Part 18

The civilisation of Central and Southern America is a wholly distinct thing; and, as I think, not without some suggestive traces of Asiatic origin; but the attempts to connect it with that of ancient Egypt, suggested mainly by the hieroglyphic sculpturing on their columns and temples, find their confutation the moment we attempt to compare the Egyptian calendar with that either of Mexico or Peru. Traces of worship of the sun, the earliest of all forms of natural religion, have undoubtedly been recovered among widely scattered tribes of North America; but there is no evidence that it was accompanied with any definite mensuration of the solar year, or the construction of a calendar. The changes of the seasons sufficed for the division of the year, not only into summer and winter, but into the diverse aspects of the seasons from month to month; as is shown in the names given to the “moons” in various native vocabularies. It was otherwise on the southern continent, and among the civilised nations of Central America. But the interblending of the science of astronomy with the religious rites of the State produced the wonted results; and this was peculiarly the case in Peru, with its equatorial site for the temple of the Sun-God; and his seeming literal presence on his altar at recurrent festivals. There accordingly, even as in ancient Egypt, the divine honours paid to the heavenly bodies was an impediment to the progress of astronomical observation. Eclipses were regarded with the same superstitious dread as among the rudest savage nations; and the conservatism of an established national creed must have proved peculiarly unfavourable to astronomical science. The impediments to Galileo’s observations were trifling compared with those which must have beset the Inca priest who ventured to question the diurnal revolution of the sun round the earth, or to solve the awful mystery of an eclipse by so simple an explanation as the interposition of the moon between the sun and the earth. The Mexican Calendar Stone, which embodies evidence of greater knowledge, was believed by Humboldt to indicate unmistakable relations to the ancient science of South-Eastern Asia. It is of more importance here to note the shortness of the Mexican cycle, and the small amount of error in their deviation from true solar time, as compared with the European calendar at the time when the Spaniards first intruded on Montezuma’s rule. That the Spaniards were ten days in error, as compared with the Aztec reckoning, only demonstrates the length of time during which error had been accumulating in the reformed Julian calendar of Europe; and so tends to confirm the idea that the civilisation of the Mexicans was of no very great antiquity.

The whole evidence supplied by Northern archæology proves that in so far as it had any civilisation of foreign origin, it must have been derived from the South, where alike in Central and in Southern America, diverse races, and a native civilisation replete with elements of progress, have left behind them many enduring memorials of skill and ingenuity. But the extremely slight and very partial traces of its influence on any people of the northern continent would of itself suffice to awaken doubts as to its long duration. The civilisation of Greece and Rome did indeed exercise no direct influence on transalpine Europe; but long centuries before the Romans crossed the Alps, as the disclosures of the lake villages, the crannoges, the kitchen middens, and the sepulchral mounds of Central and Northern Europe prove, the nations beyond their ken were familiar with weaving, and with the ceramic and metallurgic arts; were far advanced as agriculturists, had domesticated animals, acquired systems of phonetic writing, and learned the value of a currency of the precious metals.

Midway between North America with its unredeemed barbarism, and the southern seats of a native American civilisation, Mexico represents, as I believe, the first contact of the latter with the former. A gleam of light was just beginning to dawn on the horizon of the northern continent. The long night of its Dark Ages was coming to a close, when the intrusion of the Spaniards abruptly arrested the incipient civilisation, and began the displacement of its aborigines and the repetition of the Aryan ethnical revolution, which had already supplanted the autochthones of prehistoric Europe.

The publication in 1848 of the first volume of the _Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge_, devoted to the history and explorations of the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley, gave a wonderful stimulus to archæological research in the United States. For a time, indeed, much credulous zeal was devoted to the search for buried cities, inscribed records, and the fancied recovery, in more or less modified form, in northern areas, of the civilisation of the Aztecs; not unmingled with dreams of Phœnician, Hebrew, Scandinavian, and Welsh remains. The history of some of its spurious productions is not without interest; but its true fruits are seen in numerous works which have since issued from the American press, devoted to an accurate record of local antiquities. So thoroughly has this already been carried out, that it may now be affirmed that, to all appearance, the condition of the Indian tribes to the north of Mexico, as shown in the rude arts of a Stone age, scarcely at all affected in its character by their use of the native copper of Lake Superior, represents what prevailed throughout the whole northern continent in all the centuries—however prolonged,—since the hunters in the Delaware valley fashioned and employed their turtle-back celts.

