastery of the ores by fire was
already familiar to Peruvian metallurgists, and not unknown to those of
Mexico. Unalloyed copper, such as that which abounds in the igneous
rocks of the Keweenaw peninsula on Lake Superior, is extremely difficult
to cast; and the addition of a small percentage of tin not only produces
the useful bronze alloy, but renders the copper more readily fusible.
This all-important secret of science the metallurgists of Peru had
discovered for themselves, and turned largely to practical account. The
pictured chronicles of the Mexicans throw an interesting light on the
value they attached to the products of this novel art. It appears from
some of their paintings that the tribute due by certain provinces was
paid in wedges of copper. The forms of these, as well as of chisels and
other tools of bronze, are simple, and indicate no great ingenuity in
adapting the moulded metal to the artificer’s or the combatant’s
requirements. The methods of hafting the axe-blade appear to have been
of nearly the same rude description as are in use by modern savages in
fitting the handle to a hatchet of flint or stone; and the whole
characteristics of their implements suggest the probability that their
metallurgy was a recently acquired art, derived from the civilised races
on whom they had intruded as conquerors.
Such knowledge, partial as it was, must have been derived from the
south. Everywhere to the north of the Mexican Gulf we look in vain for
anything more than the mere hammered native copper, untouched by fire.
Dr. J. W. Foster does indeed quote Mr. Perkins, who himself possesses
sixty copper implements, including knives, spear heads, chisels, and
objects of anomalous form, as having arrived at the conclusion “that, by
reason of certain markings, it was evident that the Mound-Builders
possessed the art of smelting copper,”[69] but the illustrations
produced in proof of it scarcely bear out the opinion. The same idea has
been repeatedly advanced; but the contents of the Mounds amply prove
that if such a knowledge had dawned on their builders it was turned to
no practical account. Mr. Charles Rau, in his _Ancient Aboriginal Trade
in North America_, says: “Although the fire on the hearths or altars now
enclosed by the sacrificial mounds was sometimes sufficiently strong to
melt the deposited copper articles, it does not seem that this
proceeding induced the ancient inhabitants to avail themselves of fire
in working copper; they persisted in the tedious practice of hammering.
Yet one copper axe, evidently cast, and resembling those taken from the
mounds of Ohio, has been ploughed up near Auburn, in Cayuga, in the
State of New York. This specimen, which bears no trace of use, may date
from the earlier times of European colonisation. It certainly would be
wrong to place much stress on such an isolated case.”[70] The well-known
volume of Messrs. Squier and Davis furnishes illustrations of copper and
other metallic relics from the mounds of Ohio.[71] Mr. J. T. Short
engraves a variety of similar relics from Wisconsin, where they appear
to have been found in unusual abundance.[72] In the Annual Report of the
Historical Society of Wisconsin for 1878 the copper implements in their
collection are stated to number one hundred and ninety implements,
classified as spear or dirk heads, knives, chisels, axes, augurs, gads,
and drills, in addition to beads, tubes, and other personal ornaments
made out of thin sheets of hammered copper. Dr. J. W. Foster has
furnished illustrations of the various types from the valuable
collection of Mr. Perkins.[73] Colonel Charles C. Jones engraves a
specimen of the rarely known copper implements of Georgia;[74] and Dr.
Abbott shows the prevailing forms of the same class of relics found
along the whole northern Atlantic seaboard.[75] All tell the same tale
of rudest manipulation by a people ignorant of the working of metals
with the use of fire.
And yet the native copper was ready to hand in a form and in quantity
unknown elsewhere. No such supplies of the pure metal invited the
industry of the first Asiatic or European metallurgists. The
Cassiterides yielded in abundance the ores of copper and tin, but these
had to be smelted and worked with all the accumulated results of
tentative skill before they yielded the copper or more useful bronze. By
whom or where this first knowledge was mastered is unknown: the tendency
is still to look to Asia, perhaps to Phœnicia, or to the still
undetermined cradle of the Aryans, wherever that may prove to have been,
for the birth of this phase of metallurgic art which constituted so
important a stage in early civilisation. Yet if the ancient American
missed it, it was not for want of opportunity. Examples of the
accidental fusion of copper by the sacrificial fires of the
Mound-Builders repeatedly occur in the mounds of the Ohio valley. But no
gifted native alchymist was prompt to read the lesson and turn it to
practical account.
Asia and Europe appear to have passed by a natural transition, step by
step, from their rudest stages of lithic art to polished stone, and then
to implements of metal. Some of the steps were doubtless very slow.
