The intelligent inquirer cannot fail to be rewarded for any time he may devote to a consideration of the condition and relative status of the aborigines, north of the Gulf of Mexico, not only as studied from existing native tribes, or from those known since the discovery of America in 1492, but in so far as we can determine their earlier condition with the aid of archæological evidence. The student of the history of the North American nations cannot indeed altogether overlook the undoubted fact that Columbus was not the first of European voyagers within the Christian era to enter on the colonisation of the western hemisphere; whatever value he may attach to the legends and traditions of more ancient explorers.
The part played by the Scandinavian stock in European history proves their abundant aptitude to have been the organisers of a Northland of their own in the New World. The Northmen lingered behind, in their first home in the Scandinavian peninsula, while Goth, Longobard, Vandal, Suevi, Frank, Burgundian, and other tribes from the Baltic first wasted and then revolutionised the Roman world. But they were nursing a vigorous youth, which ere long, as pagan Dane, and then as Norman, stamped a new character on mediæval Europe. Their presence in the New World rests on indubitable evidence; but the very definiteness of its character in their inhospitable northern retreat helps to destroy all faith in any mere conjectural fancies relative to their settlement on points along the Atlantic seaboard which they are supposed to have visited.
Runic inscriptions on the Canadian and New England seaboard would, if genuine, give an entirely novel aspect to our study of Pre-Columbian American history, with all its possibilities of older intercourse with the eastern hemisphere. But it is the same whether we seek for traces of colonisation in the tenth or the fifteenth century, in so far as all native history is concerned. They equally little suffice to furnish evidence of relationship, in blood, language, arts or customs, between any people of the eastern hemisphere and the native American races. We are indeed invited from time to time to review indications suggestive of an Asiatic or other old-world source for the American aborigines; and in nearly every system of ethnical classification they are, with good reason, ranked as Mongolidæ; but if their pedigree is derived from an Asiatic stock, the evidence has yet to be marshalled which shall place on any well-established basis the proofs of direct ethnical affinity between them and races of the eastern hemisphere. The ethnological problem is, here as elsewhere, beset by many obscuring elements. Language, at best, yields only remote analogies, and thus far American archæology, though studied with unflagging zeal, has been able to render very partial aid.
It cannot admit of question that the compass of American archæology,—including that of the semi-civilised and lettered races of Central and Southern America,—is greatly circumscribed in comparison with that of Europe. But the simplicity which results from this has some compensating elements in its direct adaptation to the study of man, as he appears on the continent unaffected by the artificialities of a forced civilisation, and with so little that can lend countenance to any theory of degeneracy from a higher condition of life. In the modern alliance between archæology and geology, and the novel views which have resulted as to the antiquity of man, the characteristic disclosures of primitive art, alike among ancient and modern races, have given a significance to familiar phases of savage life undreamt of till very recently. The student who has by such means formed a definite conception of primeval art, and realised some idea of the condition and acquirements of the savage of Europe’s Post-Pliocene era, turns with renewed interest to living races seemingly perpetuating in arts and habits of our own day what gave character to the social life of the prehistoric dawn. This phase of primitive art can still be studied on more than one continent, and in many an island of the Pacific and the Indian ocean; but nowhere is the apparent reproduction of such initial phases of the history of our race presented in so comprehensive an aspect as on the American continent. There man is to be found in no degree superior in arts or habits to the Australian savage; while evidence of ingenious skill and of considerable artistic taste occur among nomads exposed to the extremest privations of an Arctic climate; and with no more knowledge of metallurgy than is implied in occasionally turning to account the malleable native copper, by hammering it into the desired shape; or, in their intercourse with Arctic voyagers and Hudson’s Bay trappers, acquiring by barter some few implements and weapons of European manufacture. The arts of the patient Eskimo, exercised under the stimulus of their constant struggle for existence amid all the hardships of a polar climate, have, indeed, not only suggested comparisons between them and the artistic cave-dwellers of Central Europe in its prehistoric dawn; but have been assumed to prove an ethnical affinity, and direct descent, altogether startling when we fully realise the remote antiquity thereby assigned to those Arctic nomads, and the unchanging condition ascribed to them through all the intervening ages of geographical and social revolution.
