In the summer of 1854, when civilisation had made very slight inroads on the western wilderness, I visited a group of Chippewa lodges on the south-west shore of Lake Superior, where they still maintained many of their genuine habits. Their aged chief, Buffalo, was a fine specimen of the uncorrupted savage, dressed in native attire, and wearing the collar of grizzly bear’s claws as proof of his triumph over the fiercest object of the chase. Their weapons were partly of iron, derived from the traders. But they had also their stone-tipped arrows; and one Indian was an object of interest to a group of Indian boys as he busied himself in fashioning a water-worn pebble into an edged tool. He held an oval pebble between the finger and thumb, and used it with quick strokes as a hammer. But he was only engaged on the first rough process, and I did not see the completion of his work. No doubt, the leisure of all was turned more or less to account in supplying themselves with their ordinary weapons and missiles. But Catlin’s free intercourse with the wild western tribes familiarised him with the regular sources of general supply. “The best flakes,” he said, “outside of the homemade, were a subject of commerce, and came from certain localities where the chert of the best quality was quarried in sheets or blocks, as it occurs in almost continuous seams in the intercalated limestones of the coal measures. These seams are mostly cracked or broken into blocks that show the nature of the cross fracture, which is taken advantage of by the operators, who seemed to have reduced the art of flaking to almost an absolute science, with division of labour; one set of men being expert in quarrying and selecting the stone, others in preparing the blocks for the flakers.”[[38]] But suitable and specially prized material were sometimes sought on different sites, and disseminated from them by the primitive trader. Along eastern Labrador and in Newfoundland arrow heads are mostly fashioned out of a peculiar light-gray translucent quartzite. Dr. Bell informs me that near Chimo, south of Ungava Bay, is a spot resorted to by the Indians from time immemorial for this favourite material; and arrows made of it are not uncommon even in Nova Scotia. Among the tribes remote from the sea coast, where no exposed rock furnished available material for the manufacture of their stone implements, the chief source of supply was the larger pebbles of the river beds. From these the most suitable stones were carefully selected, and often carried great distances. Those most easily worked into flakes for small arrow heads are chalcedony, jasper, agate, and quartz; and the finer specimens of such weapons are now greatly prized by collectors. The coast tribes both of the Atlantic and the Pacific found similar sources of supply of the stones best suited for their implements in the rolled gravel of the beach, and this appears to have been the most frequent resort of the Micmacs and other tribes of the Canadian Maritime Provinces.
I have already referred to information derived from Dr. G. M. Dawson and Dr. Robert Bell, to both of whom I have been indebted for interesting results of their own personal observations as members of the Canadian Geological Survey. Collectors are familiar with the elongated flat stones, with two or more holes bored through them, variously styled gorgets, implements for fashioning sinew into cord, etc. They are made of a grayish-green clay slate, with dark streaks; and the same material is used in the manufacture of personal ornaments, ceremonial objects, and occasionally for smooth spear heads and knives. Relics fashioned of this peculiar clay slate are found throughout Ontario, from Lakes Huron and Erie to the Ottawa valley. A somewhat similar stone occurs in situ at various points, but Dr. Bell believes he has satisfactorily identified the ancient quarry at the outlet of Lake Temagamic, nearly 100 miles north of Lake Nipissing. No clay slate procured from any other locality corresponds so exactly to the favourite material. The site is accessible by more than one canoe route; and quantities of the rock from different beds lie broken up in blocks of a size ready for transportation. Dr. Bell found on the shore of Lake Temissaming a large unfinished spear head, chipped out of this clay slate, and ready for grinding. When the region is settled and the land cleared, sites will probably be discovered where the aboriginal exporters reduced the rough blocks to forms convenient for transport.
Dr. Bell has described to me specimens of narrow and somewhat long spear points, of local manufacture, made from smoky chert found on or near the Athabaska, in Mackenzie river basin; and an arrow head of brown flint from the mouth of Churchill river, Hudson Bay. The flint implements of Rainy river and Lake of the Woods are of brownish flint and chert, such as are found in the drift all over the region to the south-westward of Hudson Bay; and are mostly derived from the Devonian rocks. Worn pebbles of this kind occur in the drift as far south as Lake Superior. A branch of Kinogami river is called by the Indians Flint river (Pewona sipi) from the abundance of the favourite material they find in the river gravel and shingle. The finest flint implements of Canada are those of the north shore of Lake Huron, made from material corresponding to a very fine-grained quartzite, approximating to chalcedony, found among the Huronian rocks of that region.