Worsaae believed that the use of bronze prevailed in Denmark “five or
six hundred years before the birth of Christ.”[76] In Egypt it
undoubtedly was known at a greatly earlier date. I still incline to my
early formed opinion, that gold was the first metal worked. Found in
nuggets, it could scarcely fail to attract attention. It was easy to
fashion into shape; and some of the small, highly polished stone hammers
seem fitter for this than any other work.[77] The abundant gold
ornaments of the New World at the time of the discovery of Mexico and
Peru accord with this idea. The like attraction of the bright native
copper, is proved by its employment among the southern Indians for
personal ornaments; and in this way the economic use of the metals may
have been first suggested.
From the working of gold nuggets, or of virgin copper, with the hammer,
to the smelting of the ores, was no trifling step; but that knowledge
once gained, the threshold of civilisation and true progress had been
reached. The history of the grand achievement is embodied in the
earliest myths both of the Old and the New World. Tubal-cain, Dædalus,
Hephæstus, Vulcan, Vœlund, Galant, the Luno or the Celtic Fingal, and
Wayland, the Saxon smith-god, are but legendary variations of the first
worker by whom the gift of metallurgy was communicated to man; and so
too the New World has its Quetzalcoatl, or Vœlund of the Aztecs, the
divine instructor of their ancestors in the use of the metals. But
whatever be the date of this wise instructor, no share of the knowledge
communicated by him to that favoured race appears to have ever
penetrated northward of the Mexican Gulf.
It is vain to urge such dubious evidence as the fancied traces of a
mould-ridge, or the solitary example of a casting of uncertain age, in
proof of a knowledge of the furnace and the crucible among any North
American tribe. Everywhere in Europe the soil yields not only its buried
relics of gold, copper, and bronze, but also stone and bronze moulds in
which implements and personal ornaments were cast. When the ingenious
systematising of Danish archæologists had familiarised the students of
antiquity with the idea of a succession of Stone, Bronze, and Iron
periods in the history of Europe, the question naturally followed,
whether metallurgy did not begin, there, as elsewhere, in the easy
working of virgin copper. Dr. Latham accordingly remarked, in his
_Ethnology of the British Islands_, on the supposition that no unalloyed
copper relics had been found in Britain: “Stone and bone first; then
bronze, or copper and tin combined; but no copper alone. I cannot get
over this hiatus; cannot imagine a metallurgic industry beginning with
the use of alloys.” It was a mistake, however, to assume that no copper
relics had ever been found. At first it had been taken for granted that
all such implements were of the familiar alloy. But so soon as the
importance of the distinction was recognised, examples of pure copper
were forthcoming. So early as 1822, Sir David Brewster described a large
axe of peculiar shape, and formed of copper, which was found in the hard
black till-clay at a depth of twenty feet under Ratho Bog, near
Edinburgh. This is no solitary example. The Scottish Museum of
Antiquities has other implements of pure copper; and Sir William Wilde
states in reference to the collections of the Royal Irish Academy: “upon
careful examination, it has been found that thirty of the rudest, and
apparently the very oldest celts, are of red, almost unalloyed copper”;
as is also the case with some other rudely formed tools in the same
collection.
It was a temporary advantage, doubtless, but a real loss, to the Indian
miners of Lake Superior that they found the native copper there ready to
hand, a pure ductile metal, probably regarded by them as only a variety
of stone which—unlike its rocky matrix,—they could bend, or hammer
into shape, without fracture. Its value as such was widely appreciated.
Copper tools, everywhere retaining the specs, or larger crystals of
silver, characteristic of the Lake Superior veins, tell of the diffusion
of the metal from that single source throughout all the vast regions
watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries, and eastward by lake and
river to the gulf of the St. Lawrence and the mouth of the Hudson.
There was a time when this traffic must have been systematically carried
on; when the ancient miners of Lake Superior worked its rich copper
veins with industrious zeal; and when, probably as part of the same
aggressive energy, the valley of the Ohio was filling with a settled
population; its great earthworks were in process of construction, and a
native race entered on a course that gave promise of social progress.
But, from whatever cause, the work of the old miners was abruptly
terminated;[78] the race of the Mounds vanished from the scenes of their
ingenious toil; and rudest barbarism resumed its sway over the whole
northern continent. The same Aryan race that, before the dawn of
history, before the Sanskrit-speaking people of India, or the Zends of
Persia, entered on their southern homes, spoke in its own cradleland the
mother tongue of Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic, and German, at length broke up
and went forth on its long wanderings. Whatever peoples it found there;
they were replaced by Celts, Romans, Greeks, Slavs, and Teutons, who
broke in upon the barbarism of prehistoric Europe; displaced the older
races, Allophylian, Neolithic, Iberian, Finnic, or by whatever other
name we may find it convenient to designate them; but not without a
considerable intermingling of the old blood with that of the intruders.
