THE RED MAN’S CONTINENT

A CHRONICLE OF ABORIGINAL AMERICA

By Ellsworth Huntington

NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK &
CO.

LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

1919

Contents

PREFACE

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

PREFACE

In writing this book the author has aimed first to present in readable
form the main facts about the geographical environment of American
history. Many important facts have been omitted or have been touched upon
only lightly because they are generally familiar. On the other hand,
special stress has been laid on certain broad phases of geography which
are comparatively unfamiliar. One of these is the similarity of form
between the Old World and the New, and between North and South America;
another is the distribution of indigenous types of vegetation in North
America; and a third is the relation of climate to health and energy. In
addition to these subjects, the influence of geographical conditions upon
the life of the primitive Indians has been emphasized. This factor is
especially important because people without iron tools and beasts of
burden, and without any cereal crops except corn, must respond to their
environment very differently from civilized people of today. Limits of
space and the desire to make this book readable have led to the omission
of the detailed proof of some of the conclusions here set forth. The
special student will recognize such cases and will not judge them until he
has read the author’s fuller statements elsewhere. The general reader, for
whom this book is designed, will be thankful for the omission of such
purely technical details.

THE RED MAN’S CONTINENT

CHAPTER I. THE APPROACHES TO AMERICA

Across the twilight lawn at Hampton Institute straggles a group of sturdy
young men with copper-hued complexions. Their day has been devoted to
farming, carpentry, blacksmithing, or some other trade. Their evening will
be given to study. Those silent dignified Indians with straight black hair
and broad, strong features are training their hands and minds in the hope
that some day they may stand beside the white man as equals. Behind them,
laughing gayly and chattering as if without a care in the world, comes a
larger group of kinky-haired, thick-lipped youths with black skins and
African features. They, too, have been working with the hands to train the
mind. Those two diverse races, red and black, sit down together in a
classroom, and to them comes another race. The faces that were
expressionless or merely mirthful a minute ago light up with serious
interest as the teacher comes into the room. She stands there a slender,
golden-haired, blue-eyed Anglo-Saxon girl just out of college—a mere
child compared with the score of swarthy, stalwart men as old as herself
who sit before her. Her mobile features seem to mirror a hundred thoughts
while their impassive faces are moved by only one. Her quick speech almost
trips in its eagerness not to waste the short, precious hour. Only a
strong effort holds her back while she waits for the slow answers of the
young men whom she drills over and over again in simple problems of
arithmetic. The class and the teacher are an epitome of American history.
They are more than that. They are an epitome of all history.

History in its broadest aspect is a record of man’s migrations from one
environment to another. America is the last great goal of these
migrations. He who would understand its history must know its mountains
and plains, its climate, its products, and its relation to the sea and to
other parts of the world. He must know more than this, however, for he
must appreciate how various environments alter man’s energy and capacity
and give his character a slant in one direction or another. He must also
know the paths by which the inhabitants have reached their present homes,
for the influence of former environments upon them may be more important
than their immediate surroundings. In fact, the history of North America
has been perhaps more profoundly influenced by man’s inheritance from his
past homes than by the physical features of his present home. It is indeed
of vast importance that trade can move freely through such natural
channels as New York Harbor, the Mohawk Valley, and the Great Lakes. It is
equally important that the eastern highlands of the United States are full
of the world’s finest coal, while the central plains raise some of the
world’s most lavish crops. Yet it is probably even more important that
because of his inheritance from a remote ancestral environment man is
energetic, inventive, and long-lived in certain parts of the American
continent, while elsewhere he has not the strength and mental vigor to
maintain even the degree of civilization to which he seems to have risen.

Three streams of migration have mainly determined the history of America.
One was an ancient and comparatively insignificant stream from Asia. It
brought the Indian to the two great continents which the white man has now
practically wrested from him. A second and later stream was the great tide
which rolled in from Europe. It is as different from the other as West is
from East. Thus far it has not wholly obliterated the native people, for
between the southern border of the United States on the one hand, and the
northern borders of Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay on the other, the vast
proportion of the blood is still Indian. The European tide may in time
dominate even this region, but for centuries to come the poor,
disinherited Indians will continue to form the bulk of the population. The
third stream flowed from Africa and was as different from either of the
others as South is from North.

The differences between one and another of these three streams of
population and the antagonisms which they have involved have greatly
colored American history. The Indian, the European, and the Negro
apparently differ not only in outward appearance but in the much more
important matter of mentality. According to Brinton * the average brain
capacity of Parisians, including adults of both sexes, is 1448 cubic
centimeters. That of the American Indian is 1376, and that of the Negro
1344 cubic centimeters. With this difference in size there appears to be a
corresponding difference in function. Thus far not enough accurate tests
have been made upon Indians to enable us to draw reliable conclusions. The
Negro, however, has been tested on an extensive scale. The results seem to
leave little doubt that there are real and measurable differences in the
mental powers of races, just as we know to be the case among individuals.
The matter is so important that we may well dwell on it a moment before
turning to the cause of the differences in the three streams of American
immigrants. If there is a measurable difference between the inherent brain
power of the white race and the black, it is practically certain that
there are also measurable differences between the white and the red.

Numerous tests indicate that in the lower mental powers there is no great
difference between the black and the white. In physical reactions one is
as quick as the other. In the capacity of the senses and in the power to
perceive and to discriminate between different kinds of objects there is
also practical equality. When it comes to the higher faculties, however,
such as judgment, inventiveness, and the power of organization, a
difference begins to be apparent. These, as Ferguson * says, are the
traits that “divide mankind into the able and the mediocre, the brilliant
and the dull, and they determine the progress of civilization more
directly than do the simple fundamental powers which man has in common
with the lower animals.” On the basis of the most exhaustive study yet
made, Ferguson believes that, apart from all differences due to home
training and environment, the average intellectual power of the colored
people of this country is only about three-fourths as great as that of
white persons of the same amount of training. He believes it probable,
indeed, that this estimate is too high rather than too low. As to the
Indian, his past achievements and present condition indicate that
intellectually he stands between the white man and the Negro in about the
position that would be expected from the capacity of his brain. If this is
so, the mental differences in the three streams of migration to America
are fully as great as the outward and manifest physical differences and
far more important.

Why does the American Indian differ from the Negro, and the European from
both? This is a question on which we can only speculate. But we shall find
it profitable to study the paths by which these diverse races found their
way to America from man’s primeval home. According to the now almost
universally accepted theory, all the races of mankind had a common origin.
But where did man make the change from a four-handed, tree-dwelling little
ape to a much larger, upright creature with two hands and two feet? It is
a mistake to suppose that because he is hairless he must have originated
in a warm climate. In fact quite the opposite seems to be the case, for
apparently he lost his hair because he took to wearing the skins of slain
beasts in order that he might have not only his own hair but that of other
animals as a protection from the cold.

In our search for the starting-place of man’s slow migration to America
our first step should be to ascertain what responses to physical
environment are common to all men. If we find that all men live and thrive
best under certain climatic conditions, it is fair to assume that those
conditions prevailed in man’s original home, and this conclusion will
enable us to cast out of the reckoning the regions where they do not
prevail. A study of the relations of millions of deaths to weather
conditions indicates that the white race is physically at its best when
the average temperature for night and day ranges from about 50 to 73
degrees F. and when the air is neither extremely moist nor extremely dry.
In addition to these conditions there must be not only seasonal changes
but frequent changes from day to day. Such changes are possible only where
there is a distinct winter and where storms are of frequent occurrence.
The best climate is, therefore, one where the temperature ranges from not
much below the freezing-point at night in winter to about 80 degrees F. by
day in summer, and where the storms which bring daily changes are frequent
at all seasons.

Surprising as it may seem, this study indicates that similar conditions
are best for all sorts of races. Finns from the Arctic Circle and Italians
of sunny Sicily have the best health and greatest energy under practically
the same conditions; so too with Frenchmen, Japanese, and Americans. Most
surprising of all, the African black man in the United States is likewise
at his best in essentially the same kind of weather that is most favorable
for his white fellow-citizens, and for Finns, Italians, and other races.
For the red race, no exact figures are available, but general observation
of the Indian’s health and activity suggests that in this respect he is at
one with the rest of mankind.

For the source of any characteristic so widespread and uniform as this
adaptation to environment we must go back to the very beginning of the
human race. Such a characteristic must have become firmly fixed in the
human constitution before primitive man became divided into races, or at
least before any of the races had left their original home and started on
their long journey to America. On the way to this continent one race took
on a dark reddish or brownish hue and its hair grew straight and black;
another became black skinned and crinkly-haired, while a third developed a
white skin and wavy blonde hair. Yet throughout the thousands of years
which brought about these changes, all the races apparently retained the
indelible constitutional impress of the climate of their common
birthplace. Man’s physical adaptation to climate seems to be a deep-seated
physiological fact like the uniformity of the temperature of the blood in
all races. Just as a change in the temperature of the blood brings
distress to the individual, so a change of climate apparently brings
distress to a race. Again and again, to be sure, on the way to America,
and under many other circumstances, man has passed through the most
adverse climates and has survived, but he has flourished and waxed strong
only in certain zones.

Curiously enough man’s body and his mind appear to differ in their
climatic adaptations. Moreover, in this respect the black race, and
perhaps the red, appears to be diverse from the white. In America an
investigation of the marks of students at West Point and Annapolis
indicates that the best mental work is done when the temperature averages
not much above 40 degrees F. for night and day together. Tests of school
children in Denmark point to a similar conclusion. On the other hand,
daily tests of twenty-two Negroes at Hampton Institute for sixteen months
suggest that their mental ability may be greatest at a temperature only a
little lower than that which is best for the most efficient physical
activity. No tests of this sort have ever been made upon Indians, but such
facts as the inventiveness of the Eskimo, the artistic development of the
people of northern British Columbia and southern Alaska, and the
relatively high civilization of the cold regions of the Peruvian plateau
suggest that the Indian in this respect is more like the white race than
the black. Perhaps man’s mental powers underwent their chief evolution
after the various races had left the aboriginal home in which the physical
characteristics became fixed. Thus the races, though alike in their
physical response to climate, may possibly be different in their mental
response because they have approached America by different paths.

Before we can understand how man may have been modified on his way from
his original home to America, we must inquire as to the geographical
situation of that home. Judging by the climate which mankind now finds
most favorable, the human race must have originated in the temperate
regions of Europe, Asia, or North America. We are not entirely without
evidence to guide to a choice of one of the three continents. There is a
scarcity of indications of preglacial man in the New World and an
abundance of such indications in the Old. To be sure, several skulls found
in America have been supposed to belong to a time before the last glacial
epoch. In every case, however, there has been something to throw doubt on
the conclusion. For instance, some human bones found at Vero in Florida in
1915 seem to be very old. Certain circumstances, however, suggest that
possibly they may not really belong to the layers of gravel in which they
were discovered but may have been inserted at some later time. In the Old
World, on the contrary, no one doubts that many human skulls and other
parts of skeletons belong to the interglacial epoch preceding the last
glacial epoch, while some appear to date from still more remote periods.
Therefore no matter at what date man may have come to America, it seems
clear that he existed in the Old World much earlier. This leaves us to
choose between Europe and Asia. The evidence points to central Asia as
man’s original home, for the general movement of human migrations has been
outward from that region and not inward. So, too, with the great families
of mammals, as we know from fossil remains. From the earliest geological
times the vast interior of Asia has been the great mother of the world,
the source from which the most important families of living things have
come.

Suppose, then, that we place in central Asia the primitive home of the
thin-skinned, hairless human race with its adaptation to a highly variable
climate with temperatures ranging from freezing to eighty degrees. Man
could not stay there forever. He was bound to spread to new regions,
partly because of his innate migratory tendency and partly because of
Nature’s stern urgency. Geologists are rapidly becoming convinced that the
mammals spread from their central Asian point of origin largely because of
great variations in climate. * Such variations have taken place on an
enormous scale during geological times. They seem, indeed, to be one of
the most important factors in evolution. Since early man lived through the
successive epochs of the glacial period, he must have been subject to the
urgency of vast climatic changes. During the half million years more or
less of his existence, cold, stormy, glacial epochs lasting tens of
thousands of years have again and again been succeeded by warm, dry,
interglacial epochs of equal duration.

