The relative chronology of the European drift may be thus stated: first, and most modern, the superficial deposits of recent centuries with their mediæval traces of Frank and Gaul; and along with those, the tombs, the pottery, and other remains of the Roman period, scarcely perceptibly affected in their geological relations by nearly the whole interval of the Christian era; next, in the alluvium, seemingly embedded by natural accumulation at an average depth of fifteen feet, occur remains of a European Stone period, corresponding in many respects to those of the pfahlbauten, or pile villages of the Swiss Lakes; and, underlying such accumulations exceeding in their duration the whole historical period, we come at length to the tool-bearing drift, imbedding, along with the fossil remains of many extinct mammals, the implements of palæolithicman, fashioned seemingly when the rivers were only beginning the work of excavating the valleys which give their present contour to the landscapes of France and England.
There, as elsewhere, we recognise progression from the most artless rudeness of tool manufacture, belonging to an epoch when the process of grinding flint or stone to an edge appears to have been unknown; through various stages of the primitive worker in stone, bone, ivory, and the like natural products; and then the discovery and gradual development of the metallurgic arts. Yet at the same time it must not be lost sight of that mere rudeness of workmanship is no evidence of antiquity. Nothing can well be conceived of more artless than some of the stone implements still in use among savage tribes of America. Moreover, it is to be noted that it is not amid the privations of an Arctic winter, with its analogies so suggestive of a condition of life corresponding to that of the men of Europe’s Palæolithic age, but in southern latitudes, with a climate which furnishes abundant resources for savage man, that the crudest efforts at tool-making now occur. In a report of theUnited States Geological Surveyfor 1872, Professor Joseph Leidy furnishes an interesting account of numerous implements, rude as any in the Drift, observed by him while engaged on a survey at the base of the Unitah Mountains in Southern Wyoming. “In some places,” he remarks, “the stone implements are so numerous, and at the same time are so rudely constructed, that one is constantly in doubt when to consider them as natural or accidental, and when to view them as artificial.”[47]But with these, others are mingled of fine finish. The Shoshones who haunt the region seem to be incapable of such skill as the latter imply; and express the belief that they were a gift of the Great Spirit to their ancestors. Yet many are fresh in appearance; though others are worn and decomposed on the surface, and may, as Professor Leidy assumes, have lain there for centuries. The tendency is now, even among experienced archæologists, to assume that they are actually palæolithic. Mr. Thomas Wilson remarks, in hisReportof 1887: “Dr. Leidy did not know these implements to be what they really were, that isimplements of the Palæolithic period.”[48]But in view of Dr. Leidy’s whole narrative, his assumption seems to be more consistent with the observed data. In the same narrative he describes a stone scraper, orteshoa, as the Shoshones call it, employed by them in the dressing of buffalo-skins, but of so simple a character that he says, “had I not observed it in actual use, and had noticed it among the materials of the buttes, or horizontal strata of indurated clays and sandstone, I would have viewed it as an accidental spawl.” When illustrating the characteristics of a like class of stone implements and weapons of Great Britain, Sir John Evans figures and describes an axe, or war-club, procured from the Indians of Rio Frio in Texas. Its blade is a piece of trachyte, so rudely chipped that it would scarcely attract attention as of artificial working, but for the club-like haft, evidently chopped into shape with stone tools, into which it is inserted. Nothing ruder has been brought to light in any drift or cave deposit.[49]Another modern Texas implement, in the Smithonnia collections at Washington,[50]is a rudely-fashioned flint blade, presenting considerable resemblance to a familiar class of oval implements of the river-drift.
So far, therefore, as unskilled art and the mere rudeness of workmanship are concerned, it might be assumed that the aborigines of America are thus presented to our study in their most primitive stage. They had advanced in no degree beyond the condition of the European savage of the River-Drift period, when, at the close of the fifteenth century, they were brought into contact with modern European culture; and nothing in their rude arts seemed to offer a clue to their origin, or any evidence of progression. So far as anything could be learned from their work, they might have entered on the occupation of the northern continent, subsequent to the visits of the Northmen in the tenth century; and, indeed, American archæologists generally favour the opinion that theSkrælings, as the Northmen designated the New England natives whom they encountered, were not Red Indians but Eskimo. But whatever may have been the local distribution of races at thatdate, geological evidence, which has proved so conclusive in relation to European ethnology, has at length been appealed to by American investigators, with results which seem to establish for their continent also its primeval Stone period, and remote prehistoric dawn.