Along the western coast of the Province of Nova Scotia a high ridge of trap rock extends, with slight interruption, from Briar Island to Cape Blomidon. Here the strong tidal rush of the sea undermines the cliff, and the winter frosts split it up, so that every year the shore is strewn with broken fragments from the cliff, exposing a variety of crystalline minerals, such as jasper, agate, etc. The beach gravel is also interspersed with numerous rounded pebbles derived originally from the same source. I am indebted to Mr. George Patterson, of New Glasgow, N.S., for some interesting notes on this subject. The pebbles of this beach seem to have been one of the chief sources of supply for the Indian implement-makers of Nova Scotia. Few localities have hitherto been noticed in the Maritime Provinces marked by any such large accumulation of chips as would suggest the probability of manufacture for the purpose of trade; though chips and finished implements occasionally occur together on the sites of Indian villages or encampments, suggestive of individual industry and home manufacture. But Mr. Patterson informs me that one place at Bauchman’s Beach, in the county of Lunenburg, furnishes abundant traces of an old native workshop. There, until recently, could be gathered agate, jasper, and other varieties of the fine-grained crystalline minerals from the trap, sometimes in nodules, rounded and worn, as they occur at the base of the ocean-washed cliffs. At times they showed partial traces of working; but more frequently they were split and broken, bearing the unmistakable marks of the hammer. Along with those were cores and large quantities of flakes, or chips, with arrow heads, more or less perfectly formed. At one time they might have been gathered in large quantities; but recent inroads of the sea have swept away much of the old beach, and strewed the products of the Indian stone-workers where they may be stored for the wonder of men of other centuries. It is curious, indeed, to reflect on the memorials of ages so diverse from those with which the palæontologist deals, that are now accumulating in the submarine strata in process of formation, for the instruction of coming generations, should our earth last so long. The world will, doubtless, have grown wiser before that epoch is reached. But it will require some discrimination, even in so enlightened an age, to read aright the significance of this mingling of relics of rudest barbarism with all the products of modern civilisation that are being strewn along the great ocean highways between the Old and the New World.
A curious illustration of the possible confusion of evidence is shown by the discovery in 1884 of a large stone lance head of the Eskimo type, deeply imbedded in the tissues of a whale taken at the whaling station on Ballast Point, near the harbour of San Diego, California.[[39]] In the Museum of the University of Edinburgh is the skeleton of a whale, stranded in the ancient estuary of the Forth in a prehistoric age, when the ocean tides reached the site which had been elevated into dry land long ages before the Roman invaders of Caledonia made their way over it. Alongside of the buried whale lay a rude deerhorn implement of the old Caledonian whaler; and had the San Diego whale sunk in deep waters off the Pacific coast, it would have perpetuated a similar memorial of rudest savage life, in close proximity, doubtless, to evidences of modern civilisation. Such, though in less striking form, is the process of intermingling the arts of the American Stone age with products of modern skill and refinement, that is now in progress off the Lunenburg coast of Nova Scotia. The inroads of the sea have not, however, even now effaced all traces of the old arrow-makers of Bauchman’s Beach. Specimens of their handiwork may still be gathered along the shore. To this locality it is obvious that the inland tribes resorted from remote Indian villages for some of their most indispensable supplies. Implements of the same materials also occur at sites on the northern coast; but the larger number found there are made of quartzite, felsite, or of hard, slaty stone, such as occurs in the metamorphic rocks of the mountain ranges in the interior of the Province.
From what has thus been set forth, some general inferences of a comprehensive character are suggested. It is scarcely open to doubt that at a very early stage in the development of primitive mechanical art, the exceptional aptitude of skilled workmen was recognised and brought into use for the general benefit. Co-operation and some division of labour in the industrial arts, necessary to meet the universal demand for tools and weapons, appear also to have been recognised from a very remote period in the social life of the race. There were the quarriers for the flint, the obsidian, the shale, the pipestones, the favourite minerals, and the close-grained igneous rocks, adapted for the variety of implements in general use. There were also the traders by whom the raw material was transported to regions where it could only be procured by barter; as appears to be demonstrated by the repeated discovery, not only of flint and stone implements, alike in stray examples, and in well-furnished caches; but also of work-places, remote from any flint-producing formation, strewn with the chips, flakes, and imperfect or unfinished implements of the tool-makers. It thus becomes obvious that the men of the earliest Stone age transported suitable material for their simple arts from many remote localities, and purchased the services of the skilled workman with the produce of the chase, or whatever other equivalent they could offer in exchange. The further archæological search is extended, the evidence of social co-operation and systematised industry among the men of the Palæolithic era, as well as among those of later periods prior to the dawn of metallurgic skill, becomes more apparent. Nor is it less interesting to note that there was no more equality among the men of those primitive ages, than in later civilised stages of social progress. Diversities in capacity and consequent moral force asserted themselves in the skilled handicraftsmen of the Palæolithic dawn, much as they do in the most artificial states of modern society. As a natural concomitant to this, and an invaluable element of co-operation, the prized flint flakes appear to have furnished a primitive medium of exchange, more generally available as a currency of recognised value than any other substitute for coined money. The principles on which the wealth of nations and the whole social fabric of human society depend, were thus already in operation ages before the merchants of Tyre, or the traders of Massala, had learned to turn to account the mineral resources of the Cassiterides; or that vaguer and still more remote era before the ancient Atlantis had vanished from the ken of the civilised dwellers around the Mediterranean Sea.
| [10] | Ancient Stone Implements, p. 14. |
| [11] | Hoare’s South Wilts, p. 195. |
| [12] | Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, viii. 137. |