Part 19

So far the picture is true to nature; but no dream of a millennial era for the Red Man, in which all were thenceforth to live together as brothers, can have fashioned itself in the mind of Indian seer. The Sioux, the Crees, and the Blackfeet, still continued to nurse the same feud of ages, and thirsted for each other’s blood, while European emigrants crowd in to take possession of their vast prairies, destined to become the granaries of the world. The buffalo, on which they mainly depended for their food, and their téepees or tents, have vanished from their prairies, and will ere long be as extinct as the fossil urus or mastodon. The Red Man of the North-West exhibits no change from his precursors of the fifteenth century; and for aught that appears in him of a capacity for self-development, the forests and prairies of the American continent may have sheltered hunting and warring tribes of Indians, just as they have sheltered and pastured its wild herds of buffaloes, for countless centuries since the continent rose from its ocean bed.

Only by prolonged hereditary feuds, more insatiable, and therefore more destructive in their results than the ravages of tigers or wolves, is it possible to account for such an unprogressive condition of humanity as the archæological disclosures of the northern continent seem to reveal? Its numerous rivers and lakes, and its boundless forests and prairies, afforded inexhaustible resources for the hunter, and both soil and climate have proved admirably adapted for agriculture. Still more, the great copper region of Lake Superior provided advantages such as have existed in few other countries of the known world for developing the first stages of metallurgic art on which civilisation so largely depends. Whether brought with them from Asia, or discovered for themselves, the grand secret of the mastery of the ores by fire was already familiar to Peruvian metallurgists, and not unknown to those of Mexico. Unalloyed copper, such as that which abounds in the igneous rocks of the Keweenaw peninsula on Lake Superior, is extremely difficult to cast; and the addition of a small percentage of tin not only produces the useful bronze alloy, but renders the copper more readily fusible. This all-important secret of science the metallurgists of Peru had discovered for themselves, and turned largely to practical account. The pictured chronicles of the Mexicans throw an interesting light on the value they attached to the products of this novel art. It appears from some of their paintings that the tribute due by certain provinces was paid in wedges of copper. The forms of these, as well as of chisels and other tools of bronze, are simple, and indicate no great ingenuity in adapting the moulded metal to the artificer’s or the combatant’s requirements. The methods of hafting the axe-blade appear to have been of nearly the same rude description as are in use by modern savages in fitting the handle to a hatchet of flint or stone; and the whole characteristics of their implements suggest the probability that their metallurgy was a recently acquired art, derived from the civilised races on whom they had intruded as conquerors.

Such knowledge, partial as it was, must have been derived from the south. Everywhere to the north of the Mexican Gulf we look in vain for anything more than the mere hammered native copper, untouched by fire. Dr. J. W. Foster does indeed quote Mr. Perkins, who himself possesses sixty copper implements, including knives, spear heads, chisels, and objects of anomalous form, as having arrived at the conclusion “that, by reason of certain markings, it was evident that the Mound-Builders possessed the art of smelting copper,”[69] but the illustrations produced in proof of it scarcely bear out the opinion. The same idea has been repeatedly advanced; but the contents of the Mounds amply prove that if such a knowledge had dawned on their builders it was turned to no practical account. Mr. Charles Rau, in his _Ancient Aboriginal Trade in North America_, says: “Although the fire on the hearths or altars now enclosed by the sacrificial mounds was sometimes sufficiently strong to melt the deposited copper articles, it does not seem that this proceeding induced the ancient inhabitants to avail themselves of fire in working copper; they persisted in the tedious practice of hammering. Yet one copper axe, evidently cast, and resembling those taken from the mounds of Ohio, has been ploughed up near Auburn, in Cayuga, in the State of New York. This specimen, which bears no trace of use, may date from the earlier times of European colonisation. It certainly would be wrong to place much stress on such an isolated case.”[70] The well-known volume of Messrs. Squier and Davis furnishes illustrations of copper and other metallic relics from the mounds of Ohio.[71] Mr. J. T. Short engraves a variety of similar relics from Wisconsin, where they appear to have been found in unusual abundance.[72] In the Annual Report of the Historical Society of Wisconsin for 1878 the copper implements in their collection are stated to number one hundred and ninety implements, classified as spear or dirk heads, knives, chisels, axes, augurs, gads, and drills, in addition to beads, tubes, and other personal ornaments made out of thin sheets of hammered copper. Dr. J. W. Foster has furnished illustrations of the various types from the valuable collection of Mr. Perkins.[73] Colonel Charles C. Jones engraves a specimen of the rarely known copper implements of Georgia;[74] and Dr. Abbott shows the prevailing forms of the same class of relics found along the whole northern Atlantic seaboard.[75] All tell the same tale of rudest manipulation by a people ignorant of the working of metals with the use of fire.

