The North-Americans of yesterday

When those rapacious enthusiasts, the Spaniards of the sixteenth century, had unfolded some of the mysteries of the great half-world that the resolution and daring of Columbus h...

There were many tribes and many tribe-groups, or, as the latter are usually designated, “stocks,” among the Amerinds. These various stocks differed considerably from each other...

Our pre-columbian knowledge of the Amerind people is at present meagre. The majority of the different stocks had not arrived at the point where they understood how to record the...

While there are found in the mounds of the central Mississippi region, and also among the living natives of the North-west coast, resemblances to the art work of the Aztecs, May...

Almost every tribe the world round seems to have acquired at a very early stage in its progress a knowledge of plaiting rushes, strips of bark, or other simple substances, for u...

The first article of dress of primitive people was not a woven stuff, but nevertheless weaving, like pottery, begins in plaiting and basketry, and is an ancient art. The first c...

The shaping of objects in clay, wood, or stone, or other material, known as carving, modelling, etc., constitutes sculpture. Some form of these methods was in use in very primit...

The Amerind of North America has generally been considered a shiftless and indolent being, but the preceding pages have shown, I think, that this estimate is an error, and the f...

The Amerinds were practically all in the so-called Stone Age of culture; that is, they were unacquainted with the _common use_ of metals. Some tribes worked silver, gold, and co...

Mining operations were carried on in different parts of the continent, but in a primitive, limited way. Some of the most extensive was the mining for flint with which to make st...

The popular conception that there is no fun in red men is erroneous. All of them, far from being taciturn, silent, morose, and lacking desire for amusement other than scalping o...

For a long time it was believed by the whites that the “Indians” were incapable of doing anything beyond weaving baskets, and from this condition of ignorance much of the confus...

Few Europeans can look at the world from the Amerind point of view, because few know what it means to have lands free. Happy the man who has trod the wilderness primeval, and ta...

Persons who are obliged to rely on memory find that memory develops with use and becomes more reliable. The Amerinds, having no written language, if we except the Nahuatl and Ma...

Tribes often had a definite organisation and a regular government, and each held sway over a territory with fixed boundaries. When the limits were not placed at a river, lake, o...

The manner in which America was originally peopled has been the cause of considerable speculation. For a long time it was generally believed, and there are some who still hold t...