TheReport of the Peabody Museum of American Archæology and Ethnologyfor 1877, gave the first publicity to a communication from Dr. Charles C. Abbott, setting forth the data from which he was led to assume that man existed on the American continent during the formation of the great glacial deposit which extends from Labrador as far south as Virginia. The scene of his successful research is in the valley of the Delaware, near Trenton, New Jersey. Though the relative antiquity of the Trenton gravel beds is modern compared with some subsequent disclosures, his discoveries have a special interest as foremost among those of implement-bearing gravels in the New World. In the gravel, deposited by the Delaware river in the process of excavating the valley through which its course now lies, Dr. Abbott’s diligent search has been rewarded by finding numerous specimens of rudely chipped implements of a peculiar type, to which he has given the name of “turtle-back celts.” They are fashioned of a highly indurated argillite, with a conchoidal fracture, and have been recovered at depths varying from five to upwards of twenty feet below the overlying soil, in the undisturbed gravel of the bluff facing the Delaware river, as well as in railway cuttings and other excavations.
Here, to all appearance, intelligent research had at length been rewarded by the discovery of undoubted traces of the American palæolithic man; and Dr. Abbott, not unnaturally, gave free scope to his fancy, as he realised to himself the preoccupation of the river valley with “the village sites of pre-glacial man.” There is a fascination in such disclosures which, especially in the case of the original discoverer, tempts to extreme views; and both in France and England, at the present time, the more eager among the geologists and archæologists devoted to this inquiry are reluctantly restrained from assuming as a scientific fact the existence of man in Southern England and in France under more genial climatic influences, prior to the great Ice age which wrought such enormouschanges there. The theory which Dr. Abbott formed on the basis of the evidence first presented to him by the disclosures of the Trenton gravel may be thus stated. Towards the close of the great Ice age, the locality which has rewarded his search for specimens of palæolithic art marked the termination of the glacier on the Atlantic coast. Here, at the foot of the glacier, a primitive people, in a condition closely analogous to that of the Eskimo of the present day, made their home, and wandered over the open sea in the vicinity, during the accumulation of the deposit from the melting glacier. But this drift-gravel was modified by subsequent action. According to Dr. Abbott’s conclusions, it was deposited in open water, on the bed of a shallow sea. But the position of the large boulders, and the absence of true clay in the mass, suggest that it has undergone great changes since its original deposition as glacial debris; and if this is to be accounted for by subsequent action of water, the unpolished surfaces of the chipped implements are inconsistent with such a theory of their origin. Huge boulders, of the same character as those which abound in the underlying gravel, occur on the surface; and their presence there was referred to by Dr. Abbott as throwing light upon “the occurrence of rude implements identical with those found in the underlying gravels, inasmuch as the same ice-raft that bore the one, with its accompanying sand and gravel, might well gather up also stray relics of this primitive people, and re-deposit them where they are now found.” Accordingly, seeking in fancy to recall this ancient past, he says in his first report: “In times preceding the formation of this gravel bed, now in part facing the Delaware river, there were doubtless localities, once the village sites of pre-glacial man, where these rude stone implements would necessarily be abundant,” and he accordingly asks “May not the ice in its onward march, gathering in bulk every loose fragment of rock and particle of soil, have held them loosely together, and, hundreds of miles from their original site, left them in some one locality such as this, where the river has again brought to light rude implements that characterise an almost primitive people? But, assuming that the various implements fashioned by a strictly pre-glacial people have been totally destroyed by the crushing forces of the glacier, and that thespecimens now produced were not brought from a distance, may they not be referred to an early race that, driven southward by the encroaching ice, dwelt at the foot of the glacier, and during their sojourn here these implements were lost?”[51]
The opinions thus set forth in the first published account of Dr. Abbott’s discoveries, have since been considerably modified, in so far as the geological age of the tool-bearing gravel of the Delaware valley is concerned. In his earlier publications he assumed, as no longer questionable, the existence of inter-glacial, if not pre-glacial, man on the continent. In his more matured views, as set forth in hisPrimitive Industry, he speaks of “having been seriously misled by the various geological reports that purport to give, in proper sequence, the respective ages of the several strata of clay, gravel, boulders, and sand, through which the river has finally worn its channel to the ocean level”;[52]so that he has probably ascribed too great an antiquity to the peculiar class of stone implements brought to light in the river-gravels of New Jersey. Dr. Abbott, accordingly, states as his more matured conclusion, confirmed by the reports of some of the most experienced geological observers, on whose judgment he relies, that the Trenton gravel, in which alone the turtle-back celts have thus far been found, is a post-glacial river deposit, made at a time when the river was larger than at present; and is the most recent of all the formations of the Delaware.[53]Here, however, the term “recent” is employed altogether relatively; and although Dr. Abbott no longer claims in the discovery of the stone implements of the gravel beds near Trenton, New Jersey, evidence of the existence of man on the American continent before the close of the Glacial period, he still refers the Trenton gravel tool-makers to an era which, at the lowest computation, precedes by thousands of years the earliest historical glimpses of Assyria, Egypt, or wherever among the most ancient nations of the Old World the beginnings of history can be traced.