The condition of the nations of North America at the period of its discovery, at the close of the fifteenth century, may be described as one of unstable equilibrium; and nothing in its archæological records points to an older period of any prolonged duration of settled progress. The physical geography of the continent presents in many respects such a contrast to that of Europe, as is seen in the steppes of Northern Asia, though with great navigable rivers, which only needed the appliances of modern civilisation to make them for the New World what the Euphrates and the Tigris were to Southern Asia, and the Nile to Africa, in ancient centuries. Those vast tablelands, the great steppes of Mongolia and Independent Tartary, have ever been the haunts of predatory tribes by whom the civilisation of Southern Asia has been repeatedly overthrown; and from the same barbarian hive came the Huns who ravaged the Roman world in its decline. Europe, on the contrary, nursed its youthful civilisation among detached communities of its southern peninsulas on the Mediterranean Sea; and in later ages has repeatedly experienced the advantages of geographical isolation in the valleys of the Alps, in Norway and Denmark, in Portugal, the Netherlands, and the British Islands: where nations protected in their youth from predatory hordes, and sheltered during critical periods of change, have safely passed through their earlier stages of progress.

All that we know or can surmise of the nations of North America, presents a total contrast to this. In so far as the mystery of its prehistoric Mound-Builders has been solved, we see there a people who had attained to a grade of civilisation not greatly dissimilar to that of the village communities of New Mexico and Arizona; and who had settled down in the Ohio valley, perhaps while feudal Europe was still only emerging from mediæval rudeness, if not at an earlier date. The great river-valley was occupied by populous urban centres of an industrious community. Agriculture, though prosecuted only with the simplest implements, chiefly of wood and stone, must have been practised on an extensive scale. The primitive arts of the potter were improved; the copper abounding in the remote region on the shores of Lake Superior was prized as a rarity; though metallurgy in its practical applications had scarcely entered on its first stage. The nation was in its infancy; but it had passed beyond the rude hunter state, and was entering on a settled life, with all possibilities of progress in the future, when the fierce nomads of the north swept down on the populous valley, and left it a desolate waste. If so, it was but a type of the whole native history of the continent.

From all that can be gleaned, alike from archæological chroniclings, Indian tradition, and the actual facts of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the condition of the whole population of the northern continent has ever been the same. It might not inaptly be compared to an ever-recurring springtide, followed by frosts that nipped the young germ, and rendered the promised fruitage abortive. Throughout the whole period of French and English colonial history, the influence of one or two savage but warlike tribes is traceable from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico; and the rival nations were exposed to such constant warfare that it is more than doubtful if the natural increase of population was latterly equal to the waste of war. Almost the sole memorials of vanished nations are the names of some of their mountain ranges and rivers. It is surmised, as already noted, that the Allighewi, or Tallegwi, to whom the name common to the Alleghany Mountains and river is traced, were the actual Mound-Builders.[61] If so, the history of their overthrow is not wholly a matter of surmise. The traditions of the Delawares told that the Alleghans were a powerful nation reaching to the eastern shores of the Mississippi, where their palisaded towns occupied all the choicest sites in the Ohio valley; but the Wyandots, or Iroquois, including perhaps the Eries, who had established themselves on the headwaters of the chief rivers that rise immediately to the south of the great lakes, combined with the Delawares, or Lenape nation, to crush that ancient people; and the decimated Alleghans were driven down the Mississippi, and dispersed. Some surviving remnant, such as even a war of extermination spares, may have been absorbed into the conquering nation, after the fashion systematically pursued by the Huron-Iroquois in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nor is this a mere conjecture. Mr. Horatio Hale, recognising the evident traces in the Cherokee language of a grammar mainly Huron-Iroquois, while the vocabulary is largely recruited from some foreign source, thinks it not improbable that the origin of the Cherokee nation may have been due to a union of the survivors of the old Mound-Builder stock with some branch of the conquering race; just as in 1649 a fugitive remnant of the Hurons from the Georgian Bay were adopted into the Seneca nation;[62] and a few years later such of the captive Eries as escaped torture and the stake were admitted into affiliation with their conquerors.[63]

