Chapter 2

The philosophers and ecclesiastics of the sixteenth century, who discussed the subject of the origin of the American Tribes, have left scarcely a portion of the globe untouched by their researches, or from which, they have not attempted, by some analogies, to deduce them. Generalization, as soon as Columbus returned from his first voyage, took an unlimited latitude; and theories were advanced with a degree of confidence, which was, in some measure, proportioned to the remoteness of the position of the writers, from both the stock of people found, and those of nations with whom they were sought to be compared. Scholars ransacked the archives of European archæology. They found some allusions in the Greek drama, to ancient discoveries beyond the pillars of Hercules. They speculated on the story of Atlantis, and the Fortunate Islands. They drew parallels between the hunter and corn planting tribes of America, and the lost ten tribes of Israel, who were graziers. They located ancient Ophir, where of all places it had certainly never been, namely, in America. They were satisfied with general resemblances in manners and customs, which mark uncivilized nations, in distant parts of the world, who assimilate, in some traits, from mere parity of circumstances, but between whom there are in reality, no direct affinities of blood and lineage. And they left the question, to all practical and satisfactory ends, precisely where they found it. It was still to be answered, WHO ARE THE INDIANS?

The present age is, in many respects, better prepared to undertake the examination of the question. The time which has passed away since Columbus dropped anchor at the island of Guanahani, has rendered distant nations on the globe far better acquainted with each other. This has, indeed, been the most remarkable period for its influence on all the true elements of civilization, which the world has ever known. The advance of general knowledge, the comity of national intercourse, and the policy and friendship of nations, has certainly never before reached its present state. China is no longer a sealed nation. British arms have carried the influence of arts and letters, through Hindostan, Abyssinia, Persia, and the valley of the Euphrates, have been visited and explored. The deserts of the Holy Land have been trod by learned men of Europe and America. The mouth of the Niger and the sources of the Nile, are revealed. Even Arabia, the land where Abraham and his descendants once trod, has sent an embassy of peace, to a government 18,000 miles distant, which has not had a national existence over seventy years. Not only the rulers of Arabia and America have been thus brought into the bonds of intercourse; but the age has exchanged the arts, the science and the philosophy of the utmost parts of the earth. Scientific discovery has reached its highest acme. The sites of many ancient and long unknown, though not forgotten cities, are recovered. Monuments and ruins have been disinterred in the ancient seats of human power, in the oriental world, and inscriptions deciphered, which give vitality to ancient history. Ethnology has arisen to hold up the light of her resplendent lamp, amid these ruins, to guide the footsteps of letters, science and piety.

To these evidences of the inquisitive energy of the age, it has added new and important means of study and investigation. The principles of interpretation which originated in the study of Egyptian monuments, have guided inquiries in other quarters of the globe, and the discovery of a key to the hieroglyphics of the Nile has thus reflected light on the progress of monumental researches throughout the world. The science of philology, so important in considering the affinities of nations, has been almost wholly created within fifty years. Franklin lived and died without a knowledge of it. Astronomy has been employed to some extent to detect the chronology of architectural ruins, and even the antique history of America has been illustrated by the record of an eclipse among the ancient Mexican picture-writings.[7] Geology, in her labors to determine the character of the exhumed bones and shells of extinct classes of the animal creation of former eras, has not failed to impart the most important knowledge of the physical history of the planet we occupy. Electricity and magnetism have also enlarged their boundaries. Chemistry is in the process of fulfilling the highest expectations. All these sources of knowledge have been poured into the lap of geography and ethnography, and given us a far better and truer knowledge of the character, resources, and position of the nations of the world. And after making every allowance for the literary complacency of the age, we are yet unable to point to a prior epoch of the world when man had so fully recovered his position in the scale of civilization, and in the knowledge of the various phenomena in science, letters and arts, on which his true advance depends.

[7] Vide Gallatin's paper--Trans. Am. Eth. Society, vol. I.

With these evidences of intellectual progress and the increased power of modern inquiry, there are redoubled incentives to investigate the obscure period of American history. It has been said, prematurely, in the arrogance of European criticism, that America has "no fallen columns" to examine--"no inscriptions to decypher." We answer the assertion by pointing to the enigmatical walls of Palenque and Chi Chen Itza, and to the polished ruins of Cuzco, and the valley of Anahuac. Researches in this field of observation have just commenced. Bigotry and lust of conquest, led the early Spanish adventurers to sweep as with the besom of destruction every object and monument of art which stood in their way. Cortez razed the walls of ancient Mexico to the ground as he entered it, and his zealous followers committed to the flames whatever was light and combustible. This spirit marked the entire conquest which was carried on under the triple mania of religious bigotry, the lust of gold, and the unchastened spirit of national robbery. We have to glean for facts among that which is left. It is still an interesting field, but it has been hedged up since the conquest, by the jealous spirit and narrow policy of by far the most gloomy and non-progressive nation of Europe. Spanish chivalry has been extolled to the skies, but it has ever been the chivalry of the dark ages. She has fought for the antiquity of opinion, while she has guarded the avenue to facts. There are immense districts of Central and South America, which are yet a perfect terra incognita to the traveller and the antiquarian.