During the glacial epochs the interior of Asia was well watered and full
of game which supplied the primitive human hunters. With the advent of
each interglacial epoch the rains diminished, grass and trees disappeared,
and the desert spread over enormous tracts. Both men and animals must have
been driven to sore straits for lack of food. Migration to better regions
was the only recourse. Thus for hundreds of thousands of years there
appears to have been a constantly recurring outward push from the center
of the world’s greatest land mass. That push, with the consequent
overcrowding of other regions, seems to have been one of the chief forces
impelling people to migrate and cover the earth.

Among the primitive men who were pushed outward from the Asian deserts
during a period of aridity, one group migrated northeastward toward the
Kamchatkan corner of Asia. Whether they reached Bering Sea and the
Kamchatkan shore before the next epoch of glaciation we do not know.
Doubtless they moved slowly, perhaps averaging only a few score or a
hundred miles per generation, for that is generally the way with
migrations of primitive people advancing into unoccupied territory. Yet
sometimes they may have moved with comparative rapidity. I have seen a
tribe of herdsmen in central Asia abandon its ancestral home and start on
a zigzag march of a thousand miles because of a great drought. The grass
was so scanty that there was not enough to support the animals. The tribe
left a trail of blood, for wherever it moved it infringed upon the rights
of others and so with conflict was driven onward. In some such way the
primitive wanderers were kept in movement until at last they reached the
bleak shores of the North Pacific. Even there something—perhaps
sheer curiosity—still urged them on. The green island across the bay
may have been so enticing that at last a raft of logs was knotted together
with stout withes. Perhaps at first the men paddled themselves across
alone, but the hunting and fishing proved so good that at length they took
the women and children with them, and so advanced another step along the
route toward America. At other times distress, strife, or the search for
game may have led the primitive nomads on and on along the coast until a
day came when the Asian home was left and the New World was entered. The
route by which primitive man entered America is important because it
determined the surroundings among which the first Americans lived for many
generations. It has sometimes been thought that the red men came to
America by way of the Kurile Islands, Kamchatka, and the Aleutian Islands.
If this was their route, they avoided a migration of two or three thousand
miles through one of the coldest and most inhospitable of regions. This,
however, is far from probable. The distance from Kamchatka to the first of
the Aleutian Islands is over one hundred miles. As the island is not in
sight from the mainland, there is little chance that a band of savages,
including women, would deliberately sail thither. There is equally little
probability that they walked to the island on the ice, for the sea is
never frozen across the whole width. Nevertheless the climate may at that
time have been colder than now. There is also a chance that a party of
savages may have been blown across to the island in a storm. Suppose that
they succeeded in reaching Bering Island, as the most Asiatic of the
Aleutians is called, the next step to Copper Island would be easy. Then,
however, there comes a stretch of more than two hundred miles. The chances
that a family would ever cross this waste of ocean are much smaller than
in the first case. Still another possibility remains. Was there once a
bridge of land from Asia to America in this region? There is no evidence
of such a link between the two continents, for a few raised beaches
indicate that during recent geological times the Aleutian Islands have
been uplifted rather than depressed.

The passage from Asia to America at Bering Strait, on the other hand, is
comparatively easy. The Strait itself is fifty-six miles wide, but in the
middle there are two small islands so that the longest stretch of water is
only about thirty-five miles. Moreover the Strait is usually full of ice,
which frequently becomes a solid mass from shore to shore. Therefore it
would be no strange thing if some primitive savages, in hunting for seals
or polar bears, crossed the Strait, even though they had no boats. Today
the people on both sides of the Strait belong to the American race. They
still retain traditions of a time when their ancestors crossed this narrow
strip of water. The Thilanottines have a legend that two giants once
fought fiercely on the Arctic Ocean. One would have been defeated had not
a man whom he had befriended cut the tendon of his adversary’s leg. The
wounded giant fell into Bering Strait and formed a bridge across which the
reindeer entered America. Later came a strange woman bringing iron and
copper. She repeated her visits until the natives insulted her, whereupon
she went underground with her fire-made treasures and came back no more.
Whatever may have been the circumstances that led the earliest families to
cross from Asia to America, they little recked that they had found a new
continent and that they were the first of the red race.

Unless the first Americans came to the new continent by way of the Kurile
and Aleutian Islands, it was probably their misfortune to spend many
generations in the cold regions of northeastern Asia and northwestern
America. Even if they reached Alaska by the Aleutian route but came to the
islands by way of the northern end of the Kamchatkan Peninsula, they must
have dwelt in a place where the January temperature averages -10 degrees
F. and where there are frosts every month in the year. If they came across
Bering Strait, they encountered a still more severe climate. The winters
there are scarcely worse than in northern Kamchatka, but the summers are
as cold as the month of March in New York or Chicago.

Perhaps a prolonged sojourn in such a climate is one reason for the stolid
character of the Indians. Of course we cannot speak with certainty, but we
must, in our search for an explanation, consider the conditions of life in
the far north. Food is scanty at all times, and starvation is a frequent
visitor, especially in winter when game is hard to get. The long periods
of cold and darkness are terribly enervating. The nervous white man goes
crazy if he stays too long in Alaska. Every spring the first boats
returning to civilization carry an unduly large proportion of men who have
lost their minds because they have endured too many dark, cold winters.
His companions say of such a man, “The North has got him.” Almost every
Alaskan recognizes the danger. As one man said to a friend, “It is time I
got out of here.”

“Why?” said the friend, “you seem all right. What’s the matter?”

“Well,” said the other, “you see I begin to like the smell of skunk
cabbage, and, when a man gets that way, it’s time he went somewhere else.”

The skunk cabbage, by the way, grows in Alaska in great thickets ten feet
high. The man was perfectly serious, for he meant that his mind was
beginning to act in ways that were not normal. Nowhere is the strain of
life in the far north better described than in the poems of Robert W.
Service.

Oh, the awful hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand, As I
blundered blind with a trail to find through that blank and bitter land;
Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, with its grim heartbreaking
woes, And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough
knows! North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain
Passed like a dream I slept to lose and waked to dream again. River and
plain and mighty peak—and who could stand unawed? As their summits
blazed, he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God. North,
aye, North, through a land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes, And
all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes, Till at
last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill, And I burst in
the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death, lay Bill. *

The human organism inherits so delicate an adjustment to climate that, in
spite of man’s boasted ability to live anywhere, the strain of the frozen
North eliminates the more nervous and active types of mind. Only those can
endure whose nerves lack sensitiveness and who are able to bear long
privation and the strain of hunger and cold and darkness. Though the
Indian may differ from the white man in many respects, such conditions are
probably as bad for him as for any race. For this reason it is not
improbable that long sojourns at way stations on the cold, Alaskan route
from central Asia may have weeded out certain types of minds. Perhaps that
is why the Indian, though brave, stoical, and hardy, does not possess the
alert, nervous temperament which leads to invention and progress.

The ancestors of the red man unwittingly chose the easiest path to America
and so entered the continent first, but this was their misfortune. They
could not inherit the land because they chose a path whose unfavorable
influence, exerted throughout centuries, left them unable to cope with
later arrivals from other directions. The parts of America most favorable
for the Indian are also best for the white man and Negro. There the
alerter minds of the Europeans who migrated in the other direction have
quickly eliminated the Indian. His long northern sojourn may be the reason
why farther south in tropical lands he is even now at a disadvantage
compared with the Negro or with the coolie from the East Indies. In
Central America, for instance, it is generally recognized that Negroes
stand the heat and moisture of the lowlands better than Indians. According
to a competent authority: “The American Indians cannot bear the heat of
the tropics even as well as the European, not to speak of the African
race. They perspire little, their skin becomes hot, and they are easily
prostrated by exertion in an elevated temperature. They are peculiarly
subject to diseases of hot climates, as hepatic disorders, showing none of
the immunity of the African. Furthermore, the finest physical specimens of
the race are found in the colder regions of the temperate zones, the
Pampas and Patagonian Indians in the south, the Iroquois and Algonkins in
the north; whereas, in the tropics they are generally undersized,
short-lived, of inferior muscular force and with slight tolerance of
disease.” * “No one,” adds another observer, “could live among the Indians
of the Upper Amazon without being struck with their constitutional dislike
to heat. The impression forced itself upon my mind that the Indian lives
as a stranger or immigrant in these hot regions.” * * Thus when compared
with the other inhabitants of America, from every point of view the Indian
seems to be at a disadvantage, much of which may be due to the path which
he took from the Old World to the New.

Before the red man lost his American heritage, he must have enjoyed it for
thousands upon thousands of years. Otherwise he never could have become so
different from his nearest relative, the Mongol. The two are as truly
distinct races as are the white man and the Malay. Nor could the Indians
themselves have become so extraordinarily diverse except during the lapse
of thousands of years. The Quichua of the cold highlands of Peru is as
different from the Maya of Yucatan or the Huron of southern Canada as the
Swede is from the Armenian or the Jew. The separation of one stock from
another has gone so far that almost countless languages have been
developed. In the United States alone the Indians have fifty-five
“families” of languages and in the whole of America there are nearly two
hundred such groups. These comprise over one thousand distinct languages
which are mutually unintelligible and at least as different as Spanish and
Italian. Such differences might arise in a day at the Tower of Babel, but
in the processes of evolution they take thousands of years.

During those thousands of years the red man, in spite of his Arctic
handicap, by no means showed himself wholly lacking in originality and
inventive ability. In Yucatan two or three thousand years ago the Mayas
were such good scientists and recorded their observations of the stars so
accurately that they framed a calendar more exact than any except the one
that we have used for the last two centuries. They showed still greater
powers of mind in inventing the art of writing and in their architecture.
Later we shall depict the environment under which these things occurred;
it is enough to suggest in passing that perhaps at this period the
ancestors of the Indians had capacities as great as those of any people.
Today they might possibly hold their own against the white man, were it
not for the great handicap which they once suffered because Asia
approaches America only in the cold, depressing north.

The Indians were not the only primitive people who were driven from
central Asia by aridity. Another group pushed westward toward Europe. They
fared far better than their Indian cousins who went to the northeast.
These prospective Europeans never encountered benumbing physical
conditions like those of northeastern Asia and northwestern America. Even
when ice shrouded the northern part of Europe, the rest of the continent
was apparently favored with a stimulating climate. Then as now, Europe was
probably one of the regions where storms are most frequent. Hence it was
free from the monotony which is so deadly in other regions. When the ice
retreated our European ancestors doubtless followed slowly in its wake.
Thus their racial character was evolved in one of the world’s most
stimulating regions. Privation they must have suffered, and hardihood and
boldness were absolutely essential in the combat with storms, cold, wild
beasts, fierce winds, and raging waves. But under the spur of constant
variety and change, these difficulties were merely incentives to progress.
When the time came for the people of the west of Europe to cross to
America, they were of a different caliber from the previous immigrants.

Two facts of physical geography brought Europe into contact with America.
One of these was the islands of the North, the other the trade-winds of
the South. Each seems to have caused a preliminary contact which failed to
produce important results. As in the northern Pacific, so in the northern
Atlantic, islands are stepping-stones from the Old World to the New. Yet
because in the latter case the islands are far apart, it is harder to
cross the water from Norway and the Lofoten Islands to Iceland and
Greenland than it is to cross from Asia by way of the Aleutian Islands or
Bering Strait. Nevertheless in the tenth century of the Christian era bold
Norse vikings made the passage in the face of storm and wind. In their
slender open ships they braved the elements on voyage after voyage. We
think of the vikings as pirates, and so they were. But they were also
diligent colonists who tilled the ground wherever it would yield even the
scantiest living. In Iceland and Greenland they must have labored mightily
to carry on the farms of which the Sagas tell us. When they made their
voyages, honest commerce was generally in their minds quite as much as was
plunder. Leif, the son of that rough Red Eric who first settled Greenland,
made a famous voyage to Vinland, the mainland of America. Like so many
other voyagers he was bent on finding a region where men could live
happily and on filling his boats with grapes, wood, or other commodities
worth carrying home.