The sparsely settled continent gradually filled up. Forests were
cleared, swamps drained, rivers confined by artificial banks and levées
to their channels; and there grew up in their new homes the Celtic,
Classic, Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, with all the varied culture and
civilisation which they represent. Agriculture, the special
characteristic of the whole Aryan race, flourished. They brought with
them the cereals; and, with plenty, the favoured race multiplied, till
at length it has grown straitened within the bounds of the old continent
which it had made its own.
With the close of the fifteenth century one great cycle, that of
Europe’s mediæval era, came to an end; and then we trace the first
beginnings of that fresh scattering of the Aryan clan, and its new
western movement across the Ocean. It seems in a very striking manner
once more to repeat itself under our own eyes, as we look abroad on the
millions crowding from Europe and filling up the western wilderness;
hewing down the forests, cultivating the waste prairies, and everywhere
displacing the rude aborigines: yet here also not without some
interblending of the races; though the two types, Aryan and pre-Aryan,
meet under all the repellent influences of high civilisation and the
lowest barbarism. In the Canadian North-West alone, the young province
of Manitoba began its political existence with a population of between
10,000 and 12,000 half-breeds; in part at least, a hardy race of hunters
and farmers; the representatives of what is as certainly destined to
constitute an element in the new phases which the Aryan race already
begins to assume, under the diverse conditions of a new continent, as
that curious trace of Europe’s pre-Aryan people which attracted the
observant attention of Tacitus among the ancient Britons; and which we
are learning to recognise, with a new significance, as the Melanochroi:
the representatives of the old half-breed of Europe’s prehistoric dawn.
-----
[40] Gladstone, _Juventus Mundi_, pp. 474, 479.
[41] _Indian Migrations_, p. 24.
[42] _Types of Mankind_, p. 351.
[43] _Early Man in Britain_, p. 241.
[44] _Ibid._ p. 244.
[45] _Alaska and its Resources_, p. 237.
[46] _Prehistoric Europe_, p. 550.
[47] _U.S. Geological Survey_, 1872, p. 652. _Report of National
Museum_, 1887, p. 683, Fig. 11535.
[48] _Report of National Museum_, 1887, p. 678.
[49] _Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain_, p. 140.
[50] Vide _Prehistoric Man_, 3d ed. vol. i. p. 180, Fig. 54.
[51] _Report of the Peabody Museum_, vol. ii., p. 38.
[52] _Primitive Industry_, p. 471.
[53] _Ibid._, p. 542.
[54] _Primitive Industry_, p. 547.
[55] _Ibid._, p. 545.
[56] Foster’s _Prehistoric Races_, p. 55.
[57] _The Antiquity and Origin of the Trenton Gravel_, p. 547.
[58] _Primitive Industry_, p. 481.
[59] _Report of Washington National Museum_, 1887-88, pp. 677-702.
[60] _Primitive Industry_, p. 517.
[61] _Indian Migrations as Evidence of Language_ (Horatio Hale), p. 21.
[62] _Indian Migrations_, p. 22.
[63] _Relations des Jésuites_, 1660, p. 7. Quebec ed.
[64] _Archæologia Americana_, vol. ii.
[65] Brinton, _Races and Peoples_, p. 254.
[66] _Bertram’s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia,
etc._, 1791, p. 367.
[67] _The League of the Iroquois_, p. 2.
[68] Schoolcraft, _History of the Indian Tribes_, vol. ii., p. 78.
[69] _Prehistoric Races of the United States_, p. 259.
[70] _Smithsonian Report_, 1572, p. 353. The important word _not_
supplied here, it is obvious from the context is absent by a mere
typographical error.
[71] _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, vol. i., pp.
196-207.
[72] _The North Americans of Antiquity_, p. 95.
[73] _Prehistoric Races of the United States_, pp. 251-259.
[74] _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, p. 225.
[75] _Primitive Industry_, pp. 411-422.
[76] _Primæval Antiquities_, p. 135.
[77] _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, 1st ed. 1851, p. 214; 2d ed. vol.
i.
[78] _Prehistoric Man_, 3rd ed. vol. i., pp. 203-228.
V
THE ÆSTHETIC FACULTY IN ABORIGINAL RACES