: The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest by Fiske John - Latin America History; America Discovery and exploration

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In this connection the history of the Eskimos introduces us to some interesting problems. Mention has been made of the River-drift men who lived in Europe during the milder intervals of the Glacial period. At such times they made their way into Germany and Britain, along with leopards, hyaenas, and African elephants. But as the cold intervals came on and the edge of the polar ice-sheet crept southward and mountain glaciers filled up the valleys, these men and beasts retreated into Africa; and their place was taken by a sub-arctic race of men known as the Cave men, along with the reindeer and arctic fox and musk-sheep. More than once with the secular alternations of temperature did the River-drift men thus advance and retreat and advance again, and as they advanced the Cave men retreated, both races yielding to an enemy stronger than either,--to wit, the hostile climate. At length all traces of the River-drift men vanish, but what of the Cave men? They have left no representatives among the present populations of Europe, but the musk-sheep, which always went and came with the Cave men, is to-day found only in sub-arctic America among the Eskimos, and the fossilized bones of the musk-sheep lie in a regular trail across the eastern hemisphere, from the Pyrenees through Germany and Russia and all the vast length of Siberia. The stone arrow-heads, the sewing-needles, the necklaces and amulets of cut teeth, and the daggers made from antler, used by the Eskimos, resemble so minutely the implements of the Cave men, that if recent Eskimo remains were to be put into the Pleistocene caves of France and England they would be indistinguishable in appearance from the remains of the Cave men which are now found there. There is another striking point of resemblance. The Eskimos have a talent for artistic sketching of men and beasts, and scenes in which men and beasts figure, which is absolutely unrivalled among rude peoples. One need but look at the sketches by common Eskimo fishermen which illustrate Dr. Henry Rink's fascinating book on Danish Greenland, to realize that this rude Eskimo art has a character as pronounced and unmistakable in its way as the much higher art of the Japanese. Now among the European remains of the Cave men are many sketches of mammoths, cave bears, and other animals now extinct, and hunting scenes so artfully and vividly portrayed as to bring distinctly before us many details of daily life in an antiquity so vast that in comparison with it the interval between the pyramids of Egypt and the Eiffel tower shrinks into a point. Such a talent is unique among savage peoples. It exists only among the living Eskimos and the ancient Cave men; and when considered in connection with so many other points of agreement, and with the indisputable fact that the Cave men were a sub-arctic race, it affords a strong presumption in favour of the opinion of that great palaeontologist, Professor Boyd Dawkins, that the Eskimos of North America are to-day the sole survivors of the race that made their homes in the Pleistocene caves of western Europe.

If we have always been accustomed to think of races of men only as they are placed on modern maps, it at first seems strange to think of England and France as ever having been inhabited by Eskimos. Facts equally strange may be cited in abundance from zo?logy and botany. The camel is found to-day only in Arabia and Bactria; yet in all probability the camel originated in America, and is an intruder into what we are accustomed to call his native deserts, just as the people of the United States are European intruders upon the soil of America. So the giant trees of Mariposa grove are now found only in California, but there was once a time when they were as common in Europe as maple-trees to-day in a New England village.

Familiarity with innumerable facts of this sort, concerning the complicated migrations and distribution of plants and animals, has entirely altered our way of looking at the question as to the origin of the American Indians. As already observed, we can hardly be said to possess sufficient data for determining whether they are descended from the Pleistocene inhabitants of America, or have come in some later wave of migration from the Old World. Nor can we as yet determine whether they were earlier or later comers than the Eskimos. But since we have got rid of that feeling of speculative necessity above referred to, for bringing the red men from Asia within the historic period, it has become more and more clear that they have dwelt upon American soil for a very long time. The aboriginal American, as we know him, with his language and legends, his physical and mental peculiarities, his social observances and customs, is most emphatically a native and not an imported article. He belongs to the American continent as strictly as its opossums and armadillos, its maize and its golden-rod, or any members of its aboriginal fauna and flora belong to it. In all probability he came from the Old World at some ancient period, whether pre-glacial or post-glacial, when it was possible to come by land; and here in all probability, until the arrival of white men from Europe, he remained undisturbed by later comers, unless the Eskimos may have been such. There is not a particle of evidence to suggest any connection or intercourse between aboriginal America and Asia within any such period as the last twenty thousand years, except in so far as there may perhaps now and then have been slight surges of Eskimo tribes back and forth across Bering strait.

The Indians must surely be regarded as an entirely different stock from the Eskimos. On the other hand, the most competent American ethnologists are now pretty thoroughly agreed that all the aborigines south of the Eskimo region, all the way from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, belong to one and the same race. It was formerly supposed that the higher culture of the Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians must indicate that they were of different race from the more barbarous Algonquins and Dakotas; and a speculative necessity was felt for proving that, whatever may have been the case with the other American peoples, this higher culture at any rate must have been introduced within the historic period from the Old World. This feeling was caused partly by the fact that, owing to crude and loosely-framed conceptions of the real points of difference between civilization and barbarism, this Central American culture was absurdly exaggerated. As the further study of the uncivilized parts of the world has led to more accurate and precise conceptions, this kind of speculative necessity has ceased to be felt. There is an increasing disposition among scholars to agree that the warrior of Anahuac and the shepherd of the Andes were just simply Indians, and that their culture was no less indigenous than that of the Cherokees or Mohawks.

To prevent any possible misconception of my meaning, a further word of explanation may be needed at this point. The word "race" is used in such widely different senses that there is apt to be more or less vagueness about it. The difference is mainly in what logicians call extension; sometimes the word covers very little ground, sometimes a great deal. We say that the people of England, of the United States, and of New South Wales belong to one and the same race; and we say that an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Greek belong to three different races. There is a sense in which both these statements are true. But there is also a sense in which we may say that the Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Greek belong to one and the same race; and that is when we are contrasting them as white men with black men or yellow men. Now we may correctly say that a Shawnee, an Ojibwa, and a Kickapoo belong to one and the same Algonquin race; that a Mohawk and a Tuscarora belong to one and the same Iroquois race; but that an Algonquin differs from an Iroquois somewhat as an Englishman differs from a Frenchman. No doubt we may fairly say that the Mexicans encountered by Cortes differed in race from the Iroquois encountered by Champlain, as much as an Englishman differs from an Albanian or a Montenegrin. But when we are contrasting aboriginal Americans with white men or yellow men, it is right to say that Mexicans and Iroquois belong to the same great red race.

In some parts of the world two strongly contrasted races have become mingled together, or have existed side by side for centuries without intermingling. In Europe the big blonde Aryan-speaking race has mixed with the small brunette Iberian race, producing the endless varieties in stature and complexion which may be seen in any drawing-room in London or New York. In Africa south of Sahara, on the other hand, we find, interspersed among negro tribes but kept perfectly distinct, that primitive dwarfish race with yellow skin and tufted hair to which belong the Hottentots and Bushmen, the Wambatti lately discovered by Mr. Stanley, and other tribes. Now in America south of Hudson's Bay the case seems to have been quite otherwise, and more as it would have been in Europe if there had been only Aryans, or in Africa if there had been only blacks.

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