In view of the energy of the Norsemen, the traces of their presence in the
Western Hemisphere are amazingly slight. In Greenland a few insignificant
heaps of stones are supposed to show where some of them built small
villages. Far in the north Stefansson found fair-haired, blue-eyed
Eskimos. These may be descendants of the Norsemen, although they have
migrated thousands of miles from Greenland. In Maine the Micmac Indians
are said to have had a curious custom which they may have learned from the
vikings. When a chief died, they chose his largest canoe. On it they piled
dry wood, and on the wood they placed the body. Then they set fire to the
pile and sent the blazing boat out to sea. Perhaps in earlier times the
Micmacs once watched the flaming funeral pyre of a fair-haired viking. As
the ruddy flames leaped skyward and were reflected in the shimmering waves
of the great waters the tribesmen must have felt that the Great Spirit
would gladly welcome a chief who came in such a blaze of glory. *

It seems strange that almost no other traces of the strong vikings are
found in America. The explanation lies partly in the length and difficulty
of the ocean voyage, and partly in the inhospitable character of the two
great islands that served as stepping-stones from the Old World to the
New. Iceland with its glaciers, storms, and long dreary winters is bad
enough. Greenland is worse. Merely the tip of that island was known to the
Norse—and small wonder, for then as now most of Greenland was
shrouded in ice. Various Scandinavian authors, however, have thought that
during the most prosperous days of the vikings the conditions in Greenland
were not quite so bad as at the present day. One settlement, Osterbyden,
numbered 190 farms, 12 churches, 2 monasteries, and 1 bishopric. It is
even stated that apple-trees bore fruit and that some wheat was raised.
“Cattle-raising and fishing,” says Pettersson, “appear to have procured a
good living…. At present the whole stock of cattle in Greenland does not
amount to 100 animals.” * In those days the ice which borders all the east
coast and much of the west seems to have been less troublesome than now.
In the earliest accounts nothing is said of this ice as a danger to
navigation. We are told that the best sailing route was through the strait
north of Cape Farewell Island, where today no ships can pass because of
the ice. Since the days of the Norsemen the glaciers have increased in
size, for the natives say that certain ruins are now buried beneath the
ice, while elsewhere ruins can be seen which have been cut off from the
rest of the country by advancing glacial tongues.

Why the Norsemen disappeared from the Western Hemisphere we do not exactly
know, but there are interesting hints of an explanation. It appears that
the fourteenth century was a time of great distress. In Norway the crops
failed year after year because of cold and storms. Provinces which were
formerly able to support themselves by agriculture were obliged to import
food. The people at home were no longer able to keep in touch with the
struggling colony in Greenland. No supplies came from the home land, no
reenforcements to strengthen the colonists and make them feel that they
were a part of the great world. Moreover in the late Norse sagas much is
said about the ice along the Greenland coast, which seems to have been
more abundant than formerly. Even the Eskimos seem to have been causing
trouble, though formerly they had been a friendly, peaceable people who
lived far to the north and did not disturb the settlers. In the fourteenth
century, however, they began to make raids such as are common when
primitive people fall into distress. Perhaps the storms and the advancing
ice drove away the seals and other animals, so that the Eskimos were left
hungry. They consequently migrated south and, in the fifteenth century,
finally wiped out the last of the old Norse settlers. If the Norse had
established permanent settlements on the mainland of North America, they
might have persisted to this day. As it was, the cold, bleak climate of
the northern route across the Atlantic checked their progress. Like the
Indians, they had the misfortune of finding a route to America through
regions that are not good for man.

Though islands may be stepping-stones between the Old World and the New,
they have not been the bringers of civilization. That function in the
history of man has been left to the winds. The westerlies, however, which
are the prevailing winds in the latitude of the United States and Europe,
have not been of much importance. On the Atlantic side they were for many
centuries a barrier to contact between the Old World and the New. On the
Pacific side they have been known to blow Japanese vessels to the shores
of America contrary to the will of the mariners. Perhaps the same thing
may have happened in earlier times. Asia may thus have made some slight
contribution to primitive America, but no important elements of
civilization can be traced to this source.

From latitude 30 degrees N. to 30 degrees S. the tradewinds prevail. As
they blow from the east, they make it easy for boats to come from Africa
to America. In comparatively recent times they brought the slave ships
from the Guinea coast to our Southern States. The African, like the
Indian, has passed through a most unfavorable environment on his way from
central Asia to America. For ages he was doomed to live in a climate where
high temperature and humidity weed out the active type of human being.
Since activity like that of Europe means death in a tropical climate, the
route by way of Africa has been if anything worse than by Bering Strait.

By far the most important occurrence which can be laid at the door of the
trade-winds is the bringing of the civilization of Europe and the
Mediterranean to the New World. Twice this may have happened, but the
first occurrence is doubtful and left only a slight impress. For thousands
of years the people around the Mediterranean Sea have been bold sailors.
Before 600 B.C. Pharaoh Necho, so Herodotus says, had sent Phenician ships
on a three-year cruise entirely around Africa. The Phenicians also sailed
by way of Gibraltar to England to bring tin from Cornwall, and by 500 B.C.
the Carthaginians were well acquainted with the Atlantic coast of northern
Africa.

At some time or other, long before the Christian era, a ship belonging to
one of the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean was probably blown to the
shores of America by the steady trade-winds. Of course, no one can say
positively that such a voyage occurred. Yet certain curious similarities
between the Old World and the New enable us to infer with a great deal of
probability that it actually happened. The mere fact, for example, that
the adobe houses of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico are strikingly like
the houses of northern Africa and Persia is no proof that the civilization
of the Old World and the New are related. A similar physical environment
might readily cause the same type of house to be evolved in both places.
When we find striking similarities of other kinds, however, the case
becomes quite different. The constellations of the zodiac, for instance,
are typified by twelve living creatures, such as the twins, the bull, the
lion, the virgin, the crab, and the goat. Only one of the constellations,
the scorpion, presents any real resemblance to the animal for which it is
named. Yet the signs of the zodiac in Mediterranean lands and in
pre-Columbian America from Peru to southern Mexico are almost identical.
Here is a list showing the Latin and English names of the constellations
and their equivalents in the calendars of the Peruvians, Mexicans, and
Mayas. *

Notice how closely these lists are alike. The ram does not appear in
America because no such animal was known there. The nearest substitute was
the llama. In the Old World the second constellation is now called the
bull, but curiously enough in earlier days it was called the stag in
Mesopotamia. The twins, instead of being Castor and Pollux, may equally
well be a man and a woman or two generals. To landsmen not familiar with
creatures of the deep, the crab and the cuttlefish would not seem greatly
different. The lion is unknown in America, but the creature which most
nearly takes his place is the puma or ocelot. So it goes with all the
signs of the zodiac. There are little differences between the Old World
and the New, but they only emphasize the resemblance. Mathematically there
is not one chance in thousands or even millions that such a resemblance
could grow up by accident. Other similarities between ceremonies or
religious words in the Old World and the New might be pointed out, but the
zodiac is illustration enough.

Such resemblances, however, do not indicate a permanent connection between
Mediterranean civilization and that of Central America. They do not even
indicate that any one ever returned from the Western Hemisphere to the
Eastern previous to Columbus. Nor do they indicate that the civilization
of the New World arose from that of the Old. They simply suggest that
after the people of the Mediterranean regions had become well civilized
and after those of America were also sufficiently civilized to assimilate
new ideas, a stray ship or two was blown by the trade-winds across the
Atlantic. That hypothetical voyage was the precursor of the great journey
of Columbus. Without the tradewinds this historic discoverer never could
have found the West Indies. Suppose that a strong west wind had blown him
backward on his course when his men were mutinous. Suppose that he had
been forced to beat against head winds week after week. Is there one
chance in a thousand that even his indomitable spirit could have kept his
craft headed steadily into the west? But because there were the
trade-winds to bring him, the way was opened for the energetic people of
Europe to possess the new continent. Thus the greatest stream of
immigration commenced to flow, and the New World began to take on a
European aspect.

CHAPTER II. THE FORM OF THE CONTINENT

America forms the longest and straightest bone in the earth’s skeleton.
The skeleton consists of six great bones, which may be said to form a
spheroidal tetrahedron, or pyramid with a triangular base, for when a
globe with a fairly rigid surface collapses because of shrinkage, it tends
to assume this form. That is what has happened to the earth. Geologists
tell us that during the thousand million years, more or less, since
geological history began, the earth has grown cooler and hence has
contracted. Moreover some of the chemical compounds of the interior have
been transformed into other compounds which occupy less space. For these
reasons the earth appears to have diminished in size until now its
diameter is from two hundred to four hundred miles less than formerly.
During the process of contraction the crust has collapsed in four main
areas, roughly triangular in shape. Between these stand the six ridges
which we have called the bones. Each of the four depressed areas forms a
side of our tetrahedron and is occupied by an ocean. The ridges and the
areas immediately flanking the oceans form the continents. The side which
we may think of as the base contains the Arctic Ocean. The ridges
surrounding it are broad and flat. Large parts of them stand above
sea-level and form the northern portions of North America, Europe, and
Asia. A second side is the Pacific Ocean with the great ridge of the two
Americas on one hand and Asia and Australia on the other. Next comes the
side containing the Indian Ocean in the hollow and the ridges of Africa
and Australia on either hand. The last of the four sides contains the
Atlantic Ocean and is bounded by Africa and Europe on one hand and North
and South America on the other. Finally the tip of the pyramid projects
above the surrounding waters, and forms the continent of Antarctica.

It may seem a mere accident that this tip lies near the South Pole, while
the center of the opposite face lies near the North Pole. Yet this has
been of almost infinite importance in the evolution not only of plants and
animals but of men. The reason is that this arrangement gives rise to a
vast and almost continuous land mass in comparatively high latitudes. Only
in such places does evolution appear to make rapid progress. *

Evolution is especially stimulated by two conditions. The first is that
there shall be marked changes in the environment so that the process of
natural selection has full opportunity to do its work. The second is that
numerous new forms or mutants, as the biologists call them, shall be
produced. Both of these conditions are most fully met in large continents
in the temperate zone, for in such places climatic variations are most
extreme. Such variations may take the form of extreme changes either from
day to night, from season to season, or from one century to another. In
any case, as Darwin long ago pointed out, they cause some forms of life to
perish while others survive. Thus climatic variations are among the most
powerful factors in causing natural selection and hence in stimulating
evolution. Moreover it has lately been shown that variations in
temperature are one of the chief causes of organic variation. Morgan and
Plough, * for example, have discovered that when a certain fly, called the
drosophila, is subjected to extremes of heat or cold, the offspring show
an unusually strong tendency to differ from the parents. Hence the
climatic variability of the interior of large continents in temperate
latitudes provides new forms of life and then selects some of them for
preservation. The fossils found in the rocks of the earth’s crust support
this view. They indicate that most of the great families of higher animals
originated in the central part of the great land mass of Europe and Asia.
A second but much smaller area of evolution was situated in the similar
part of North America. From these two centers new forms of life spread
outward to other continents. Their movements were helped by the fact that
the tetrahedral form of the earth causes almost all the continents to be
united by bridges of land.

If any one doubts the importance of the tetrahedral form, let him consider
how evolution would have been hampered if the land of the globe were
arranged as isolated masses in low latitudes, while oceans took the place
of the present northern continents. The backwardness of the indigenous
life of Africa shows how an equatorial position retards evolution. The
still more marked backwardness of Australia with its kangaroos and
duck-billed platypuses shows how much greater is the retardation when a
continent is also small and isolated. Today, no less than in the past, the
tetrahedral form of the earth and the relation of the tetrahedron to the
poles and to the equator preserve the conditions that favor rapid
evolution. They are the dominant factors in determining that America shall
be one of the two great centers of civilization.

If North and South America be counted as one major land mass, and Europe,
Asia, and Africa as another, the two present the same general features.
Yet their mountains, plains, and coastal indentations are so arranged that
what is on the east in one is on the west in the other. Their similarity
is somewhat like that of a man’s two hands placed palms down on a table.