Entire tribes and nations in the gloomy ranges of the Andes and the Cordilleras have never submitted to the Spanish yoke, and still enjoy their original customs and institutions. So far as modern explorations have been made, the results are, in a high degree, auspicious. Mr. Stephens has opened vistas in our antiquarian history by his two exploratory journies, which tend to show how little we yet know of the ancient epochs of the country, and the field of inquiry is about to be occupied at various points under the highest advantages. Some of the figures and devices on the antique walls and temples of equinoctial America, appear to contain information for a future Young or Champollion to reveal. Time and scrutiny will do much to lift the veil of mystery from these ancient ruins, and to form and regulate sound opinion upon the ancient inhabitants of that quarter, and their state of arts. There can be no doubt that evidences exist in buried antiquities which will tend to connect the arts and religion, mythology and astronomy of the eastern and western hemispheres--to unravel the difficulties in the way of comparative philology, and to reconstruct and connect the links in the broken chain of national affiliation.

Even in our less attractive latitudes and longitudes, a more auspicious and healthy tone has been given to the spirit of investigation. A voice from one of our western mounds (which has been alluded to) promises to restore the reading of an inscription in one of the earliest alphabets of the world. Sculptures have recently been disclosed in some of the minor mounds of the West, which are executed in a polished style of art, and strongly connect the Mexican and American tribes. The figures of animals and birds, taken from some barrows in the Scioto valley, are executed in a manner quite equal to anything of the kind found in Mexico or Peru.

Mythological evidence is also assuming more distinctive grounds. An imitative mound of a gigantic serpent swallowing an egg, has been discovered in one of the forest counties of Ohio, while I have been engaged in penning these remarks. The discovery of this curious structure, which is coiled for the distance of a quarter of a mile around a hill, transfers to our soil a striking and characteristic portion of oriental mythology. Scarcely a season passes, indeed, which does not add, by the extension of our settlements, or the direct agency of exploration, to the number of monumental evidences of antique occupancy.

But were these, indeed, wanting--were there no mounds or pyramids of sepulture or sacrifice--no remains of art--no inscriptive testimonies to speak of by-gone centuries--we have before us one of the most interesting of all monumental proofs in the lost and enigmatical race, who yet rove the boundless forests of the West and South. Whether there be evidences to separate the eras and nations of the most ancient inhabitants from those whose descendants yet remain, is one of the very points at issue. If the descendants of the mound and temple builders yet exist, the traditions of the era have passed from them in the process of their declension. But whoever the builders were, and whether their blood still flows in the existing race or not, they clung, like this race, so firmly to their ancient mythology and religion as to impress it indelibly on the features of their architecture, and in almost every work or labor which they attempted.

Viewed in every age, the existing tribes have exhibited such a fixity and peculiarity of character, as to have rendered them at once a paradox and a bye-word. The Turk has not been more inflexible; nor the Jew shown more individuality. We have hardly begun systematically to examine this subject. If the ancient builders were nomads--mere hunters of the bear, the deer, and the bison, who were too happy in the Parthian attainments of the bow and arrow to need towns and temples--certainly no such development arose in these more northern latitudes. And yet, if we make some peculiar exceptions, it appears difficult to suppose that the entire race, viewed in its generic and ethnological aspect, did not present a unity. While the very amplitude of the continent, and the variety of its soil, climate and productions, would lead, inevitably, to divisions and sub-divisions of tribes and languages, there are characteristics so deeply seated in their organization and habits, physical and mental, as to mark them as a peculiar family of the Red Type of man. Adopting this idea of unity as a basis of study, there are, at least, fewer obstacles in grouping the phenomena from which our deductions are to be drawn. The proof of negation is not the strongest proof, but it is something to assert that they are neither of Japhetic or Hamitic origin. In the traditions of one of the most celebrated North American tribes, namely, the Iroquois, the continent or "island," as it is termed, is called Aonio,[8] and we may hence denominate the race Aonic, and the individuals Aonites. If we do not advance by this term in the origin of the people, we at least advance in the precision of discussion.