But whatever may be the value ultimately assigned to the Eskimo pedigree, a like phenomenon of unprogressive humanity, perpetuating through countless generations the same rudimentary arts, everywhere presents itself, and seems to me to constitute the really remarkable feature in North American ethnology and archæology. We find, not only in Canada but throughout the whole region northward from the Gulf of Mexico, diversified illustrations of savage life; but nearly all of them unaffected by traces of contact with earlier civilisation. From the northern frontiers of Canada the explorer may travel through widely diversified regions till he reach the cañons of Mexico and the ruined cities of Central America; and all that he finds of race and art, of language or native tradition, is in contrast to the diversities of the European record of manifold successions of races and of arts. There within the Arctic circle the Eskimo constructs his lodge of snow, and successfully maintains the battle for life under conditions which determine to a large extent the character of his ingenious arts and manufacture. Immediately to the south are found the nomad tribes of forest and prairie, with their téepees of buffalo-skin, or their birch-bark wigwams and canoes: wandering hunter tribes of the great North-West; type of the red Indian of the whole northern continent. The Ohio and Mississippi valleys abound with earthworks and other remains of the vanished race of the Mound-Builders: of old the dwellers there in fortified towns, agriculturalists, ingenious potters, devoted to the use of tobacco, expending laborious art on their sculptured pipes, and with some exceptionally curious skill in practical geometry; yet, they too, ignorant of almost the very rudiments of metallurgy, and only in the first stage of the organised life of a settled community. The modifying influences of circumstances must be recognised in the migratory or settled habits of different tribes. The Eskimo are of necessity hunters and fishers, yet they are not, strictly speaking, nomads. In summer they live in tents, constantly moving from place to place, as the exigencies of the reindeer-hunting, seal-hunting, or fishing impel them. But they generally winter in the same place for successive generations, and manifest as strong an attachment to their native home as the dwellers in more favoured lands. Their dwelling-houses accommodate from three or four to ten families; and the same tendency to gather in communities under one roof is worthy of notice wherever other wandering tribes settle even temporarily. A drawing, made by me in 1866, of a birch-bark dwelling which stood among a group of ordinary wigwams on the banks of the Kaministiquia, shows a lodge of sufficiently large dimensions to accommodate several families of a band of Chippewas, who had come from the far West to trade their furs with the Hudson’s Bay factor there. The Haidahs, the Chinooks, the Nootkas, the Columbian and other Indian tribes to the west of the Rocky Mountains, all use temporary tents or huts in their frequent summer wanderings; but their permanent dwellings are huge structures sufficient to accommodate many families, and sometimes the whole tribe. They are constructed of logs or split planks, and in some cases, as among the Haidahs of Queen Charlotte Islands, they are elaborately decorated with carving and painting.
The gregarious habits thus manifested by many wandering tribes, whenever circumstances admit of their settling down in a permanent home, may be due mainly to the economy of labour which experience has taught them in the construction of one common dwelling, instead of the multiplication of single huts or lodges. But far to the southward are the ancient pueblos, the casas grandes, the cliff dwellings, of a race not yet extinct: timid, unaggressive, living wholly on the defensive, gathered in large communities like ants or bees; industrious, frugal, and manifesting ingenious skill in their pottery and other useful arts; but, they too, in no greatly advanced stage. Still farther to the south we come at length to the seats of an undoubted native American civilisation. The comparative isolation of Central America, and the character of its climate and productions, all favoured a more settled life; with, as genuine results, its architecture, sculpture, metallurgy, hieroglyphics, writing, and all else that gives so novel a character to the memorials of the Central American nations. But great as is their contrast with the wild tribes of the continent, the highest phases of native civilisation will not compare with the arts of Egypt, in centuries before Cadmus taught letters to the rude shepherds of Attica, or the wolf still suckled her cubs on the Palatine hill.
If this is a correct reading of American archæology, its bearings are significant in reference to the whole history of American man. In Europe the student of primitive antiquity is habitually required to discriminate between products of ingenious skill belonging to periods and races widely separated alike by time and by essentially diverse stages of progress in art. For not only do its Palæolithic and Neolithic periods long precede the oldest written chronicles; but even its Aryan colonisation lies beyond any record of historic beginnings. The civilisation which had already grown up around the Mediterranean Sea while the classic nations were in their infancy, extended its influences not only to what was strictly regarded as transalpine Europe, but beyond the English Channel and the Baltic, centuries before the Rhine and Danube formed the boundary of the Roman world. Voltaire, when treating of the morals and spirit of nations, says: “It is not in the nature of man to desire that which he does not know.” But it is certainly in his nature, at any rate, to desire much that he does not possess; and the cravings of the rudest outlying tribes of ancient Europe must have been stimulated by many desires of which those of the New World were unconscious till the advent of Europeans in the fifteenth century brought them into contact with a long-matured civilisation.