The disclosures of Dr. Abbott claim a special importance among the fruits of archæological investigation on the American continent, not only from the fact that they furnish the first well-authenticated results of systematic research based on thescientific analogies of European archæology, but these later results have included the remains of man himself. When Dr. Usher of Mobile contributed toThe Types of Mankindan account of the discovery of a human skeleton at New Orleans, found under circumstances from which the existence of man in the delta of the Mississippi was deduced well nigh sixty thousand years ago, it was scarcely calculated to win the reader’s acceptance of that assumption when it was added that “the type of the cranium was, as might have been expected, that of the aboriginal American race.” Nor is this the only example of skull of a strictly modern Indian type from which the inference has been drawn that the same unchanging form has prevailed from the era of pre-glacial American man till now. Three human crania found in the Trenton gravel are now in the Peabody Museum at Cambridge (Harvard). All are of the same type, but it differs essentially from that of the Red Indian skull. They are of small size, oval, and present a striking contrast to all other skulls in the Peabody collection. Their value is due to the fact of their discovery in the implement-bearing gravel, in proximity to the characteristic examples of what are assumed to be palæolithic celts. For it is well for us to bear in remembrance that the evidences of the antiquity of man in Europe do not rest on any number of chance disclosures. It is a simple procedure to dig into a Celtic or Saxon barrow, and find there the implements and pottery of its builders lying alongside of their buried remains. But archæologists have learned to recognise the palæolithic implements as not less characteristic of certain post-pliocene deposits than the palæontology of the same geological formation. The river-drift and cave deposits are characterised by traces of contemporaneous life, as shown in the examples of primitive art from which they receive the name of the tool-bearing drift or gravel; just as older geological formations have their characteristic animal and vegetable fossils. The specific character of the tool-bearing gravel of the French Drift having been determined, geologists and archæologists have sought for flint implements in corresponding English strata, as they would seek for the fossils of the same period, and with like success. Palæolithic implements have been recovered in this manner in Suffolk, Bedford, Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, Surrey, and otherdistricts in the south of England. So entirely indeed has the man of the Drift passed beyond the province of the archæologist, that in 1861 Professor Prestwich followed up hisNotes on Further Discoveries of Flint Implements in Beds of Post-Pleiocene Gravel and Clay, with a list of forty-one localities where gravel and clay pits or gravel beds occur, as some of the places in the south of England where he thought flint implements might also by diligent search possibly be found; and subsequent discoveries confirmed his anticipations. It has been by the application of the same principle to the drift and river-valley gravels of the New World that a like success has been achieved. The result of a careful study of the tool-bearing gravel of the Delaware may be thus summarised from recent reports of trustworthy scientific observers. The Trenton gravel is a post-glacial river deposit, made at a time when the river was larger than its present volume. It represents apparently the latest of the surface deposits of the upper Delaware valley;[54]and Dr. Abbott remarks of it: “The melting of a local glacier in the Cattskill Mountains would probably result, at the headwaters of the Delaware, in a continued flood of sufficient volume, if supplemented by the action of floating ice, to form the Trenton gravels.”[55]But these gravels are now recognised as the youngest of the series of ancient implement-bearing deposits. Underneath lies the older Columbia gravel, which has also yielded—though in much fewer numbers,—palæoliths of primitive types. The researches of Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson in the State of Delaware have already been referred to; and from those results, as well as from similar disclosures in Ohio and Indiana, it is no longer doubted that reliable traces have been recovered of American man contemporary with the mammoth and the mastodon; and—like the old cave-dwellers of Cro-Magnon,—a hunter of the reindeer in the valley of the Delaware.