The whole region to the east of the Mississippi, from the fifty-second to the thirty-sixth degree of north latitude, appears to have been occupied by the two great Indian stocks, the Algonquin-Lenape and the Iroquois. But Gallatin, who directed special attention to the determination of the elements of philological affinity between them, recognised to the south of their region the existence of at least three essentially distinct languages of extensive use: the Catawba, the Cherokee, and that which he assumed to include in a common origin, both the Muskhogee and the Choctaw.[64] But besides those, six well-ascertained languages of smaller tribes, including those of the Uchees and the Natchez, appear to demand separate recognition. Their region differs essentially from those over which the Algonquin and Iroquois war-parties ranged at will. It is broken up by broad river channels, and intersected by impenetrable swamps; and has thus afforded refuge for the remnants of conquered tribes, and for the preservation of distinct languages among small bands of refugees. The Timucuas were the ancient occupants of Florida; but they appear to have been displaced by the Chatta-Muskogee nations; driven forth, as is surmised, from their homes in the Ohio valley; and the older race is only known now by the preservation of its language in works of the Spanish missionaries.[65]

When the Ohio valley was first explored it was uninhabited; and in the latter part of the seventeenth century the whole region extending from Lake Erie to the Tennessee river was an unpeopled desert. But the Cherokees were in the occupation of their territory when first visited by De Soto in 1540; and they are described by Bertram in 1773, with their great council-house, capable of accommodating several hundreds, erected on the summit of one of the large mounds, in their town of Cowe, on the Tanase river, in Florida. But Bertram adds: “This mound on which the rotunda stands, is of a much ancienter date than the building, and perhaps was raised for another purpose. The Cherokees themselves are as ignorant as we are by what people, or for what purpose, these artificial hills were raised.”[66] It would, indeed, no more occur to those wanderers into the deserted regions of the Mound-Builders to inquire into the origin of their mounds, than into that of the Alleghany Mountains.

If then it is probable that we thus recover some clue to the identity of the vanished race of the Ohio valley, the very designation of the river is a memorial of their supplanters. The Ohio is an Iroquois name given to the river of the Alleghans by that indomitable race of savage warriors who effectually counteracted the plans of France, under her greatest monarchs, for the settlement of the New World. Their historian, the late Hon. L. H. Morgan, remarks of the Iroquois: “They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other race of Indian lineage except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European colonisation, they stood, for nearly two centuries, with an unshaken front, against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border population. Under their federal system, the Iroquois flourished in independence, and capable of self-protection, long after the New England and Virginia races had surrendered their jurisdictions, and fallen into the condition of dependent nations; and they now stand forth upon the canvas of Indian history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil institutions, their sagacity in the administration of the league, and their courage in its defence.”[67] But to characterise the elements of combined action among the Six Nation Indians as wise civil institutions; or to use such terms as league and federal system in the sense in which they are employed by the historian of the Iroquois; is to suggest associations that are illusory. With all the romance attached to the League of the Hodenosauneega, they were to the last mere savages. When the treaty which initiated the great league was entered into by its two oldest members, the Mohawks and the Oneidas, the former claimed the name of Kanienga, or “People of the Flint.” Whatever may have been the precise idea they attached to the designation, they were, as they remained to the last, but in their Stone period. Their arts were of the rudest character, and their wars had no higher aim than the gratification of an inextinguishable hatred. All that we know of them only serves to illustrate a condition of life such as may have sufficed through countless generations to perpetuate the barbarism which everywhere reveals itself in the traces of man throughout the northern continent of America. One nation after another perished by the fury of this race, powerful only to destroy. The Susquehannocks, whose name still clings to the beautiful river on the banks of which they once dwelt, are believed to have been of the same lineage as the Alleghans; but they incurred the wrath of the Iroquois, and perished. At a later date the Delawares provoked a like vengeance; and the remnant of that nation quitted for ever the shores of the river which perpetuates their name. Such in like manner was the fate of the Shawnees, Nanticokes, Unamis, Minsi, and Illinois. All alike were vanquished, reduced to the condition of serfs, or driven out and exterminated.

The tribes that lived to the west of the Mississippi appear to have been for the most part more strictly nomad. The open character of the country, with its vast tracts of prairie, and its herds of buffalo and other game, no doubt helped to encourage a wandering life. The Crees, the Blackfeet, the Sioux, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Apaches were all of this class, and with their interminable feuds and perpetual migrations rendered all settled life impossible. The Mandans, the most civilised among the tribes of the North-West, abandoned village after village under the continual attacks of the Sioux, until they disappeared as a nation; and the little handful of survivors found shelter with another tribe.