The archæology of the American continent is, in this respect, at least, simple. Its student is nowhere exposed to misleading or obscuring elements such as baffle the European explorer from the intermingling of relics of widely diverse eras, or even such a succession of arts of the most dissimilar character as Dr. Schliemann found on the site of the classic Ilium. The history of America cannot repeat that of Europe. Its great river-valleys and vast prairies present a totally different condition of things from that in which the distinctive arts, languages, and nationalities of Europe have been matured. The physical geography of the latter with its great central Alpine chain, its highlands, its dividing seas, its peninsulas, and islands, has necessarily fostered isolation; and so has tended to develop the peculiarities of national character, as well as to protect incipient civilisation and immature arts from the constant erasures of barbarism. The steppes of Asia in older centuries proved the nurseries of hordes of rude warriors, powerful only for spoliation. The evidence of the isolation of the nations of Europe in early centuries is unmistakable. Scarcely any feature in the history of the ancient world is more strange to us now than the absence of all direct intercourse between countries separated only by the Alps, or even by the Danube or the Rhine. “The geography of Greek experience, as exhibited by Homer, is limited, speaking generally, to the Ægean and its coasts, with the Propontis as its limit in the north-east; with Crete for a southern boundary; and with the addition of the western coast of the peninsula and its islands as far northwards as the Leucadian rock. The key to the great contrast between the outer geography and the facts of nature lies in the belief of Homer that a great sea occupied the space where we know the heart of the European continent to lie.”[[40]] To the early Romans the Celtic nations were known only as warlike nomads whose incursions from beyond the Alpine frontier of their little world were perpetuated in the half-legendary tales of their own national childhood. To the Greek even of the days of Herodotus no more was known of the Gauls or Germans than the rumours brought by seamen and traders whose farthest voyage was to the mouth of the Rhone.
It is, indeed, difficult for us now, amid the intimate relations of the modern world, and the interchange of products of the remotest east and west, to realise a condition of things when the region beyond the Alps was a mystery to the Greek historian, and the very existence of the river Rhine was questioned; or when, four centuries later, the nations around the Baltic, which were before long to supplant the masters of the Roman world, were so entirely unknown to them that, as Dr. Arnold remarks, in one of his letters: “The Roman colonies along the Rhine and the Danube looked out on the country beyond those rivers as we look up at the stars, and actually see with our own eyes a world of which we know nothing.” Yet such ignorance was not incompatible with indirect intercourse; and was so far from excluding the barbarians beyond the Alps or the Baltic from all the fruits of the civilisation which grew up around the Mediterranean Sea, that the elements of the oldest runic epigraphy of the Goths and Scandinavians are traced to that source; and the stamp of Hellenic influence is apparent in the later runic writing. Moreover the elucidation of European archæology has owed its chief impediment to the difficulty of discriminating between arts of diverse eras and races of northern Europe, intermingled with those of its Neolithic and Bronze periods; or of separating them from the true products of Celtic and classic workmanship.
It is altogether different with American archæology. Were there any traces there of Celtic, Roman, or mediæval European art, the whole tendency of the American mind would be to give even an exaggerated value to their influence. Superficial students of the ruins of Mexico and Central America have misinterpreted characteristics pertaining to what may not inaptly be designated instincts common to the human mind in its first efforts at visible expression of its ideas; and have recognised in them fancied analogies with ancient Egyptian art, or with the mythology and astronomical science of the East. Had, indeed, the more advanced nations of the New World borrowed the arts of Egypt, India, or Greece, the great river highways and the vast unbroken levels of the northern continent presented abundant facilities for their diffusion, with no greater aid than the birch-bark canoe of the northern savage. The copper of Lake Superior was familiar to nations on the banks of the Mississippi, the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, and the Delaware. Nor was the influence of southern civilisation wholly inoperative. Reflex traces of the prolific fancy of the Peruvian potter may be detected in the rude ware of the mounds of Georgia and Tennessee; and the conventional art of Yucatan reappears in the ornamentation of the lodges of the Haidahs of Queen Charlotte’s Islands, and in the wood and ivory carvings of the Tawatin and other tribes of British Columbia. Already, moreover, the elaborate native devices which give such distinctive character to the ivory and claystone carvings of the Chimpseyan and Clalam Indians, have been largely superseded by reproductions of European ornamentation, or literal representations of houses, shipping, horses, fire-arms, and other objects brought under the notice of the native artist in his intercourse with white men. We are justified, therefore, in assuming that no long-matured civilisation could have existed in any part of the American continent without leaving, not only abundant evidence of its presence within its own area, but also many traces of its influence far beyond. Yet it cannot be said of the vanished races of the North American continent that they died and made no sign. Their memorials are abundant, and some of their earthworks and burial mounds are on a gigantic scale. But they perpetuate no evidence of a native civilisation of elder times bearing the slightest analogy to that of Europe through all its historic centuries. The western hemisphere stands a world apart, with languages and customs essentially its own; and with man and his arts embraced within greatly narrower limits of development than in any other quarter of the globe, if we except Australia. The evolutionist may, indeed, be tempted by the absence not only of the anthropoid apes, but by all but the lowest families of the Primates, to regard man as a recent intruder on the American continent. But in this, as in the archæologist’s deductions, the term “recent” is a relative one. To whatever source American man may be referred, his relations to the old-world races are sufficiently remote to preclude any theory of geographical distribution within the historic period.