And yet the native copper was ready to hand in a form and in quantity unknown elsewhere. No such supplies of the pure metal invited the industry of the first Asiatic or European metallurgists. The Cassiterides yielded in abundance the ores of copper and tin, but these had to be smelted and worked with all the accumulated results of tentative skill before they yielded the copper or more useful bronze. By whom or where this first knowledge was mastered is unknown: the tendency is still to look to Asia, perhaps to Phœnicia, or to the still undetermined cradle of the Aryans, wherever that may prove to have been, for the birth of this phase of metallurgic art which constituted so important a stage in early civilisation. Yet if the ancient American missed it, it was not for want of opportunity. Examples of the accidental fusion of copper by the sacrificial fires of the Mound-Builders repeatedly occur in the mounds of the Ohio valley. But no gifted native alchymist was prompt to read the lesson and turn it to practical account.

Asia and Europe appear to have passed by a natural transition, step by step, from their rudest stages of lithic art to polished stone, and then to implements of metal. Some of the steps were doubtless very slow. Worsaae believed that the use of bronze prevailed in Denmark “five or six hundred years before the birth of Christ.”[76] In Egypt it undoubtedly was known at a greatly earlier date. I still incline to my early formed opinion, that gold was the first metal worked. Found in nuggets, it could scarcely fail to attract attention. It was easy to fashion into shape; and some of the small, highly polished stone hammers seem fitter for this than any other work.[77] The abundant gold ornaments of the New World at the time of the discovery of Mexico and Peru accord with this idea. The like attraction of the bright native copper, is proved by its employment among the southern Indians for personal ornaments; and in this way the economic use of the metals may have been first suggested.

From the working of gold nuggets, or of virgin copper, with the hammer, to the smelting of the ores, was no trifling step; but that knowledge once gained, the threshold of civilisation and true progress had been reached. The history of the grand achievement is embodied in the earliest myths both of the Old and the New World. Tubal-cain, Dædalus, Hephæstus, Vulcan, Vœlund, Galant, the Luno or the Celtic Fingal, and Wayland, the Saxon smith-god, are but legendary variations of the first worker by whom the gift of metallurgy was communicated to man; and so too the New World has its Quetzalcoatl, or Vœlund of the Aztecs, the divine instructor of their ancestors in the use of the metals. But whatever be the date of this wise instructor, no share of the knowledge communicated by him to that favoured race appears to have ever penetrated northward of the Mexican Gulf.