On a map of the world place a finger of one hand on the western end of
Alaska and a finger of the other on the northeastern tip of Asia and
follow the main bones of the two continents. See how the chief mountain
systems, the Pacific “cordilleras,” trend away from one another,
southeastward and southwestward. In the centers of the continents they
expand into vast plateaus. That of America in the Rocky Mountain region of
the United States reaches a width of over a thousand miles, while that of
Asia in Tibet and western China expands to far greater proportions.

From the plateaus the two cordilleras swing abruptly Atlantic-ward. The
Eurasian cordillera extends through the Hindu Kush, Caucasus, and Asia
Minor ranges to southern Europe and the Alps. Then it passes on into Spain
and ends in the volcanoes of the Canary Islands. The American cordillera
swings eastward in Mexico and continues as the isolated ranges of the West
Indies until it ends in the volcanoes of Martinique. Central America
appears at first sight to be a continuation of the great cordillera, but
really it is something quite different—a mass of volcanic material
poured out in the gap where the main chain of mountains breaks down for a
space. In neither hemisphere, however, is the main southward sweep of the
mountains really lost. In the Old World the cordillera revives in the
mountains of Syria and southern Arabia and then runs southward along the
whole length of eastern Africa. In America it likewise revives in the
mighty Andes, which take their rise fifteen hundred miles east of the
broken end of the northern cordillera in Mexico. In the Andes even more
distinctly than in Africa the cordillera forms a mighty wall running north
and south. It expands into the plateau of Peru and Bolivia, just as its
African compeer expands into that of Abyssinia, but this is a mere
incident. The main bone, so to speak, keeps on in each case till it
disappears in the great southern ocean. Even there, however, it is not
wholly lost, for it revives in the cold, lofty continent of Antarctica,
where it coalesces once more with the other great tetrahedral ridges of
Africa and Australia.

It is easy to see that these great cordilleras have turned most of the
earth’s chief rivers toward the Atlantic and the Arctic Oceans. That is
why these two oceans with an area of only forty-three million square miles
receive the drainage from twenty million square miles of land, while the
far larger Indian and Pacific Oceans with an area of ninety-one million
square miles receive the rivers of only ten million square miles. The
world’s streams of civilization, like the rivers of water, have flowed
from the great cordilleras toward the Atlantic. Half of the world’s
people, to be sure, are lodged in the relatively small areas known as
China and India on the Pacific side of the Old World cordillera.
Nevertheless the active streams of civilization have flowed mainly on the
other side—the side where man apparently originated. From the
earliest times the mountains have served to determine man’s chief
migrations. Their rugged fastnesses hinder human movements and thereby
give rise to a strong tendency to move parallel to their bases. During the
days of primitive man the trend of the mountains apparently directed his
migrations northeastward to Bering Strait and then southeastward and
southward from one end of America to the other. In the same way the
migrations to Europe and Africa which ultimately reached America moved
mainly parallel to the mountains.

From end to end of America the great mountains form a sharp dividing line.
The aboriginal tribes on the Pacific slope are markedly different from
those farther east across the mountains. Brinton sums the case up
admirably:

“As a rule the tribes of the western coast are not connected with any east
of the mountains. What is more singular, although they differ surprisingly
among themselves in language, they have marked anthropologic similarities,
physical and psychical. Virchow has emphasized the fact that the skulls
from the northern point of Vancouver’s Island reveal an unmistakable
analogy to those from the southern coast of California; and this is to a
degree true of many intermediate points. Not that the crania have the same
indices. On the contrary, they present great and constant differences
within the same tribe; but these differences are analogous one to the
other, and on fixed lines.

“There are many other physical similarities which mark the Pacific Indians
and contrast them with those east of the mountains. The eyes are less
oblique, the nose flatter, the lips fuller, the chin more pointed, the
face wider. There is more hair on the face and in the axilla, and the
difference between the sexes is much more obvious.

“The mental character is also in contrast. The Pacific tribes are more
quiet, submissive, and docile; they have less courage, and less of that
untamable independence which is so constant a feature in the history of
the Algonquins and Iroquois.” *

Although mountains may guide migrations, the plains are the regions where
people dwell in greatest numbers. The plains in the two great land masses
of the Old World and the New have the same inverse or right- and
left-handed symmetry as the mountains. In the north the vast stretches
from the Mackenzie River to the Gulf of Mexico correspond to the plains of
Siberia and Russia from the Lena to the Black Sea. Both regions have a
vast sweep of monotonous tundras at the north and both become fertile
granaries in the center. Before the white man introduced the horse, the
ox, and iron ploughs, there prevailed an extraordinary similarity in the
habits of the plains Indians from Texas to Alberta. All alike depended on
the buffalo; all hunted him in much the same way; all used his skins for
tents and robes, his bones for tools, and his horns for utensils. All
alike made him the center of their elaborate rituals and dances. Because
the plains of North America were easy to traverse, the relatively high
culture of the ancient people of the South spread into the Mississippi
Valley. Hence the Natchez tribe of Mississippi had a highly developed form
of sun-worship and a well-defined caste system with three grades of
nobility in addition to the common people. Even farther north, almost to
the Ohio River, traces of the sun-worship of Mexico had penetrated along
the easy pathway of the plains.

South of the great granaries of North America and Eurasia the plains are
broken, but occur again in the Orinoco region of South America and the
Sahara of Africa. Thence they stretch almost unbroken toward the southern
end of the continents. In view of the fertility of the plains it is
strange that the centers of civilization have so rarely been formed in
these vast level expanses.

The most striking of the inverse resemblances between America and the Old
World are found along the Atlantic border. In the north of Europe the
White Sea corresponds to Hudson Bay in America. Farther toward the
Atlantic Ocean Scandinavia with its mountains, glaciers, and fiords is
similar to Labrador, although more favored because warmer. Next the
islands of Great Britain occupy a position similar to that of Newfoundland
and Prince Edward Island. But here again the eastern climate is much more
favorable than the western. Although practically all of Newfoundland is
south of England, the American island has only six inhabitants per square
mile, while the European country has six hundred. To the east of the
British Isles the North Sea, the Baltic, and Lakes Ladoga and Onega
correspond in striking fashion to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the river of
the same name, and the Great Lakes from Ontario to Superior. Next the
indented shores of western France and the peninsula of Spain resemble our
own indented coast and the peninsula of Florida. Here at last the American
regions are as favored as the European. Farther south the Mediterranean
and Black seas penetrate far into the interior just as does the Gulf of
Mexico, and each continent is nearly cut in two where the canals of Suez
and Panama respectively have been trenched. Finally in the southern
continents a long swing eastward in America balances a similar swing
westward in Africa. Thus Cape Saint Roque and Cape Verde are separated by
scarcely 16 degrees of longitude, although the extreme points of the Gulf
of Mexico and the Black Sea are 140 degrees apart. Finally to the south of
the equator the continents swing away from one another once more,
preserving everywhere the same curious inverse relationship.

Even more striking than the inverse resemblance of the New World to the
Old is the direct similarity of North and South America. In physical form
the two continents are astonishingly alike. Not only does each have the
typical triangular form which would naturally arise from tetrahedral
shrinking of the globe, but there are four other cardinal points of
resemblance. First, in the northeast each possesses an area of extremely
ancient rocks, the Laurentian highlands of Quebec and Labrador in North
America and the highlands of Guiana in South America. Second, in the
southeast lie highlands of old but not the most ancient rocks stretching
from northeast to southwest in the Appalachian region of North America,
and in the Brazilian mountains of the southern continent. Third, along the
western side of each continent recent crustal movements supplemented by
volcanic action on a magnificent scale have given rise to a complex series
of younger mountains, the two great cordilleras. Finally, the spaces
between the three mountain masses are occupied by a series of vast
confluent plains which in each case extend from the northern ocean to the
southern and bend around the southeastern highlands. These plains are the
newest part of America, for many of them have emerged from the sea only in
recent geological times. Taken as a whole the resemblance between the two
continents is striking.

If these four physiographic provinces of North and South America lay in
similar latitudes in the respective continents we might expect each pair
to have a closely similar effect on life. In fauna, flora, and even in
human history they would present broad and important resemblances. As a
matter of fact, however, they are as different as can well be imagined.
Where North America, is bathed by icy waters full of seals and floating
ice South America is bathed by warm seas full of flying-fish and coral
reefs. The northern continent is broadest in the cool latitudes that are
most favorable for human activity. The southern expands most widely in
latitudes whose debilitating monotony of heat and moisture is the worst of
handicaps to human progress. The great rivers of the northern continent
correspond very closely to those of the southern. The Mackenzie, however,
is bound in the rigid bands of winter for eight months each year, while
the Orinoco, the corresponding South American river, lies sweltering under
a tropical sun which burns its grassy plains to bitter dust even as the
sharp cold reduced the Mackenzie region to barren tundra. The St. Lawrence
flows through fertile grain fields and the homes of an active people of
the temperate zone, but the Amazon winds its slow way amid the malarious
languor of vast tropical forests in which the trees shut out the sky and
the few natives are apathetic with the eternal inertia of the hot, damp
tropics.

Only when we come to the Mississippi in the northern continent and the Rio
de la Plata in the southern do we find a pair of rivers which correspond
to any degree in the character of the life surrounding them, as well as in
their physiographic character. Yet even here there is a vast difference,
especially in the upper courses of the river. Each at its mouth flows
through a rich, fertile plain occupied by a progressive, prosperous
people. But the Rio de la Plata takes its rise in one of the world’s most
backward plains, the home of uncivilized Indians, heartless rubber
adventurers, and the most rapacious of officials. Not infrequently, the
degenerate white men of these regions, yielding to the subtle and
insidious influence of the tropics, inflict the most outrageous abuses
upon the natives, and even kill them on slight provocation. The natives in
turn hate their oppressors, and when the chance comes betray them or leave
them to perish in sickness and misery. The upper Mississippi, on the other
hand, comes from a plain where agriculture is carried on with more
labor-saving devices than are found anywhere else in the world. There
States like Wisconsin and Minnesota stand in the forefront of educational
and social progress. The contrasts between the corresponding rivers of the
two Americas are typical of the contrasts in the history of the two
continents.

CHAPTER III. THE GEOGRAPHIC PROVINCES OF NORTH AMERICA

The four great physical divisions of North America—the Laurentian
highland, the Appalachian highland, the plains, and the western cordillera—are
strikingly different in form and structure. The Laurentian highland
presents a monotonous waste of rough hills, irregular valleys, picturesque
lakes, and crooked rivers. Most of it is thinly clothed with pine trees
and bushes such as the blueberry and huckleberry. Yet everywhere the
ancient rock crops out. No one can travel there without becoming
tiresomely familiar with fine-grained, shattered schists, coarse granites,
and their curiously banded relatives, the gneisses. This rocky highland
stretches from a little north of the St. Lawrence River to Hudson Bay,
around which it laps in the form of a V, and so is known as the Archaean V
or shield.

Everywhere this oldest part of the Western Hemisphere presents
unmistakable signs of great age. The schists by their fine crumpling and
scaly flakes of mineral show that they were formed deep in the bowels of
the earth, for only there could they be subjected to the enormous pressure
needed to transform their minerals into sheets as thin as paper. The
coarse granites and gneisses proclaim still more clearly that they must
have originated far down in the depths of the earth; their huge crystals
of mica, quartz, hornblende, feldspar, and other minerals could never have
been formed except under a blanket of rock which almost prevented the
original magmas from cooling. The thousands or tens of thousands of feet
of rock which once overlay the schists and still more the granites and
gneisses must have been slowly removed by erosion, for there was no other
way to get rid of them. This process must have taken tens of millions of
years, and yet the whole work must have been practically completed a
hundred or perhaps several hundred million years ago. We know this because
the selfsame ancient eroded surface which is exposed in the Laurentian
highland is found dipping down under the oldest known fossiliferous rocks.
Traces of that primitive land surface are found over a large part of the
American continent. Elsewhere they are usually buried under later strata
laid down when the continent sank in part below sea-level. Only in
Laurentia has the land remained steadily above the reach of the ocean
throughout the millions of years.