American archæologists have undoubtedly been repeatedly deceived by the misleading traces of comparatively modern remains in deposits of some geological antiquity; as in instances already referred to in the California gravel beds. In these, indeed, ground and polished instruments of stone, including a “plummet” of highly polished syenite, “anexhibition of the lapidary’s skill superior to anything yet furnished by the Stone age of either continent,”[56]are produced from time to time from the same post-pliocene formation where the remains of the elephant and mastodon abound. Dr. Abbott did not overlook the danger to which the archæologist is thus exposed on a continent which, so far as its aborigines are concerned, has scarcely yet emerged from its Stone age. He accordingly remarked in his original report: “The chance occurrence of single specimens of the ordinary forms of Indian relics, at depths somewhat greater than they have usually reached, even in constantly cultivated soils, induced me, several years since, to carefully examine the underlying gravels, to determine if the common surface-found stone implements of Indian origin were ever found therein, except in such manner as might easily be explained, as in the case of deep burials by the uprooting of large trees, whereby an implement lying on the surface, or immediately below it, might fall into the gravel beneath, and subsequently become buried several feet in depth; and lastly, by the action of the water, as where a spring, swollen by spring freshets, cuts for itself a new channel, and carrying away a large body of earth, leaves its larger pebbles, and possibly stone implements of late origin, upon the gravel of the new bed of the stream.” But there is little difficulty in separating chance-buried neolithic or modern implements from the genuine palæolithic celts or hatchets abundantly present in the undisturbed gravel beds, from which they have been taken on their first exposure.
Professor Henry C. Lewis, of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, states that “at the localities on the Pennsylvania Railroad, where extensive exposures of these gravels have been made, the deposit is undoubtedly undisturbed. No implement could have come into this gravel except at a time when the river flowed upon it, and when they might have sunk through the loose and shifting material. All the evidence points to the conclusion that at the time of the Trenton gravel flood, Man, in a rude state, with habits similar to those of the river-drift hunter of Europe, and probably under a climate similar to that of more northern regions, lived upon the banks of the ancient Delaware, and lost his stone implements in the shiftingsands and gravel of the bed of that stream.”[57]To this Dr. Abbott adds: “At just such a locality as Trenton, where the river widens out, traces of man, had he existed during the accumulation of the gravel, would be most likely to occur. This is true not only because there is here the greatest mass of the gravel, and the best opportunities for examining it in section, but the locality would be one most favourable for the existence of man at the time. The higher ground in the immediate vicinity was sufficiently elevated to be free from the encroachments of the ice and water, and the climate, soil, and fauna are all such as to make it possible for man to exist at this time in this locality.”[58]In 1878 the tusk of a mastodon was found under partially stratified gravel at a depth of fourteen feet; and Dr. Abbott states that, within a few yards of this, palæolithic implements have been gathered, one at the same and three at greater depths. Now that an intelligent interest has been awakened in the subject, numerous labourers are enlisted in its elucidation. To this a coherent unity has been given by the archæologists of the Peabody Museum at Harvard, and the curators of the National Museum at Washington. The results of a systematic inquiry by the latter into the localities and numbers of examples of supposed palæolithic works of art already recovered, have disclosed abundant confirmatory evidence. Special attention was invited to the occurrence of surface-finds, as well as to the depth and the geological indications of age in those recovered from excavations or chance exposures under the surface. Of the superficial examples the proof of the occurrence of stone implements of palæolithic types over widely diffused areas, from New England to Texas, is abundant. Much caution is required in the conclusions derived from such implements found exposed, or in superficial deposits, on a continent where weapons and implements of stone are still in frequent use. But after the elimination of all doubtful examples, abundant evidence remains of the presence of man on the American continent in a Palæolithic as well as an early Neolithic age. An interestingrésuméof recent evidence is embodied in the “Results of an Inquiry as to the Existence of Man in NorthAmerica during the Palæolithic Period of the Stone Age,” by Mr. Thomas Wilson of the National Museum at Washington.[59]
It may still be a question whether the Palæolithic age of the New World 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 theSkrælingsreferred 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 stepsmay 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, entitledPrimitive 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 instructiveepitome 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 antiquitiessuggestive 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 sitefor 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 andmetallurgic 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 theSmithsonian 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 geographyof 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 fromthe 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 wasraised 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 theFlint.” 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.
The tribes that lived to the west of the Mississippi appear to have been 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, especiallywith 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 fullyequal 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:—