It is vain to urge such dubious evidence as the fancied traces of a mould-ridge, or the solitary example of a casting of uncertain age, in proof of a knowledge of the furnace and the crucible among any North American tribe. Everywhere in Europe the soil yields not only its buried relics of gold, copper, and bronze, but also stone and bronze moulds in which implements and personal ornaments were cast. When the ingenious systematising of Danish archæologists had familiarised the students of antiquity with the idea of a succession of Stone, Bronze, and Iron periods in the history of Europe, the question naturally followed, whether metallurgy did not begin, there, as elsewhere, in the easy working of virgin copper. Dr. Latham accordingly remarked, in his _Ethnology of the British Islands_, on the supposition that no unalloyed copper relics had been found in Britain: “Stone and bone first; then bronze, or copper and tin combined; but no copper alone. I cannot get over this hiatus; cannot imagine a metallurgic industry beginning with the use of alloys.” It was a mistake, however, to assume that no copper relics had ever been found. At first it had been taken for granted that all such implements were of the familiar alloy. But so soon as the importance of the distinction was recognised, examples of pure copper were forthcoming. So early as 1822, Sir David Brewster described a large axe of peculiar shape, and formed of copper, which was found in the hard black till-clay at a depth of twenty feet under Ratho Bog, near Edinburgh. This is no solitary example. The Scottish Museum of Antiquities has other implements of pure copper; and Sir William Wilde states in reference to the collections of the Royal Irish Academy: “upon careful examination, it has been found that thirty of the rudest, and apparently the very oldest celts, are of red, almost unalloyed copper”; as is also the case with some other rudely formed tools in the same collection.

It was a temporary advantage, doubtless, but a real loss, to the Indian miners of Lake Superior that they found the native copper there ready to hand, a pure ductile metal, probably regarded by them as only a variety of stone which—unlike its rocky matrix,—they could bend, or hammer into shape, without fracture. Its value as such was widely appreciated. Copper tools, everywhere retaining the specs, or larger crystals of silver, characteristic of the Lake Superior veins, tell of the diffusion of the metal from that single source throughout all the vast regions watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries, and eastward by lake and river to the gulf of the St. Lawrence and the mouth of the Hudson.

There was a time when this traffic must have been systematically carried on; when the ancient miners of Lake Superior worked its rich copper veins with industrious zeal; and when, probably as part of the same aggressive energy, the valley of the Ohio was filling with a settled population; its great earthworks were in process of construction, and a native race entered on a course that gave promise of social progress. But, from whatever cause, the work of the old miners was abruptly terminated;[78] the race of the Mounds vanished from the scenes of their ingenious toil; and rudest barbarism resumed its sway over the whole northern continent. The same Aryan race that, before the dawn of history, before the Sanskrit-speaking people of India, or the Zends of Persia, entered on their southern homes, spoke in its own cradleland the mother tongue of Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic, and German, at length broke up and went forth on its long wanderings. Whatever peoples it found there; they were replaced by Celts, Romans, Greeks, Slavs, and Teutons, who broke in upon the barbarism of prehistoric Europe; displaced the older races, Allophylian, Neolithic, Iberian, Finnic, or by whatever other name we may find it convenient to designate them; but not without a considerable intermingling of the old blood with that of the intruders. The sparsely settled continent gradually filled up. Forests were cleared, swamps drained, rivers confined by artificial banks and levées to their channels; and there grew up in their new homes the Celtic, Classic, Slavic, and Teutonic tongues, with all the varied culture and civilisation which they represent. Agriculture, the special characteristic of the whole Aryan race, flourished. They brought with them the cereals; and, with plenty, the favoured race multiplied, till at length it has grown straitened within the bounds of the old continent which it had made its own.

With the close of the fifteenth century one great cycle, that of Europe’s mediæval era, came to an end; and then we trace the first beginnings of that fresh scattering of the Aryan clan, and its new western movement across the Ocean. It seems in a very striking manner once more to repeat itself under our own eyes, as we look abroad on the millions crowding from Europe and filling up the western wilderness; hewing down the forests, cultivating the waste prairies, and everywhere displacing the rude aborigines: yet here also not without some interblending of the races; though the two types, Aryan and pre-Aryan, meet under all the repellent influences of high civilisation and the lowest barbarism. In the Canadian North-West alone, the young province of Manitoba began its political existence with a population of between 10,000 and 12,000 half-breeds; in part at least, a hardy race of hunters and farmers; the representatives of what is as certainly destined to constitute an element in the new phases which the Aryan race already begins to assume, under the diverse conditions of a new continent, as that curious trace of Europe’s pre-Aryan people which attracted the observant attention of Tacitus among the ancient Britons; and which we are learning to recognise, with a new significance, as the Melanochroi: the representatives of the old half-breed of Europe’s prehistoric dawn.