Today this old, old land might be as rich as many others if climate had
been kind to it. Its soil, to be sure, would in many parts be sandy
because of the large amount of quartz in the rocks. That would be a small
handicap, however, provided the soil were scores of feet deep like the red
soil of the corresponding highland in the Guiana region of South America.
But today the North American Laurentia has no soil worth mentioning. For
some reason not yet understood this was the part of America where snow
accumulated most deeply and where the largest glaciers were formed during
the last great glacial period. Not once but many times its granite surface
was shrouded for tens of thousands of years in ice a mile or more thick.
As the ice spread outward in almost every direction, it scraped away the
soil and gouged innumerable hollows in the softer parts of the underlying
rock. It left the Laurentian highland a land of rocky ribs rising between
clear lakes that fill the hollows. The lakes are drained by rapid rivers
which wind this way and that in hopeless confusion as they strive to move
seaward over the strangely uneven surface left by the ice. Such a land is
good for the hunter and trapper. It is also good for the summer
pleasure-seeker who would fain grow strong by paddling a canoe. For the
man who would make a permanent home it is a rough, inscrutable region
where one has need of more than most men’s share of courage and
persistence. Not only did the climate of the past cause the ice to scrape
away the soil, but the climate of the present is so cold that even where
new soil has accumulated the farmer can scarcely make a living.

Around the borders of the Laurentian highland the ice accomplished a work
quite different from the devastation of the interior. One of its chief
activities was the scouring of a series of vast hollows which now hold the
world’s largest series of lakes. Even the lakes of Central Africa cannot
compare with our own Great Lakes and the other smaller lakes which belong
to the same series. These additional lakes begin in the far north with
Great Bear Lake and continue through Great Slave Lake, Lake Athabasca, and
Lake Winnipeg to the Lake of the Woods, which drains into Lake Superior.
All these lakes lie on the edge of the great Laurentian shield, where the
ice, crowding down from the highland to the north and east, was compressed
into certain already existent hollows which it widened, deepened, and left
as vast bowls ready to be filled with lakes.

South and southwest of the Laurentian highland the great ice sheet proved
beneficial to man. There, instead of leaving the rock naked, as in the
Laurentian region, it merely smoothed off many of the irregularities of
the surface and covered large areas with the most fertile soil.

In doing this, to be sure, the ice-cap scoured some hollows and left a
vastly larger number of basins surrounded in whole or in part by glacial
debris. These have given rise to the innumerable lakes, large and small,
whose beauty so enhances the charms of Canada, New England, New York,
Minnesota, and other States. They serve as reservoirs for the water supply
of towns and power plants and as sources of ice and fish. Though they take
land from agriculture, they probably add to the life of the community as
much in other ways as they detract in this. Moreover glaciation diverted
countless streams from their old courses and made them flow over falls and
rapids from which water-power can easily be developed. That is one reason
why glaciated New England contains over forty per cent of all the
developed water-power in the United States.

Far more important, however, than the glacial lakes and rivers is the
fertile glacial soil. It comes fresh from the original rocks and has not
yet been exhausted by hundreds of thousands of years of weathering. It
also has the advantage of being well mixed, for generally it is the
product of scrapings from many kinds of rocks, each of which contributes
its own particular excellence to the general composition. Take Wisconsin
as an example. * Most parts of that State have been glaciated, but in the
southwest there lies what is known as the “driftless area” because it is
not covered with the “drift” or glacial debris which is thickly strewn
over the rest of the State. A comparison of otherwise similar counties
lying within and without the driftless area shows an astonishing contrast.
In 1910 the average value of all the farm land in twenty counties covered
with drift amounted to $56.90 per acre. In six counties partly covered
with drift and partly driftless the value was $59.80 per acre, while in
thirteen counties in the driftless area it was only $33.30 per acre. In
spite of the fact that glaciation causes swamps and lakes, the proportion
of land cultivated in the glaciated areas is larger than in the driftless.
In the glaciated area 61 per cent of the land is improved and in the
driftless area only 43.5 per cent. Moreover, even though the underlying
rock and the original topography be of the same kind in both cases, the
average yield of crops per acre is greater where the ice has done its
work. Where the country rock consists of limestone, which naturally forms
a rich soil, the difference in favor of the glaciated area amounts to only
1 or 2 per cent. Where the country rock is sandy, the soil is so much
improved by a mixture of fertilizing limestone or even of clay and other
materials that the average yield of crops per acre in the glaciated areas
is a third larger than in the driftless. Taking everything into
consideration it appears that the ancient glaciation of Wisconsin
increases the present agricultural output by from 20 to 40 per cent.
Upwards of 10,000,000 acres of glaciated land have already been developed
in the most populous parts of the State. If the average value of all
products on this area is reckoned at $15 per acre and if the increased
value of agricultural products due to glaciation amounts to 30 per cent,
then the net value of glaciation per year to the farmers of Wisconsin is
$45,000,000. This means about $300 for each farmer in the glaciated area.

Wisconsin is by no means unique. In Ohio, for instance, there is also a
driftless area. * It lies in the southeast along the Ohio River. The
difference in the value of the farm land there and in the glaciated region
is extraordinary. In the driftless area the average value per acre in 1910
was less than $24, while in the glaciated area it was nearly $64. Year by
year the proportion of the population of the State in the unglaciated area
is steadily decreasing. The difference between the two parts of the State
is not due to the underlying rock structure or to the rainfall except to a
slight degree. Some of the difference is due to the fact that important
cities such as Cleveland and Toledo lie on the fertile level strip of land
along the lake shore, but this strip itself, as well as the lake, owes
much of its character to glaciation. It appears, therefore, that in Ohio,
perhaps even more than in Wisconsin, man prospers most in the parts where
the ice has done its work.

We have taken Wisconsin and Ohio as examples, but the effect of glaciation
in those States does not differ materially from its effect all over
southern Canada and the northern United States from New England to Kansas
and Minnesota. Each year the people of these regions are richer by perhaps
a billion dollars because the ice scraped its way down from Laurentia and
spread out over the borders of the great plains on the west and of the
Appalachian region on the east.

We have considered the Laurentian highland and the glaciation which
centered there. Let us now turn to another highland only the northern part
of which was glaciated. The Appalachian highland, the second great
division of North America, consists of three parallel bands which extend
southwestward from Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence River to Georgia and
Alabama. The eastern and most important band consists of hills and
mountains of ancient crystalline rocks, somewhat resembling those of the
Laurentian highland but by no means so old. West of this comes a broad
valley eroded for the most part in the softer portions of a highly folded
series of sedimentary rocks which are of great age but younger than the
crystalline rocks to the east. The third band is the Alleghany plateau,
composed of almost horizontal rocks which lie so high and have been so
deeply dissected that they are often called mountains.

The three Appalachian bands by no means preserve a uniform character
throughout their entire length. The eastern crystalline band has its chief
development in the northeast. There it comprises the whole of New England
and a large part of the maritime provinces of Canada as well as
Newfoundland. Its broad development in New England causes that region to
be one of the most clearly defined natural units of the United States.
Ancient igneous rocks such as granite lie intricately mingled with old and
highly metamorphosed sediments. Since some of the rocks are hard and
others soft and since all have been exposed to extremely long erosion, the
topography of New England consists typically of irregular masses of
rounded hills free from precipices. Here and there hard masses of
unusually resistant rock stand up as isolated rounded heights, like Mount
Katahdin in Maine. They are known as “monadnocks” from the mountain of
that name in southern New Hampshire. In other places larger and more
irregular masses of hard rock form mountain groups like the White
Mountains, the Green Mountains, and the Berkshires, each of which is
merely a great series of monadnocks.

In the latitude of southern New York the crystalline rocks are compressed
into narrow compass and lose their mountainous character. They form the
irregular hills on which New York City itself is built and which make the
suburbs of Westchester County along the eastern Hudson so diverse and
beautiful. To the southeast the topography of the old crystalline band
becomes still less pronounced, as may be seen in the rolling, fertile
hills around Philadelphia. Farther south the band divides into two parts,
the mountains proper and the Piedmont plateau. The mountains begin at the
Blue Ridge, which in Virginia raises its even-topped heights mile after
mile across the length of that State. In North Carolina, however, they
lose their character as a single ridge and expand into the broad mass of
the southern Appalachians. There Mount Mitchell dominates the eastern part
of the American continent and is surrounded by over thirty other mountains
rising to a height of at least six thousand feet. The Piedmont plateau,
which lies at the eastern foot of the Blue Ridge, is not really a plateau
but a peneplain or ancient lowland worn almost to a plain. It expands to a
width of one hundred miles in Virginia and the Carolinas and forms the
part of those States where most of the larger towns are situated. Among
its low gentle heights there rises an occasional little monadnock like
Chapel Hill, where the University of North Carolina lies on a rugged
eminence which strikingly recalls New England. For the most part, however,
the hills of the Piedmont region are lower and more rounded than those in
the neighborhood of Philadelphia. The country thus formed has many
advantages, for it is flat enough to be used for agriculture and yet
varied enough to be free from the monotony of the level plains.

The prolonged and broken inner valley forming the second band of the
Appalachians was of some importance as a highway in the days of the
Indians. Today the main highways of traffic touch it only to cross it as
quickly as possible. From Lake Champlain it trends straight southward in
the Hudson Valley until the Catskills have been passed. Then, while the
railroads and all the traffic go on down the gorge of the Hudson to New
York, the valley swings off into Pennsylvania past Scranton, Wilkesbarre,
and Harrisburg. There the underlying rock consists of a series of
alternately hard and soft layers which have been crumpled up much as one
might wrinkle a rug with one’s foot. The pressure involved in the process
changed and hardened the rocks so much that the coal which they contain
was converted into anthracite, the finest coal in all the world and the
only example of its kind. Even the famous Welsh coal has not been so
thoroughly hardened. During a long period of erosion the tops of the
folded layers were worn off to a depth of thousands of feet and the whole
country was converted into an almost level plain. Then in the late
geological period known as the early Tertiary the land was lifted up
again, and once more erosion went on. The soft rocks were thus etched away
until broad valleys were formed. The hard layers were left as a
bewildering succession of ridges with flat tops. A single ridge may double
back and forth so often that the region well deserves the old Indian name
of the “Endless Mountains.” Southwestward the valley grows narrower, and
the ridges which break its surface become straighter. Everywhere they are
flat-topped, steep-sided, and narrow, while between them lie parts of the
main valley floor, flat and fertile. Here in the south, even more clearly
than in the north, the valley is bordered on the east by the sharply
upstanding range of the crystalline Appalachians, while on the west with
equal regularity it comes to an end in an escarpment which rises to the
Alleghany plateau.

This plateau, the third great band of the Appalachians, begins on the
south side of the Mohawk Valley. To the north its place is taken by the
Adirondacks, which are an outlier of the great Laurentian area of Canada.
The fact that the outlier and the plateau are separated by the low strip
of the Mohawk Valley makes this the one place where the highly complex
Appalachian system can easily be crossed. If the Alleghany plateau joined
the Adirondacks, Philadelphia instead of New York would be the greatest
city of America. Where the plateau first rises on the south side of the
Mohawk, it attains heights of four thousand feet in the Catskill
Mountains. We think of the Catskills as mountains, but their steep cliffs
and table-topped heights show that they are really the remnants of a
plateau, the nearly horizontal strata of which have not yet been worn
away. Westward from the Catskills the plateau continues through central
New York to western Pennsylvania. Those who have traveled on the
Pennsylvania Railroad may remember how the railroad climbs the escarpment
at Altoona. Farther east the train has passed alternately through gorges
cut in the parallel ridges and through fertile open valleys forming the
main floor of the inner valley. Then it winds up the long ascent of the
Alleghany front in a splendid horseshoe curve. At the top, after a short
tunnel, the train emerges in a wholly different country. The valleys are
without order or system. They wind this way and that. The hills are not
long ridges but isolated bits left between the winding valleys. Here and
there beds of coal blacken the surface, for here we are among the rocks
from which the world’s largest coal supply is derived. Since the layers
lie horizontally and have never been compressed, the same material which
in the inner valley has been changed to hard, clean-burning anthracite
here remains soft and smoky.

