These first comers have “discovered America,” without knowing it. They have no idea that they are the first to set foot in a “new world.” It looks just like the “old-world” to them. They have been living on the sea-shore, over there at the tip of Asia. Their number has increased, and other tribes have come up behind them, so they have simply crossed over to the land they have often seen at a distance, where they can have the hunting all to themselves. They just go on living as they have been used to living.
Some of them wander along the north coast, where they still wander,—we call them Eskimo. [a]Peopling a Continent]
Most of the newcomers, however, turn to the right, and follow the coast to the south. One family follows another, family after family, band after band,—not close on each other’s heels, or many at a time, but in driblets, for hundreds or thousands of years. When the coast of Alaska is dotted with encampments, the next comers pass on and pitch their skin tents on the empty shores of British Columbia. There they are astonished to find a mighty forest. They make rough shelters of bark and branches, instead of skin tents. After a time some clever fellow says,—“This is a good place to live; we don’t need to wander about all the time, for the salmon and deer are plenty. Let us cut down trees and build houses.” So they do, though they have never seen such a thing as a house before. They learn to be carpenters, and finally wood carvers. They have no teachers, they just learn by trying. With axes of big chipped stone they cut down trees, and build houses with thick posts which they carve and color in rough imitation of men. They make boats, each of one tree, hollowed out like Robinson Crusoe’s.
More little bands follow, and settle all along the shore of the Continent. Some of them strike inland, perhaps chased off the coast by others, perhaps finding the food supply too poor where they have landed. One party comes at last to what we now call Mexico.
One day, while the men are off hunting, the children find here and there a plant of wild maize, and bite the juicy grains off the cob. The men come back at night, empty-handed; game is getting scarce. They are glad to eat the corn their children have found. It is good. Later on, when the corn is ripe and hard to chew, some one has a bright idea. I think it must have been a [a]First Baker, First Gardener] woman, a mother with little children whose teeth cannot chew the hard grains. She spreads a handful of the grains on a flat stone, breaks them up with a stone hammer, and mixes the meal with water, so the little ones have mush to eat. Some of the mush she roasts in lumps. She is the first baker in the new world. Next year another woman, or perhaps it is the same, takes some of the big grains left over, makes a scratch in the earth, and drops them in, so that she can have food close at hand without wandering about to pick the wild ears. She is the first gardener.
Year after year more corn is planted, till there are fields of it. The men still hunt, and leave the farming to their wives, but they are glad to have so much food without hunting. The band does not need to move every time the game is scarce. The people settle down and make a permanent home for themselves. More bands come, and quarrel and fight as savages do,—we all have a good deal of the savage in us even yet,—but the foolishness of it strikes them presently, so a number of bands join to make a tribe. One tribe fights another, but at last several tribes join to make a nation. As food is plentiful, the men have time to think and plan and invent. They mould clay into pottery, and bake it. They twist fibres and spin cotton, though they never happen to think of a spinning wheel. They make looms, and learn weaving. They have no iron, but with stone and copper tools they cut rock and build pyramids, and temples decorated with sculpture. They become expert goldsmiths and silversmiths. They invent a kind of writing, something like that of ancient Egypt.
Passing Mexico by, other bands thread their way along the isthmus of Panama, or skirt the coast till they [a]Wanderings of the Tribes] come to South America, and there they settle and grow into a nation, high up among the mountains of Peru. Here also the people build cities, and roads, and aqueducts, and temples adorned with sheets of dazzling gold. They farm, and spin, and weave. They tame the wild llama, and make it their beast of burden; its cousin, the wild alpaca, too, they raise in flocks for its wool.
Wild tribes of men continue streaming down from the north. Some of them conquer the Mexicans, and settle down among them and learn their arts. Some hover on the outskirts of the new civilization for a while, and learn how to spin and weave and raise corn, but then wander on to the east along the Gulf of Mexico, or north up the Mississippi. A group of these tribes, finding their way at last into the St. Lawrence Valley, settle down there and join forces in the great Iroquois alliance of the “Six Nations.” Their women grow corn, melons, beans and pumpkins, but the favorite occupation of the men is fighting, as the first white Canadians will discover to their cost in the seventeenth century. Between fights, they play a magnificent game of their own invention, which we call lacrosse. The goals are the two villages in which the teams live.
Lacrosse—Before the White Man Played It