[40] Gladstone, _Juventus Mundi_, pp. 474, 479.

[41] _Indian Migrations_, p. 24.

[42] _Types of Mankind_, p. 351.

[43] _Early Man in Britain_, p. 241.

[44] _Ibid._ p. 244.

[45] _Alaska and its Resources_, p. 237.

[46] _Prehistoric Europe_, p. 550.

[47] _U.S. Geological Survey_, 1872, p. 652. _Report of National Museum_, 1887, p. 683, Fig. 11535.

[48] _Report of National Museum_, 1887, p. 678.

[49] _Ancient Stone Implements of Great Britain_, p. 140.

[50] Vide _Prehistoric Man_, 3d ed. vol. i. p. 180, Fig. 54.

[51] _Report of the Peabody Museum_, vol. ii., p. 38.

[52] _Primitive Industry_, p. 471.

[53] _Ibid._, p. 542.

[54] _Primitive Industry_, p. 547.

[55] _Ibid._, p. 545.

[56] Foster’s _Prehistoric Races_, p. 55.

[57] _The Antiquity and Origin of the Trenton Gravel_, p. 547.

[58] _Primitive Industry_, p. 481.

[59] _Report of Washington National Museum_, 1887-88, pp. 677-702.

[60] _Primitive Industry_, p. 517.

[61] _Indian Migrations as Evidence of Language_ (Horatio Hale), p. 21.

[62] _Indian Migrations_, p. 22.

[63] _Relations des Jésuites_, 1660, p. 7. Quebec ed.

[64] _Archæologia Americana_, vol. ii.

[65] Brinton, _Races and Peoples_, p. 254.

[66] _Bertram’s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, etc._, 1791, p. 367.

[67] _The League of the Iroquois_, p. 2.

[68] Schoolcraft, _History of the Indian Tribes_, vol. ii., p. 78.

[69] _Prehistoric Races of the United States_, p. 259.

[70] _Smithsonian Report_, 1572, p. 353. The important word _not_ supplied here, it is obvious from the context is absent by a mere typographical error.

[71] _Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley_, vol. i., pp. 196-207.

[72] _The North Americans of Antiquity_, p. 95.

[73] _Prehistoric Races of the United States_, pp. 251-259.

[74] _Antiquities of the Southern Indians_, p. 225.

[75] _Primitive Industry_, pp. 411-422.

[76] _Primæval Antiquities_, p. 135.

[77] _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, 1st ed. 1851, p. 214; 2d ed. vol. i.

[78] _Prehistoric Man_, 3rd ed. vol. i., pp. 203-228.

V THE ÆSTHETIC FACULTY IN ABORIGINAL RACES

THE ingenious arts of the palæolithic cave-dwellers of the Vézère abundantly prove that it needed no wanderers from the cradlelands of Old World civilisation to that strange Atlantis lying in the engirdling ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, to engraft their artistic capacities on the “Achoriens” by whom it was peopled. The innate faculty for art has manifested itself in individuals and in nations, among widely diverse Assyrian, Egyptian, Hellenic, Arabian, and mediæval races, as in later Frank, Fleming, and Dane, with unaccountable partiality. For its absence, or very subordinate manifestation, is seen to be compatible with the highest intellectual triumphs in other directions. The arts of Britain’s Allophyliæ manifest no instinctive aim at a reproduction of familiar natural objects, such as is characteristic of some races at a very primitive stage. Nor was it till a recent generation that the stock from which Shakespeare and Newton sprung put forth its first efforts at rivalling the great masters of the Renaissance, or entering into competition with the skilled painters of the Low Countries. It is otherwise with the nations of the New World. The highest stage of civilisation attained there is a very partial one. But among the various characteristics of the American aborigines which invite attention, the very wide diffusion of an aptitude for imitative art is one that merits careful study as typical of American man. It is not, indeed, to be overlooked that if due allowance be made for the narrow range in degrees of civilisation among the races of the New World, the same diversity of racial characteristics is observable there as elsewhere. The tendency, moreover, of civilisation is to efface, or greatly to modify, such distinctions. Civilised nations habitually borrow the arts and imitate the social habits of neighbouring races, or accept some common standard of intellectual and moral pre-eminence. Nevertheless, while the capacity for imitative art is neither peculiar to the New World, nor characteristic of all its diverse nationalities, it appears to be more generally diffused among the races of America than elsewhere. It is prevalent among tribes in nearly every condition, from the rude Indian nomad, or the Eskimo, to the semi-civilised Zuñi, and the skilled metallurgists and architects of Central America and Peru.