In its southwestern continuation through West Virginia and Kentucky to
Tennessee the plateau maintains many of its Pennsylvanian characteristics,
but it now rises higher and becomes more inaccessible. The only habitable
portions are the bottoms of the valleys, but they are only wide enough to
support a most scanty population. Between them most of the land is too
rough for anything except forests. Hence the people who live at the
bottoms of the valleys are strangely isolated. They see little or nothing
of the world at large or even of their neighbors. The roads are so few and
the trails so difficult that the farmers cannot easily take their produce
to market. Their only recourse has been to convert their bulky corn into
whisky, which occupied little space in proportion to its value. Since the
mountaineer has no other means of getting ready money, it is not strange
that he has become a moonshiner and has fought bitterly for what he
genuinely believed to be his rights in that occupation. Education has not
prospered on the plateau because the narrowness of the valleys causes the
population to be too poor and too scattered to support schools. For the
same reason feuds grow up. When people live by themselves they become
suspicious. Not being used to dealing with their neighbors, they suspect
the motives of all but their intimate friends. Moreover, in those deep
valleys, with their steep sides and their general inaccessibility, laws
cannot easily be enforced, and therefore each family takes the law into
its own hands.

Today the more rugged parts of the Appalachian system are chiefly
important as a hindrance to communication. On the Atlantic slope of the
old crystalline band there are great areas of gentle relief where an
abundant population can dwell. Westward on the edges of the plateau and
the plains beyond a still greater population can find a living, but in the
intervening space there is opportunity for only a few. The great problem
is to cross the mountains as easily as possible. Each accessible
crossing-place is associated with a city. Boston, as well as New York,
owes much to the low Mohawk-Hudson route, but is badly handicapped because
it has no easy means of crossing the eastern crystalline band.
Philadelphia, on the other hand, benefits from the fact that in its
vicinity the crystallizes are low and can readily be crossed even without
the aid of the valleys of the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is
handicapped, however, by the Alleghany escarpment at Altoona, even though
this is lower there than farther south. Baltimore, in the same way, owes
much of its growth to the easy pathways of the Susquehanna on the north
and the Potomac on the south. Farther south both the crystalline band and
the Alleghany plateau become more difficult to traverse, so that
communication between the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi Valley is
reduced to small proportions. Happy is New York in its situation where no
one of the three bands of the Appalachians opposes any obstacle. The
plains of North America form the third of the four main physical divisions
of the continent. For the most part they lie between the great western
cordillera on one side and the Laurentian and Appalachian highlands on the
other. Yet they lap around the southern end of the Appalachians and run
far up the Atlantic coast to New York. They remained beneath the sea till
a late date, much later than the other three divisions. They were not,
however, covered with deep water like that of the abysmal oceans, but only
with shallow seas from which the land at times emerged. In spite of the
old belief to the contrary, the continents appear to be so permanent that
they have occupied practically their present positions from the remotest
geological times. They have moved slowly up and down, however, so that
some parts have frequently been submerged, and the plains are the parts
that remained longest under water.

The plains of North America may be divided into four parts according to
the character of their surface: the Atlantic coastal plain, the prairies,
the northwestern peneplain, and the southwestern high plains. The Atlantic
coastal plain lies along the Atlantic coast from New York southward to
Florida and Alabama. It also forms a great embayment up the Mississippi
Valley as far as the Ohio River, and it extends along the shore of the
Gulf of Mexico to the Rio Grande. The chief characteristic of this
Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain is its belted nature. One layer of rocks
is sandy, another consists of limestone, and a third of clay. When
uplifted and eroded each assumes its own special topography and is covered
with its own special type of vegetation. Thus in South Carolina and
Georgia the crystalline Piedmont band of the Appalachian province is
bordered on the southeast by a belt of sandstone. This rock is so far from
the sea and has been raised so high above it that erosion has converted it
into a region of gentle hills, whose tops are six hundred or seven hundred
feet above sea-level. Its sandy soil is so poor that farming is difficult.
The hills are largely covered with pine, yielding tar and turpentine.
Farther seaward comes a broad band of younger rock which forms a clayey
soil or else a yellow sandy loam. These soils are so rich that splendid
cotton crops can be raised, and hence the region is thickly populated.
Again there comes a belt of sand, the so-called “pine barrens,” which form
a poor section about fifty miles inland from the coast. Finally the
coastal belt itself has emerged from beneath the sea so recently and lies
so nearly at sea-level that it has not been greatly eroded, and is still
covered with numerous marshes and swamps. The rich soil and the moisture
are good for rice, but the region is so unhealthy and so hard to drain
that only small parts are inhabited.

Everywhere in the coastal plain this same belted character is more or less
evident. It has much to do with all sorts of activities from farming to
politics. On consulting the map showing the cotton production of the
United States in 1914, one notices the two dark bands in the southeast.
One of them, extending from the northwestern part of South Carolina across
Georgia and Alabama, is due to the fertile soil of the Piedmont region.
The other, lying nearer the sea, begins in North Carolina and extends well
into Alabama before it swings around to the northwest toward the area of
heavy production along the Mississippi. It is due to the fertile soil of
that part of the coastal plain known as the “cotton belt.” Portions of it
are called the “black belt,” not because of the colored population, but
because of the darkness of the soil. Since this land has always been
prosperous, it has regularly been conservative in politics.

The Atlantic coastal plain is by no means the only part of the United
States where the fertility of the soil is the dominant fact in the life of
the people. Because of their rich soil the prairies which extend from
western Ohio to the Missouri River and northward into Canada are fast
becoming the most steadily prosperous part of America. They owe their
surpassing richness largely to glaciation. We have already seen how the
coming of the ice-sheet benefited the regions on the borders of the old
Laurentian highland. This same benefit extended over practically the whole
of what are now the prairies. Before the advent of the ice the whole
section consisted of a broadly banded coastal plain much older than that
of the Atlantic coast. When the ice with its burden of material scraped
from the hills of the north passed over the coastal plain, it filled the
hollows with rich new soil. The icy streams that flowed out from the
glaciers were full of fine sediment, which they deposited over enormous
flood plains. During dry seasons the winds picked up this dust and spread
it out still more widely, forming the great banks of yellow loess whose
fertile soil mantles the sides of many a valley in the Mississippi basin.
Thus glaciers, streams, and winds laid down ten, twenty, fifty, or even
one hundred feet of the finest, most fertile soil. We have already seen
how much the soil was improved by glaciation in Wisconsin and Ohio. It was
in the prairie States that this improvement reached a maximum. The soil
there is not only fine grained and free from rocks, but it consists of
particles brought from widely different sources and is therefore full of
all kinds of plant foods. In most parts of the world a fine-grained soil
is formed only after a prolonged period of weathering which leaches out
many valuable chemical elements. In the prairies, however, the soil
consists largely of materials that were mechanically ground to dust by the
ice without being exposed to the action of weathering. Thus they have
reached their present resting-places without the loss of any of their
original plant foods. When such a soil is found with a climate which is
good for crops and which is also highly stimulating to man, the
combination is almost ideal. There is some justification for those who say
that the north central portion of the United States is more fortunate than
any other part of the earth. Nowhere else, unless in western Europe, is
there such a combination of fertile soil, fine climate, easy
communication, and possibilities for manufacturing and commerce. Iron from
that outlier of the Laurentian highland which forms the peninsula of
northern Michigan can easily be brought by water almost to the center of
the prairie region. Coal in vast quantities lies directly under the
surface of this region, for the rock of the ancient coastal plain belongs
to the same Pennsylvanian series which yields most of the world’s coal.
Here man is, indeed, blessed with resources and opportunities scarcely
equaled in any other part of the world, and finds the only drawbacks to be
the extremes of temperature in both winter and summer and the remoteness
of the region from the sea. Because of the richness of their heritage and
because they live safely protected from threats of foreign aggression, the
people who live in this part of the world are in danger of being slow to
feel the currents of great world movements.

The western half of the plains of North America consists of two parts
unlike either the Atlantic coastal plain or the prairies. From South
Dakota and Nebraska northward far into Canada and westward to the Rocky
Mountains there extends an ancient peneplain worn down to gentle relief by
the erosion of millions of years. It is not so level as the plains farther
east nor so low. Its western margin reaches heights of four or five
thousand feet. Here and there, especially on the western side, it rises to
the crest of a rugged escarpment where some resistant layer of rocks still
holds itself up against the forces of erosion. Elsewhere its smooth
surfaces are broken by lava-capped mesas or by ridges where some ancient
volcanic dike is so hard that it has not yet been worn away. The soil,
though excellent, is thinner and less fertile than in the prairies.
Nevertheless the population might in time become as dense and prosperous
as almost any in the world if only the rainfall were more abundant and
good supplies of coal were not quite so far away. Yet in spite of these
handicaps the northwestern peneplain with its vast open stretches, its
cattle, its wheat, and its opportunities is a most attractive land.

South of Nebraska and Wyoming the “high plains,” the last of the four
great divisions of the plains, extend as far as western Texas. These, like
the prairies, have been built up by deposits brought from other regions.
In this case, however, the deposits consist of gravel, sand, and silt
which the rivers have gradually washed out from the Rocky Mountains. As
the rivers have changed their courses from one bed to another, layer after
layer has been laid down to form a vast plain like a gently sloping beach
hundreds of miles wide. In most places the streams are no longer building
this up. Frequently they have carved narrow valleys hundreds of feet deep
in the materials which they formerly deposited. Elsewhere, however, as in
western Kansas, most of the country is so flat that the horizon is like
that of the ocean. It seems almost incredible that at heights of four or
five thousand feet the plains can still be so wonderfully level. When the
grass is green, when the spring flowers are at their best, it would be
hard to find a picture of greater beauty. Here the buffalo wandered in the
days before the white man destroyed them. Here today is the great cattle
region of America. Here is the region where the soul of man is filled with
the feeling of infinite space.

To the student of land forms there is an ever-present contrast between
those due directly to the processes which build up the earth’s surface and
those due to the erosive forces which destroy what the others have built.
In the great plains of North America two of the divisions, that is, the
Atlantic coastal plain of the southeast and the peneplain of the
northwest, owe their present form to the forces of erosion. The other two,
that is, the prairies and the high plains, still bear the impress of the
original processes of deposition and have been modified to only a slight
extent by erosion.

A similar but greater contrast separates the mountains of eastern North
America and those of the western cordillera—the fourth and last of
the main physical divisions of the continent. In both the Laurentian and
the Appalachian highlands the eastern mountains show no trace of the
original forms produced by the faulting of the crust or by volcanic
movements. All the original distinctive topography has been removed. What
we see today is the product of erosion working upon rocks that were
thousands of feet beneath the surface when they were brought to their
present positions. In the western cordillera, on the contrary, although
much of the present form of the land is due to erosion, a vast amount is
due directly to so-called “tectonic” activities such as the breaking of
the crust, the pouring out of molten lavas, and the bursting forth of
explosive eruptions.

The character of these tectonic activities has differed widely in
different parts of the cordillera. A broad upheaval of great blocks of the
earth’s crust without tilting or disturbance has produced the plateaus of
Arizona and Utah. The gorges that have been rapidly cut into such great
upheaved blocks form part of the world’s most striking scenery. The Grand
Canyon of the Colorado with its tremendous platforms, mesas, and
awe-inspiring cliffs could have been formed in no other way. Equally
wonderful are some of the narrow canyons in the broadly upheaved plateaus
of southern Utah where the tributaries of the Virgin and other rivers have
cut red or white chasms thousands of feet deep and so narrow that at their
bottoms perpetual twilight reigns. It is a curious proof of the
fallibility of human judgment that these great gorges are often cited as
the most striking examples of the power of erosion. Wonderful as these
gorges certainly are, the Piedmont plain or the northwestern peneplain is
far more wonderful. Those regions had their grand canyons once upon a
time, but now erosion has gone so far that it has reduced the whole area
to the level of the bottoms of the gorges. Though such a fate is in store
for all the marvelous scenery of the western cordillera, we have it, for
the present at least, as one of the most stimulating panoramas of our
American environment. No man worthy of the name can sit on the brink of a
great canyon or gaze up from the dark depths of a gorge without a sense of
awe and wonder. There, as in few other places, Nature shows with
unmistakable grandeur the marvelous power and certainty with which her
laws work out the destiny of the universe.