All this was the work of Indians. The Spaniards, indeed, wasted and destroyed with no less merciless indiscrimination. Not only nations perished, but a singularly interesting phase of native civilisation was abruptly arrested in Mexico, Central America, and Peru. The intrusion of French, Dutch, and English colonists was, no doubt, fatal to the aborigines whom they supplanted. Nevertheless their record is not one of indiscriminate massacre. The relations of the French, especially with the tribes with whom they were brought into immediate contact, were on the whole kindly and protective. But as we recover the history of the native tribes whose lands are now occupied by the representatives of those old colonists, we find the Indians everywhere engaged in the same exterminating warfare; and whether we look at the earlier maps, or attempt to reconstruct the traditionary history of older tribes, we learn only the same tale of aimless strife and extinction. When Cartier first explored the St. Lawrence in 1535 he found large Indian settlements at Quebec and on the island of Montreal; but on the return of the French under Champlain, little more than half a century later, there were none left to dispute their settlement. At the later date, and throughout the entire period of French occupation, the country to the south of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario was occupied by the Iroquois, or Six Nation Indians, as they were latterly called. Westward of the river Ottawa the whole region was deserted until near the shores of the Georgian Bay; though its early explorers found everywhere the traces of recent occupation by the Wyandot or other tribes, who had withdrawn to the shores of Lake Huron to escape the fury of their implacable foes.

At the period when the Hurons were first brought under the notice of the French Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century they were established along the Georgian Bay and around Lake Simcoe; and in so far as the wild virtues of the savage warrior are concerned, they fully equalled the Iroquois by whom they were at length driven out and nearly exterminated. When Locke visited Paris in 1679 the narratives of the Jesuit fathers had rendered familiar the unflinching endurance of this race under the frightful tortures to which they were subjected by their Iroquois captors; and which they, in turn, not only inflicted on their captive foes, but on one after another of the missionaries whose devoted zeal exposed them to their fury. We now read with interest this reflection noted in Locke’s Journal, in which he recognises in these savages the common motives of humanity; the same desire to win credit and reputation, and to avoid shame and disgrace, which animates all men: “This makes the Hurons and other people of Canada with such constancy endure inexpressible torments; this makes merchants in one country and soldiers in another; this puts men upon school divinity in one country and physics and mathematics in another; this cuts out the dresses for the women, and makes the fashions for the men, and makes them endure the inconveniences of all.” The great English philosopher manifestly entertained no doubt that the latent elements on which all civilisation depends were equally shared by Indian and European. But the Hurons perished—all but a little remnant of Christianised half-breeds now settled on the St. Charles river below Quebec—in their very hour of contact with European civilisation.

Father Sagard estimated the Huron tribes at the close of their national history, when they had been greatly reduced in numbers, as still between thirty and forty thousand. But besides these there lay between them and the shores of Lake Erie and the Niagara river the Tiontonones and the Attiwendaronks, and to the south of the Great Lake the Eries, all of the same stock, and all sharers in the same fate. Tradition points to the kindling of the council-fire of peace among the Attiwendaronks before the organisation of the Iroquois confederacy. Father Joseph de la Roche d’Allyon, who passed through their country when seeking to discover the source of the Niagara river, speaks of twenty-eight towns and villages under the rule of its chief Sachem, and of their extensive cultivation of maize, beans, and tobacco. They had won, moreover, the strange character of being lovers of peace, and were styled by the French the Neuters, from the desire they manifested to maintain a friendly neutrality alike with the Hurons and the Iroquois. Of the Eries we know less. In the French maps of the seventeenth century the very existence of the great lake which perpetuates their name was unknown; but the French fur-traders were aware of a tribe existing to the west of the Iroquois, whose country abounded with the lynx or wild cat, the fur of which was specially prized, and they designated it “La Nation du Chat.” To their artistic skill are ascribed several remains of aboriginal art, among which a pictorial inscription on Cunningham’s Island is described as by far the most elaborate work of its class hitherto found on the continent.[68] From the partial glimpses thus recovered of both nations we are tempted to ascribe to them an aptitude for civilisation fully equal to that of which the boasted federal league of the Iroquois gave evidence. But they perished by the violence of kindred nations before either the French or English could establish intercourse with them; and their fate doubtless reveals to us glimpses of history such as must have found frequent repetition in older centuries throughout the whole North American continent.

The legend of the peace-pipe, Longfellow’s poetic version of the Red Indian Edda, founded on traditions of the Iroquois narrated by an Onondaga chief, represents Gitche Manito, the Master of Life, descending on the crag of the red pipestone quarry at the Côteau des Prairies, and calling all the tribes together:—

And they stood there on the meadow With their weapons and their war gear, Wildly glaring at each other. In their faces stern defiance, In their hearts the feuds of ages, The hereditary hatred, The ancestral thirst of vengeance.