This development of a feeling for art in savage races is at all times interesting as indicative of intellectual capacity and powers of observation, even when manifested, as it frequently is, within a very narrow range. It is by no means a general characteristic either of savage or civilised man. Yet recent archæological discoveries prove it to have been one of the earliest forms of intellectual activity among the cave-dwellers of Europe’s palæolithic dawn. The most civilised nations have differed widely in the manifestations of this æsthetic faculty. The city of Dante was the Athens of the Middle Ages in art as well as letters; while the land which gave birth to Shakespeare can scarcely be said to have had a native school of painting or sculpture till late in the eighteenth century. The like differences are observable among barbarous nations. Races are met with, to whom the drawing of a familiar object suggests no idea of the original; while others, in nearly the same stage of savage life, habitually practise the representation of natural objects in the decorative details of their implements and articles of dress, and in the carvings which furnish occupation for many leisure hours.

A special interest attaches to the disclosures of archæology relative to the prehistoric races of Europe, owing to the evidence thereby furnished of striking resemblances in their arts and conditions of life to those of uncultured races of our own day. In many respects it seems as though the present condition of some existing races of America only repeats that of Europe’s infancy. But so far as imitative art is concerned, the analogy fails when the more recent contents of the barrows, cairns, and grave mounds of prehistoric Europe are brought into comparison with those of the New World. If, indeed, we leave behind us the age of cromlechs, kistvaens, cairns, and barrows, and seek to estimate aright the disclosures of artistic ability pertaining to the far more ancient men of Europe’s Mammoth and Reindeer periods, it is otherwise. But, before reviewing the wonderfully definite glimpses thereby furnished of tribes of rude yet skilful hunters of that post-glacial world, it may be of some help, in the comparisons which they suggest, to recall impressions derived from a study of that Stone period in which the natives of the British Islands appear to have approximated, in many respects, to the Red Indian nomad of the American forest.

One little-heeded point of evidence of this correspondence, to which I long since drew attention, is to be found in the traces of artificial modification of the head-form in ancient British crania; a comparison of which with skulls recovered from Indian grave mounds helps to throw light on the habits and social life of the British Islands in prehistoric times. In illustration of this I may refer to an exploration, now of old date. In the early summer of 1851, I learned of the accidental exposure of a stone cist, in trenching a garden at Juniper Green, a few miles distant from Edinburgh, and immediately proceeded to the spot. There, under a slightly elevated knoll—the remains, in all probability, of the ancient barrow,—lay a rude sarcophagus of unhewn sandstone, within which was a male skeleton, still in good preservation. The body had been laid on its left side, with the arms folded over the breast, and the knees drawn up so as to touch the elbows. A flat water-worn stone formed the pillow, from which the skull had rolled to the bottom of the cist. Above the right shoulder stood a gracefully formed clay vase, containing only a little sand and black dust, the remains, it may be presumed, of food which it originally contained when deposited there by affectionate hands, in some long-forgotten century. It was recovered uninjured, and is now deposited, along with the skull, in the Archæological Museum of Edinburgh.