The monsters have gone, for ever vanished from the earth. Gone are the tree-ferns and towering palms. New birds have come, like those we know, and sing among trees and shrubs of the kind still growing around us. The hairy rhinoceros, the mammoth and the mastodon, thunder over the grassy plain. We see our northern musk ox grazing as far south as Kentucky and Tennessee.
We look for men and find none at all. Not one man, woman or child, in all these two vast continents. Fifteen million square miles, empty and waiting, all ready for man, but waiting for him in vain; perhaps till even the last and smallest of the ice-caps has disappeared.
Far away in the north-west the land comes to an end; but looking over the water we see the coast of Asia only sixty miles off, with a convenient little group of islands half-way over. There is nothing to prevent man from coming over in a canoe in summer, or on the ice in winter.
And there he is, coming!
CHAPTER II
The Indian by Himself
LOOK far enough, and we see him, a wanderer with his little family, starting from the heart of Asia, hunting and fishing as they go, camping for a few years or a century in one place, moving on when their number increases and food is not enough for all, or when some other tribe comes up behind and drives them on,—moving on, and on, and on,—a few families at a time or hundreds together. They belong, as all the American “Indians” do, to one great human stock that spread out east and west along the northern lands of Asia and Europe, where their closest kin to-day are found among the tribes of North Siberia and the Lapps of Russia and Norway. Another branch of the same ancestral stock settled in China, where it made many new inventions and slowly built up a civilization of its own, with high achievements in literature and art. But our “Indians” must have broken away long before that, for they had none of these inventions to bring with them,—not even that of the wheel, either for vehicles, for spinning, or for pottery; though the wheel was in common use among the Chinese and other old-world races thousands of years ago.
Let us watch these first men coming, now, and see what they are like.
They are a shaggy-looking folk, with bear-skins thrown over their shoulders and tied round their waists. Their hair hangs long and black. Their skin is dark. [a]The First Men Here]
They have little baggage. They bring nothing with them except spears, bows and arrows, and furs. For a spear they have fixed a pointed bone or horn or sharp broken stone to the end of a pole. Their arrows are just little spears. The furs are the skins of bear, walrus, seal and caribou.
When we ourselves start on a journey, we know where we are going; we are bound for some particular place with a name. But these first wanderers from Asia don’t know where they are going, and don’t much care. They are not looking for a place to settle down in, land of their own to farm, to build a house on. So long as they find plenty of wild beasts, berries and roots to eat, they are satisfied. They know how to make fire, by twirling a stick between their hands till its lower end, by friction against another piece of dry wood, kindles a spark which they catch on dry bark or moss and blow into flame. They have neither pottery nor baskets, but carry small articles in a big bowl-shaped receptacle of rawhide. Their only animal is the dog, the half-tamed descendant of foxes, wolves or jackals.