Gambar halaman
PDF
ePub

CHAPTER X.

THE MOUND BUILDERS AND THE FIRST MEN IN THE VALLEY.

When the Age of Ice drew to its close the Champlain Period opened. The indications are that during the Glacial Period the northern part of the continent was raised at least some hundreds of feet higher than now. This elevation was followed by a sinking of the same regions, or, at least, of all that lay below the northern border of Lake Superior, several hundred feet lower than now. It was as if Mother Nature filled her lungs and emptied them again, causing a measured rise and fall of her bosom. The St. Lawrence Valley was an arm of the sea far up toward Lake Ontario, and salt-water stood some hundreds of feet deep over Montreal. Lake Champlain was an interior sea, visited by whales, while huge animals, among them the mammoth, browsed on its banks and left their bones in its marshes.

Both in this country and in Europe multitudes of very large and very ferocious animals made their appearance in this Age of the Drift-often called the Champlain Period, because it has been most carefully studied near that Lakeand at this time the first traces of man are found on each continent. It was a period of fresh-water overflow from the melting ice, of lakes and marshes in the Valley, and the remains of animals were buried in the drift as it was distributed by the surging floods. The traces of man in this period are very numerous in Europe, and are not wanting in America, though not so fully studied here.

Many facts have been collected which seem to leave no doubt that men lived in the Valley when the mammoth, the mastodon, the lion, the tiger, and other large and ferocious

[graphic][merged small][subsumed]
[ocr errors][merged small][merged small]

animals, since extinct, roamed over the highlands, and were mired in the marshes. "Big-bone Lick," in Kentucky, acquired its name from the numbers of the immense animals whose remains were entombed there. In a similar spot near the Osage River, in Missouri, the bones of some eighty or more distinct animals have been found. Among these were found several arrow-heads of human manufacture. One was beneath the bones of a mammoth entombed fifteen feet below the surface in a mass of drift.

In another part of the same state the indications were very plain that one of these huge animals was mired in the presence of men, who attacked it with flint-tipped arrows, spears, and stone axes, when, finding the animal helpless but tenacious of life, they built a fire around its head and destroyed it, after which the spot, with all these proofs of human presence, was covered by drift and soil. Numerous marks of a similar kind have been found at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. In the Mississippi delta, below New Orleans, a human skeleton was found beneath two successive forests of cypress. Many other indications, within and without the Valley, go to confirm the same point. The shell-heaps of Florida and California are as significant as the "Kitchen-middings" of Denmark.

So far as the general tone of these indications can now be estimated, they are fully in keeping with later developments. The early European man progressed steadily, so that four dif ferent stages of approach to civilization are seen to stand out with great distinctness. They are characterized by the arms and tools of each period as the Rude Stone Age, the Polished Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age.

These distinctions are not as sharp and clear in America, but there is a marked resemblance. The implements, indicated by their position in the drift as the oldest on this continent, are rude. The Mound Builders belonged to the Polished Stone Age, and the Peruvians reach the development of the Bronze Age; but the Iron Age was introduced by Europeans.

The movement toward civilization here was slower and had some very weak sides where that of the Old World came out strong. It can not well be doubted, however, that the Valley was inhabited as early as the western part of Europe; that the start was from the same point of rudeness; and that progress was only made by select races under favoring circumstances. The Indians were always savages, and it is unlikely that the first men in the Valley tended toward civilization. Whence came the first inhabitants of America? question that has awakened great interest, and the books that have been written on it are to be counted by thousands. It has been, and is still, a general impression that the human race originated in Asia. Many courses of inquiry indicate the highlands near the Caspian Sea as the point from which dispersion commenced for the Old World races; but the more closely the Aborigines and ancient monuments of America are studied, the more difficult does it seem to make out their origin. Books have been written to prove their descent from almost every leading race in Asia and Europe; but the more exact studies of recent science show that they have no detailed likeness with any, and that their separation—if that took place-must have been accomplished before the original stock had made any important or permanent progress. In color, languages and features of character, viewed as a whole, they are a class apart, while the Old World has four well

marked classes.

After these first traces of man there seems to be, as yet, a long blank during which, in Europe, the record is apparently continuous; but that was a region of limited and favorable areas surrounded with barriers which protected dawning improvement, while America permitted wide dispersion. This circumstance was highly unfavorable to steady advance. There was too wide a range over a region abundant in spontaneous gifts to man, which, in temporary want or danger, permitted easy migration to better supplies and greater security.

« SebelumnyaLanjutkan »