[8] Notes on the Iroquois.

But where shall we find a basis, on which to rest their Chronology? Must we run back to the epoch of the original dispersion of man, or can we rest at a subsequent point? Has the era of christianity any definite relation to their migration? Was the migration designed, or accidental? Did it consist of one tribe, or twenty tribes? Did it happen at one epoch, or many epochs? Have they wandered here eighteen centuries, or double that period? These are some of the inquiries that naturally occur.

The first great question to be decided in the history of the Red Race, is, whether they were, as they have been vaguely called, the _aborigines_, or were preceded, on the continent, by other races? The second, whether the type of civilization, of which we behold evidences in Mexico, Yucatan and South America, was an _indigenous development_ of energies latent in the human mind, or derived its leading and suggestive features from _foreign lands_? There is intermingled with these inquiries, the scarcely less important one, whether or not, the _antiquarian ruins of America_, denote an element or elements of _European population_, in the later eras, whose fate became involved in the hunter mass, and who may be supposed to have been completely obliterated from the traditions of the existing tribes, prior to the discovery by Columbus.

Indian tradition has little or nothing to offer on this head. Time and barbarism have blotted out all. The entire sum of the traditions of all the various races of Red men, on the continent, when sifted from the mass of fabulous and incongruous matter by which it is accompanied, and when there is any allusion to it at all, amounts to this: that their ancestors came from the east; a few tribes, assert that they had come by water.[9] The land from whence they set out, the time devoted to the purposes of their long migration, and the actual period of their landing, and all such questions, are indefinite. And we must re-construct their chronology, in the best way possible, from a careful system of patient historical and antiquarian induction. Exactitude it cannot have, but it may reach plausibility. Granting to the Scandinavian, the Cimbrian and the Italian periods of adventure, which have been named, the fullest limits, in point of antiquity, which have under any circumstances been claimed, we cannot carry even this species of history beyond the year A. D. 1001; leaving 999 years to be accounted for, to the commencement of the Christian era. The Aztec empire which had reached such a point of magnificence when Mexico was first entered by Cortez, in 1519, did not, according to the picture writings and Mexican chronologists, date back farther than 1038, or by another authority, 958. The Toltecs, who preceded them in the career of empire, and whom together with the Chichimecs and their allies they overthrew, do not, allowing them the most liberal latitude of authors, extend their reign beyond A. D. 667. Prior to this, Indian chronology makes mention of the Olmecs--a people who are described as having mechanical arts, and to whom even the Toltecs ascribed the erection of some of their most antique and magnificent monuments. According to Fernando D'Alva, himself of Aztec lineage, the most ancient date assigned to the entire group of Mexican dynasties is A. D. 299. There are monuments in those benignant latitudes of perpetual summer, exempted as they are from the disintegrating effects of frosts, which corroborate such a chronology, and denote even a more ancient population, who were builders, agriculturists and worshippers of the sun. But we require a far longer period than any thus denoted, to account for those changes and subdivisions which have been found in the American languages.

[9] Such are the traditions of the Aztecs and of the Athapascas. Nearly every Aonic tribe, on the contrary, affirm that their ancestors came out of the ground.

Language is itself so irrefragable a testimony of the mental affinities of nations, and so slow in the periods of its mutations, that it offers one of the most important means for studying the history of the people. Grammars and vocabularies are required of all the tribes, whose history and relations we seek to fathom, before we can successfully compare them with each other, and with foreign languages. It is a study of high interest, from the diversity and curious principles of the dialects. There is a general agreement in the principles of Indian utterance, while their vocabularies exhibit wide variances. Some of the concords required, are anomalous to the occidental grammars, while there is a manifest general resemblance to these ancient plans of thought. The most curious features consist in the personal forms of the verbs, the constant provision for limiting the action to specific objects, the submergence of gender in many cases into two great organic and inorganic classes of nature, marked by vitality or inertia, and the extraordinary power of syllabical combination, by which Indian lexicography is rendered so graphic and descriptive in the bestowal of names. They are all, or nearly all, transpositive and polysynthetic; yet although now found in a very concrete form, this appears to have been not their original form, but rather the result of the progress of syllabical accretion, from a few limited roots and particles, which are yet when dissected found to be monosyllabic. That they have incorporated some of the Hebrew pronouns, and while like this language, wanting the auxiliary verb _to be_, have preserved its solemn causative verb, for existence, are among the points of the philology to be explained. But I have not time to pursue this subject. Even these notices are made at the sacrifice of other and perhaps more generally interesting traits of their antiquity.

