The savage Indians ranged to the west of Hudson Bay, and southward between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, to the northern part of Mexico. They lived by catching fish or game. They knew little or nothing of tilling the soil. They did not dwell in permanent villages, but roamed from place to place like Bedouin Arabs.
The barbarous Indians inhabited the country east of the Rocky Mountains. They did not depend wholly upon hunting or fishing, but knew how to upturn the soil slightly with rude tools, and raise squashes, beans, tomatoes, and, most important of all, Indian corn. They lived in villages, and made houses that would last several years. They had dogs of an inferior breed, but no other domestic animals. Some tribes were able to weave coarse cloth and make weapons of polished stones. They had strange social customs and singular religious beliefs. Fighting was their principal occupation.
The half-civilized Indians once lived in New Mexico and the adjoining region. They have had almost nothing to do with the history of the United States. They are the Pueblo Indians, so called from the pueblos or strongholds, dwellings which they built of stones or of sun-dried brick. Some of these strongholds, story above story, would accommodate at least three thousand inhabitants! They were built oftentimes in situations almost inaccessible, like eagles' nests on cliffs, apparently that they might be defended more easily against the attack of an enemy.
6. The Northmen and their Discoveries.—The real contact between the eastern and western halves of the world practically began in 1492, the year of the first great voyage of Columbus. Occasional visitors may have sailed before that date directly across the "Sea of Darkness" from the Old World to the New. The subject is shrouded for the most part in the mists of vague stories and obscure traditions.
It seems quite certain, however, that in the year 986 a daring Scandinavian navigator, Eric the Red, founded on the southwestern coast of Greenland a colony that lasted four or five hundred years. In the same year, as the Iceland Sagas (heroic legends) tell us, another Norse sailor, voyaging from Iceland to Greenland, was driven by storms far out towards the southwest, and was perhaps the first white man to behold the American coast.
Norse Ruins in Greenland.
Many interesting ruins of stone-built houses and of a church are still to be seen on that desolate Greenland shore. In those ages the Northmen, or Norsemen, as the people of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were called, were the most skillful sailors in the world. Eric the Red had several sons, bold sailors like their father. The oldest of these (whose statue stands on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston), Leif the Lucky, with thirty-five hardy men, sailed south from Greenland in the year 1000, to explore these lands that had been discovered fourteen years before. He landed at several points along the coast. In a place which he called "Vinland the Good" (land of vines), he found an abundance of luscious wild grapes. Just where this sturdy Norse sailor feasted on the grapes is, of course, uncertain, but good authorities are inclined to think it may have been not far from Plymouth, on the coast of Massachusetts Bay. He returned home in the spring. Two years later Leif's brother, Thorwald, came on a voyage of discovery, but was killed by the natives in the summer of 1004.
In the spring of the year 1007 an Icelandic chief, accompanied by his wife and a crew of one hundred and sixty men, in three vessels, came to this Vinland. He remained here three years, and had many dealings with the Indians.
