For centuries before Columbus discovered San Salvador, the red men (or Indians as they are usually called) roamed over all the great continent of North America, and, having no knowledge of iron as a metal, they were forced to make of stone or bone all their weapons, hunting and household implements. From this fact they are called, when referring to those early times, a stone-age people, and so, of course, the boys and girls of that period were stone-age children.
But it is not to be supposed that because the children of savages they were altogether unlike the youngsters of to-day. In one respect, at least, they were quite the same—they were very fond of play.
Their play, however, was not like the games of to-day. We might, perhaps, call the principal game of the boys "Playing Man," for the little stone implements that were their toys were only miniatures of the great stone axes and long spear-points of their fathers.
In one particular these old-time children were really in advance of the youngsters of to-day; they not only did, in play, what their parents did in earnest, but they realized, in part, the results of their playful labor. A good old Moravian missionary who labored hard to convert these Indians to Christianity, says: "Little boys are frequently seen wading in shallow brooks, shooting small fishes with their bows and arrows." Going-a-fishing, then, as now, was good fun; but to shoot fishes with a bow and arrow is not an easy thing to do, and this is one way these stone-age children played, and played to better advantage than most of my young-readers can. Among the stone-age children's toys that I gathered that afternoon was a very pretty stone hatchet, very carefully shaped, and still quite sharp. It has been worked out from a porphyry pebble, and in every way, except size, is the same as hundreds that are still to be found lying about the fields.
No red man would ever deign to use such an insignificant looking axe, and so we must suppose it to have been a toy hatchet for some little fellow that chopped away at saplings, or, perhaps knocked over some poor squirrel or rabbit; for our good old Moravian friend, the missionary, also tells us that "the boys learn to climb trees when very young, both to catch birds and to exercise their sight, which by this method is rendered so quick that in hunting they see objects at an amazing distance." Their play, then, became an excellent schooling for them; and if they did nothing but play it was not a loss of time.
Several little arrow-points I also found in the valley. The axe was not far away, and both it and they may have belonged to the same bold and active young hunter. All of these arrow-points are very neatly made.
The same missionary tells us that these young red men of the forest "exercise themselves very early with bows and arrows, and in shooting at a mark. As they grow up they acquire a remarkable dexterity in shooting birds, squirrels, and small game."
Every boy remembers his first pen-knife, and, whether it had one or three blades, was proud enough of it; but how different the fortune of the stone-age children, in this matter of a pocket-knife, which was doubtless a piece of flint chipped into a shape that might be used as a knife.
I have found scores of such knives in the fields that extend along the little valley, and a few came to light in my search that afternoon in the brook-side sands and gravel. So, if this chipped flint is a knife, then, as in modern times, the children were whittlers.
Of course, our boys nowadays would be puzzled to cut a willow whistle or mend the baby's go-cart with such a knife as this; but still, it will not do to despise stone cutlery. There is a big canoe in one of the Government buildings that is sixty feet long. That boat was made in quite recent times, and only stone knives and hatchets were used in the process.