In other parts of the great American cordillera some of the simplest and
youngest mountain ridges in the world are found. In southern Oregon, for
example, lava blocks have been broken and uplifted and now stand with
steep fresh faces on one side and with the old surface inclining more
gently on the other. Tilted blocks on a larger scale and much more deeply
carved by erosion are found in the lofty St. Elias Mountain of Alaska,
where much of the erosion has been done by some of the world’s greatest
glaciers. The western slope of the Wasatch Mountains facing the desert of
Utah is the wall of a huge fracture, as is the eastern face of the Sierra
Nevadas facing the deserts of Nevada. Each of these great faces has been
deeply eroded. At the base, however, recent breaking and upheaval of the
crust have given rise to fresh uneroded slopes. Some take the form of
triangular facets, where a series of ridges has been sliced across and
lifted up by a great fault. Others assume the shape of terraces which
sometimes continue along the base of the mountains for scores of miles. In
places they seem like bluffs cut by an ancient lake, but suddenly they
change their altitude or pass from one drainage area to another as no
lake-formed strand could possibly do.

In other parts of the cordillera, mountains have been formed by a single
arching of the crust without any breaking. Such is the case in the Uinta
Mountains of northwestern Utah and in some of the ranges of the Rocky
Mountains in Colorado. The Black Hills of South Dakota, although lying out
in the plains, are an example of the same kind of structure and really
belong to the cordillera. In them the layers of the earth’s crust have
been bent up in the form of a great dome. The dome structure, to be sure,
has now been largely destroyed, for erosion has long been active. The
result is that the harder strata form a series of concentric ridges, while
between them are ring-shaped valleys, one of which is so level and
unbroken that it is known to the Indians as the “race-course.” In other
parts of the cordillera great masses of rock have been pushed horizontally
upon the tops of others. In Montana, for example, the strata of the plains
have been bent down and overridden by those of the mountains. These are
only a few of the countless forms of breaking, faulting, and crumpling
which have given to the cordillera an almost infinite variety of scenery.

The work of mountain building is still active in the western cordillera,
as is evident from such an event as the San Francisco earthquake. In the
Owens Valley region in southern California the gravelly beaches of old
lakes are rent by fissures made within a few years by earthquakes. In
other places fresh terraces on the sides of the valley mark the lines of
recent earth movements, while newly formed lakes lie in troughs at their
base. These Owens Valley movements of the crust are parts of the
stupendous uplift which has raised the Sierra Nevada to heights of over
14,000 feet a few miles to the west. Along the fault line at the base of
the mountains there runs for over 9.50 miles the world’s longest aqueduct,
which was built to relieve Los Angeles from the danger of drought. It is a
strange irony of fate that so delicate and so vital an artery of
civilization should be forced to lie where a renewal of earthquake
movements may break it at any time. Yet there was no other place to put
it, for in spite of man’s growing control of nature he was forced to
follow the topography of the region in which he lived and labored.

On the southern side of the Mohave Desert a little to the east of where
the Los Angeles aqueduct crosses the mountains in its southward course,
the record of an earthquake is preserved in unique fashion. The steep face
of a terrace is covered with trees forty or fifty years old. Near the base
the trees are bent in peculiar fashion. Their lower portions stand at
right angles to the steeply sloping face of the terrace, but after a few
feet the trunks bend upward and stand vertically. Clearly when these trees
were young the terrace was not there. Then an earthquake came. One block
of the earth’s crust was dropped down while another was raised up. Along
the dividing line a terrace was formed. The trees that happened to stand
along the line were tilted and left in a slanting position on the sloping
surface between the two parts of the earth’s crust. They saw no reason to
stop growing, but, turning their tips toward the sky, they bravely pushed
upward. Thus they preserve in a striking way the record of this recent
movement of the earth’s crust.

Volcanoes as well as earth movements have occurred on a grand scale within
a few hundred years in the cordillera. Even where there is today no
visible volcanic activity, recent eruptions have left traces as fresh as
if they had occurred but yesterday. On the borders of the Grand Canyon of
the Colorado one can see not only fresh cones of volcanic ash but lava
which has poured over the edges of the cliffs and hardened while in the
act of flowing. From Orizaba and Popocatepetl in Mexico through Mount San
Francisco in Arizona, Lassen Peak and Mount Shasta in California, Mount
Rainier with its glaciers in the Cascade Range of Washington, and Mount
Wrangell in Alaska, the cordillera contains an almost unbroken chain of
great volcanoes. All are either active at present or have been active
within very recent times. In 1912 Mount Katmai, near the northwestern end
of the volcanic chain, erupted so violently that it sent dust around the
whole world. The presence of the dust caused brilliant sunsets second only
to those due to Krakatoa in 1883. It also cut off so much sunlight that
the effect was felt in measurements made by the Smithsonian Institution in
the French provinces of North Africa. In earlier times, throughout the
length of the cordillera great masses of volcanic material were poured out
to form high plateaus like those of southern Mexico or of the Columbia
River in Oregon. In Utah some of these have been lifted up so that heavy
caps of lava now form isolated sheets topping lofty plateaus. There the
lowland shepherds drive their sheep in summer and live in absolute
isolation for months at a time. There, as everywhere, the cordillera bears
the marks of mountains in the making, while the mountains of eastern
America bear the marks of those that were made when the world was young.

The geysers and hot springs of the Yellowstone are another proof of recent
volcanic activity. They owe their existence to hot rocks which lie only a
little way below the surface and which not long ago were molten lava. The
terraces and platforms built by the geysers are another evidence that the
cordillera is a region where the surface of the earth is still being
shaped into new forms by forces acting from within. The physical features
of the country are still in process of construction.

In spite of the importance of the constructive forces which are still
building up the mountains, much of the finest scenery of the cordillera is
due to the destructive forces of erosion. The majestic Columbia Canyon,
like others of its kind, is the work of running water. Glaciers also have
done their part. During the glacial period the forces which control the
paths of storms did not give to the cordillera region such an abundance of
snow as was sifted down upon Laurentia. Therefore no such huge continental
glaciers have flowed out over millions of square miles of lower country.
Nevertheless among the mountains themselves the ice gouged and scraped and
smoothed and at its lower edges deposited great moraines. Its work today
makes the cliffs and falls of the Yosemite one of the world’s most famous
bits of scenery. This scenery is young and its beauty will pass in a short
time as geology counts the years, for in natural scenery as in human life
it is youth that makes beauty. The canyons, waterfalls, and geysers of the
cordillera share their youth with the lakes, waterfalls, and rapids due to
recent glaciation in the east. Nevertheless, though youth is the condition
of most striking beauty, maturity and old age are the condition of
greatest usefulness. The young cordillera with its mountains still in the
making can support only a scanty population, whereas the old eastern
mountains, with the lines of long life engraved upon every feature, open
their arms to man and let him live and prosper.

It is not enough that we should picture merely the four divisions of the
land of our continent. We must see how the land meets the sea. In low
latitudes in both the Old World and the New, the continents have tended to
emerge farther and farther from the sea during recent geological times.
Hence on the eastern side of both North and South America from New Jersey
to Brazil the ocean is bordered for the most part by coastal plains,
uplifted from the sea only a short time ago. On the mountainous western
side of both continents, however, the sea bottom shelves downward so
steeply that its emergence does not give rise to a plain but merely to a
steep slope on which lie a series of old beaches several hundred and even
one thousand feet above the present shore line. Such conditions are not
favorable to human progress. The coastal plains produced by uplift of the
land may be fertile and may furnish happy homes for man, but they do not
permit ready access to the sea because they have no harbors. The chief
harbor of Mexico at Vera Cruz is merely a little nick in the coast-line
and could never protect a great fleet, even with the help of its
breakwater. Where an enterprising city like Los Angeles lies on the
uplifted Pacific coast, it must spend millions in wresting a harbor from
the very jaws of the sea.

In high latitudes in all parts of the world the land has recently been
submerged beneath the sea. In some places, especially those like the
coasts of Virginia and central California which lie in middle latitudes, a
recent slight submergence has succeeded a previous large emergence.
Wherever such sinking of the land has taken place, it has given rise to
countless bays, gulfs, capes, islands, and fiords. The ocean water has
entered the valleys and has drowned their lower parts. It has surrounded
the bases of hills and left them as islands; it has covered low valleys
and has created long sounds where traffic may pass with safety even in
great storms. Though much land has thus been lost which would be good for
agriculture, commerce has been wonderfully stimulated. Through Long Island
Sound there pass each day hundreds of boats which again and again would
suffer distress and loss if they were not protected from the open sea. It
is no accident that of the eight largest metropolitan districts in the
United States five have grown up on the shores of deep inlets which are
due to the drowning of valleys.

Nor must the value of scenery be forgotten in a survey such as this. Year
by year we are learning that in this restless, strenuous American life of
ours vacations are essential. We are learning, too, that the love of
beauty is one of Nature’s greatest healers. Regions like the coast of
Maine and Puget Sound, where rugged land and life-giving ocean interlock,
are worth untold millions because of their inspiring beauty. It is indeed
marvelous that in the latitude of the northern United States and southern
Canada so many circumstances favorable to human happiness are combined.
Fertile soil, level plains, easy passage across the mountains, coal, iron,
and other metals imbedded in the rocks, and a stimulating climate, all
shower their blessings upon man. And with all these blessings goes the
advantage of a coast which welcomes the mariner and brings the stimulus of
foreign lands, while at the same time it affords rest and inspiration to
the toilers here at home.

CHAPTER IV. THE GARMENT OF VEGETATION

No part of the world can be truly understood without a knowledge of its
garment of vegetation, for this determines not only the nature of the
animal inhabitants but also the occupations of the majority of human
beings. Although the soil has much to do with the character of vegetation,
climate has infinitely more. It is temperature which causes the moss and
lichens of the barren tundras in the far north to be replaced by orchids,
twining vines, and mahogany trees near the equator. It is rainfall which
determines that vigorous forests shall grow in the Appalachians in
latitudes where grasslands prevail in the plains and deserts in the
western cordillera.

Forests, grass-lands, deserts, represent the three chief types of
vegetation on the surface of the earth. Each is a response to certain
well-defined conditions of climate. Forests demand an abundance of
moisture throughout the entire season of growth. Where this season lasts
only three months the forest is very different from where it lasts twelve.
But no forest can be vigorous if the ground habitually becomes dry for a
considerable period during which the weather is warm enough for growth.
Desert vegetation, on the other hand, which consists primarily of bushes
with small, drought-resistant leaves, needs only a few irregular and
infrequent showers in order to endure long periods of heat and drought.
Discontinuity of moisture is the cause of deserts, just as continuity is
the necessary condition of forest growth. Grasses prevail where the
climatic conditions are intermediate between those of the forest and the
desert. Their primary requisite is a short period of fairly abundant
moisture with warmth enough to ripen their seeds. Unlike the trees of the
forests, they thrive even though the wet period be only a fraction of the
entire time that is warm enough for growth. Unlike the bushes of the
desert, they rarely thrive unless the ground is well soaked for at least a
few weeks. Most people think of forests as offering far more variety than
either deserts or grass-lands. To them grass is just grass, while trees
seem to possess individuality. In reality, however, the short turfy grass
of the far north differs from the four-foot fronds of the bunchy saccaton
grass of Arizona, and from the far taller tufts of the plumed pampas
grass, much more than the pine tree differs from the palm. Deserts vary
even more than either forests or grass-lands. The traveler in the Arizona
desert, for example, has been jogging across a gravelly plain studded at
intervals of a few yards with little bushes a foot high. The scenery is so
monotonous and the noon sunshine so warm that he almost falls asleep. When
he wakes from his daydream, so weird are his surroundings that he thinks
he must be in one of the places to which Sindbad was carried by the roc.
The trail has entered an open forest of joshuas, as the big tree yuccas
are called in Arizona. Their shaggy trunks and uncouth branches are
rendered doubly unkempt by swordlike, ashy-yellow dead leaves that double
back on the trunk but refuse to fall to the ground. At a height of from
twelve to twenty feet each arm of the many-branched candelabrum ends in a
stiff rosette of gray-green spiky leaves as tough as hemp. Equally bizarre
and much more imposing is a desert “stand” of giant suhuaros, great fluted
tree-cacti thirty feet or more high. In spite of their size the suhuaros
are desert types as truly as is sagebrush.