The _Astronomy_ of the American tribes, has been thought to merit attention, in any attempts to compare them with foreign nations. The evidences of the attainments of the ancient Mexicans in this science, as well as the facts of their general history, chronology and languages, have been examined by the venerable archæologist and ex-statesman, who presides over this society, in a critical dissertation, published by the American Ethnological Society, which is the ablest paper of the age. The results of Mr. Gallatin's labors, and his reading of the ancient scrolls of Mexican picture writing, preserved in the folios of Lord Kingsborough, while they limit the amount of precise historical information in these unique records to very narrow grounds, yet denote a degree of system and exactitude, both in their chronology and astronomy, which are very remarkable.

The simple astronomy of our Aonic tribes of the north, gave them a lunar year, consisting of twelve moons. They consequently had a year of about three hundred and sixty days. As they had no names for days, no week and no subperiods of a moon, but noticed and relied simply on the moon's phases, they did not become acquainted with the necessity of intercalations for the true length of the year. The Aztecs of Mexico, on the contrary, had a solar year, and had made an extraordinary advance in computing the true time. Their year consisted of eighteen months, of twenty days each, a perfectly arbitrary system. This division would give but three hundred and sixty days to the year. The remaining five were called _empty_ or superfluous days, and were added to the last month of the eighteen. A tropical year is, however, about six hours longer than three hundred and sixty-five days, and by throwing away six hours annually, there would be an entire day lost every four years. The Mexican astronomers were well aware of this fact; but instead of supplying the deficiency every fourth year as we do, they disregarded it entirely, till a whole cycle consisting of fifty-two years was completed, and then they intercalated thirteen days, to make up the time and complete their cycle. In this way they came to the same result as the Egyptians, but by a different process, since the Egyptian calendar was founded on a computation of twelve lunar months of thirty days each. It was precisely the same in the old Persian calendar, which consisted of a year of three hundred and sixty days, made up of twelve months of thirty days each.

The Aztecs divided their cycle of fifty two years, into four periods of thirteen years; called TLALPILLI, and their month of twenty days, into four sub-periods, or weeks, of five days. The cycle was called XIUHMOLPILLI, which signifies, "the tying up of years." Each day of the month had a separate _name_, derived from some animate, or inanimate object, as _Tochtli_, a rabbit, _Calli_, a house, _Atl_, water, _Tecpatl_, Silex, _Xochitl_, a flower, _Cohuatl_, a serpent. The fifth day, was a fair or market day. The names of the days were represented by hieroglyphic figures of the objects described. The divisions were perfect and regular, and enabled them to denote, in their scrolls of picture writing, the chronology of the month, and of the Tlalpilli, or period of thirteen years.[10]

[10] As to the market day or week of five days, Sir Wm. Jones and Sir Stamford Raffles, tell us that the same period, existed, for the same purpose, in India. In the symbols for days, we find four to correspond exactly with the zodiacal signs of India, eight with those of Thibet, six with those of Siam and Japan, and others with those of the Chinese and Moguls.

The scheme itself denotes, not only a very certain mode of keeping the record of time, but a very exact knowledge of the tropical year. It is now known that the length of the year is precisely three hundred and sixty five days, five hours, forty eight minutes, and forty eight seconds; and it is perfectly well ascertained, that the Aztecs computed its length, at the period of their highest advance, at three hundred and sixty five days, five hours, forty six minutes, and nine seconds, differing only two minutes and thirty nine seconds from our own computation.[11] There is evidence, indeed, that the ancient inhabitants of this continent, had more science, than is generally conceded. If we are to credit writers, the Aztecs understood the true causes of eclipses, as well as we do. Diagrams exist, in their pictorial records, in which the earth is represented as projecting its disc upon the moon--thus indicating, clearly, a true knowledge of this phenomenon. Mr. Gallatin remarks that the Indian astronomical system, as developed in Mexico, is not one of _indigenous origin_, but that they had, manifestly, received it, at least their calendar, from a foreign source. Its results could not have been attained without long and patient observations. Some of its methods of combination, in the double use of names and figures, in their cycles, are thought to denote an ancient primitive system of oriental astronomy, reaching back to the earliest times. Here, then, we have one probable fact to serve as the nucleus of antiquarian testimony. We begin it abroad.

[11] With respect to intercalations, various periods have been taken by ancient nations. And while we take the shortest possible one, of four years; and the Aztecs took fifty two, the Chinese took sixty, and the Persians one hundred and twenty.