In America the most widespread type of forest is the evergreen coniferous
woodland of the north. Its pines, firs, spruces, hemlocks, and cedars
which are really junipers, cover most of Canada together with northern New
England and the region south of Lakes Huron and Superior. At its northern
limit the forest looks thoroughly forlorn. The gnarled and stunted trees
are thickly studded with half-dead branches bent down by the weight of
snow, so that the lower ones sweep the ground, while the upper look tired
and discouraged from their struggle with an inclement climate. Farther
south, however, the forest loses this aspect of terrific struggle. In
Maine, for example, it gives a pleasant impression of comfortable
prosperity. Wherever the trees have room to grow, they are full and
stocky, and even where they are crowded together their slender upspringing
trunks look alert and energetic. The signs of death and decay, indeed,
appear everywhere in fallen trunks, dead branches, and decayed masses of
wood, but moss and lichens, twinflowers and bunchberries so quickly mantle
the prostrate trees that they do not seem like tokens of weakness. Then,
too, in every open space thousands of young trees bank their soft green
masses so gracefully that one has an ever-present sense of pleased
surprise as he comes upon this younger foliage out of the dim aisles among
the bigger trees.

Except on their southern borders the great northern forests are not good
as a permanent home for man. The snow lies so late in the spring and the
summers are so short and cool that agriculture does not prosper. As a home
for the fox, marten, weasel, beaver, and many other fur-bearing animals,
however, the coniferous forests are almost ideal. That is why the Hudson’s
Bay Company is one of the few great organizations which have persisted and
prospered from colonial times to the present. As long ago as 1670 Charles
II granted to Prince Rupert and seventeen noblemen and gentlemen a charter
so sweeping that, aside from their own powers of assimilation, there was
almost no limit to what the “Governor and Company of Adventurers of
England trading into Hudson’s Bay” might acquire. By 1749, nearly eighty
years after the granting of the charter, however, the Company had only
four or five forts on the coast of Hudson Bay, with about 120 regular
employees. Nevertheless the poor Indians were so ignorant of the value of
their furs and the consequent profits were so large that, after Canada had
been ceded to Great Britain in 1763, a rival organization, the Northwest
Fur Company of Montreal, was established. Then there began an era that was
truly terrible for the Indians of the northern forest. In their eagerness
to get the valuable furs the companies offered the Indians strong liquors
in an abundance that ruined the poor red man, body and soul. Moreover the
fur-bearing animals were killed not only in winter but during the breeding
season. Many mother animals were shot and their little ones were left to
die. Hence in a short time the wild creatures of the great northern forest
were so scarce that the Indians well-nigh starved.

In spite of this slaughter of fur-bearing animals, the same Company still
draws fat dividends from the northern forest and its furry inhabitants. If
the forest had been more habitable, it would long ago have been occupied
by settlers, as have its warmer, southern portions, and the Company would
have ceased to exist. Aside from the regions too cold or too dry to
support any vegetation whatever, few parts of the world are more deadening
to civilization than the forests of the far north. Near the northern limit
of the great evergreen forest of North America wild animals are so rare
that a family of hunting Indians can scarcely find a living in a thousand
square miles. Today the voracious maw of the daily newspaper is eating the
spruce and hemlock by means of relentless saws and rattling pulp-mills. In
the wake of the lumbermen settlers are tardily spreading northward from
the more favored tracts in northern New England and southern Canada.
Nevertheless most of the evergreen forests of the north must always remain
the home of wild animals and trappers, a backward region in which it is
easy for a great fur company to maintain a practical monopoly.

Outliers of the pine forest extend far down into the United States. The
easternmost lies in part along the Appalachians and in part along the
coastal plain from southern New Jersey to Texas. The coastal forest is
unlike the other coniferous forests in two respects, for its distribution
and growth are not limited by long winters but by sandy soil which quickly
becomes dry. This drier southern pine forest lacks the beauty of its
northern companion. Its trees are often tall and stately, but they are
usually much scattered and are surrounded by stretches of scanty grass.
There is no trace of the mossy carpet and dense copses of undergrowth that
add so much to the picturesqueness of the forests farther north. The
unkempt half-breed or Indian hunter is replaced by the prosaic gatherer of
turpentine. As the man of the southern forests shuffles along in blue or
khaki overalls and carries his buckets from tree to tree, he seems a dull
figure contrasted with the active northern hunter who glides swiftly and
silently from trap to trap on his rawhide snowshoes. Yet though the
southern pine forest may be less picturesque than the northern, it is more
useful to man. In spite of its sandy soil, much of this forest land is
being reclaimed, and all will some day probably be covered by farms.

Two other outliers of the northern evergreen forest extend southward along
the cool heights of the Rocky Mountains and of the Pacific coast ranges of
the United States. In the Olympic and Sierra Nevada ranges the most
western outlier of this northern band of vegetation probably contains the
most inspiring forests of the world. There grow the vigorous Oregon pines,
firs, and spruces, and the still more famous Big Trees or sequoias. High
on the sides of the Sierra above the yuccas, the live oaks, and the
deciduous forest of the lower slopes, one meets these Big Trees. To come
upon them suddenly after a long, rough tramp over the sunny lower slopes
is the experience of a lifetime. Upward the great trees rise sheer one
hundred feet without a branch. The huge fluted trunks encased in soft, red
bark six inches or a foot thick are more impressive than the columns of
the grandest cathedral. It seems irreverent to speak above a whisper. Each
tree is a new wonder. One has to walk around it and study it to appreciate
its enormous size. Where a tree chances to stand isolated so that one can
see its full majesty, the sense of awe is tempered by the feeling that in
spite of their size the trees have a beauty all their own. Lifted to such
heights, the branches appear to be covered with masses of peculiarly soft
and rounded foliage like the piled-up banks of a white cumulus cloud
before a thunderstorm. At the base of such a tree the eye is caught by the
sharp, triangular outline of one of its young progeny. The lower branches
sweep the ground. The foliage is harsh and rough. In almost no other
species of trees is there such a change from comparatively ungraceful
youth to a superbly beautiful old age.

The second great type of American forest is deciduous. The trees have
broad leaves quite unlike the slender needles or overlapping scales of the
northern evergreens. Each winter such forests shed their leaves. Among the
mountains where the frosts come suddenly, the blaze of glory and
brilliance of color which herald the shedding of the leaves are surpassed
in no other part of the world. Even the colors of the Painted Desert in
northern Arizona and the wonderful flowers of the California plains are
less pleasing. In the Painted Desert the patches of red, yellow,
gray-blue, white, pale green, and black have a garish, almost repellent
appearance. In California the flame-colored acres of poppies in some
places, of white or yellow daisylike flowers in others, or of purple
blossoms elsewhere have a softer expression than the bare soil of the
desert. Yet they lack the delicate blending and harmony of colors which is
the greatest charm of the autumn foliage in the deciduous forests. Even
where the forests consist of such trees as birches, beeches, aspens, or
sycamores, whose leaves merely turn yellow in the fall, the contrast
between this color and the green tint of summer or the bare branches of
winter adds a spice of variety which is lacking in other and more
monotonous forests.

From still other points of view the deciduous forest has an almost
unequaled degree of variety. In one place it consists of graceful little
birches whose white trunks shimmering in the twilight form just the
background for ghosts. Contrast them with the oak forest half a mile away.
There the sense of gracefulness gives place to a feeling of strength. The
lines are no longer vertical but horizontal. The knotted elbows of the
branches recall the keels of sturdy merchantmen of bygone days. The acorns
under foot suggest food for the herds of half-wild pigs which roam among
the trees in many a southern county. Of quite another type are the stately
forests of the Appalachians where splendid magnolia and tulip trees spread
their broad limbs aloft at heights of one hundred feet or more.

Deciduous forests grow in the well-balanced regions where summer and
winter approach equality, where neither is unduly long, and where neither
is subject to prolonged drought. They extend southward from central New
England, the Great Lakes, and Minnesota, to Mississippi, Arkansas, and
eastern Texas. They predominate even in parts of such prairie States as
Michigan, Indiana, southern Illinois, and southeastern Missouri. No part
of the continent is more populous or more progressive than the regions
once covered by deciduous forests. In the United States nearly sixty per
cent of the inhabitants live in areas reclaimed from such forests. Yet the
area of the forests is less than a quarter of the three million square
miles that make up the United States.

In their relation to human life the forests of America differ far more
than do either grass-lands or deserts. In the far north, as we have seen,
the pine forests furnish one of the least favorable environments. In
middle latitudes the deciduous forests go to the opposite extreme and
furnish the most highly favored of the homes of man. Still farther
southward the increasing luxuriance of the forests, especially along the
Atlantic coast, renders them less and less favorable to mankind. In
southern Mexico and Yucatan the stately equatorial rain forest, the most
exuberant of all types of vegetation and the most unconquerable by man,
makes its appearance. It forms a discontinuous belt along the wet east
coast and on the lower slopes of the mountains from southern Yucatan to
Venezuela. Then it is interrupted by the grasslands of the Orinoco, but
revives again in still greater magnificence in the Guianas. Thence it
stretches not only along the coast but far into the little known interior
of the Great Amazon basin, while southward it borders all the coast as far
as southern Brazil. In the Amazon basin it reaches its highest development
and becomes the crowning glory of the vegetable world, the most baffling
obstacle to human progress.

Except in its evil effects on man, the equatorial rain forest is the
antithesis of the forests of the extreme north. The equatorial trees are
hardwood giants, broad leaved, bright flowered, and often fruit-bearing.
The northern trees are softwood dwarfs, needle-leaved, flowerless, and
cone-bearing. The equatorial trees are often branchless for one hundred
feet, but spread at the top into a broad overarching canopy which shuts
out the sun perpetually. The northern trees form sharp little pyramids
with low, widely spreading branches at the base and only short twigs at
the top. In the equatorial forests there is almost no underbrush. The
animals, such as monkeys, snakes, parrots, and brilliant insects, live
chiefly in the lofty treetops. In the northern forests there is almost
nothing except underbrush, and the foxes, rabbits, weasels, ptarmigans,
and mosquitoes live close to the ground in the shelter of the branches.
Both forests are alike, however, in being practically uninhabited by man.
Each is peopled only by primitive nomadic hunters who stand at the very
bottom in the scale of civilization.

Aside from the rain forest there are two other types in tropical countries—jungle
and scrub. The distinction between rain forest, jungle, and scrub is due
to the amount and the season of rainfall. An understanding of this
distinction not only explains many things in the present condition of
Latin America but also in the history of pre-Columbian Central America.
Forests, as we have seen, require that the ground be moist throughout
practically the whole of the season that is warm enough for growth. Since
the warm season lasts throughout the year within the tropics, dense
forests composed of uniformly large trees corresponding to our oaks,
maples, and beeches will not thrive unless the ground is wet most of the
time. Of course there may be no rain for a few weeks, but there must be no
long and regularly recurrent periods of drought. Smaller trees and such
species as the cocoanut palm are much less exacting and will flourish even
if there is a dry period of several months. Still smaller, bushy species
will thrive even when the rainfall lasts only two or three months. Hence
where the rainy season lasts most of the year, rain forest prevails; where
the rainy and dry seasons do not differ greatly in length, tropical jungle
is the dominant growth; and where the rainy season is short and the dry
season long, the jungle degenerates into scrub or bush.

The relation of scrub, jungle, and rain forest is well illustrated in
Yucatan, where the ancient Mayas reared their stately temples. On the
northern coast the annual rainfall is only ten or fifteen inches and is
concentrated largely in our summer months. There the country is covered
with scrubby bushes six to ten feet high. These are beautifully green
during the rainy season from June to October, but later in the year lose
almost all their leaves. The landscape would be much like that of a thick,
bushy pasture in the United States at the same season, were it not that in
the late winter and early spring some of the bushes bear brilliant red,
yellow, or white flowers. As one goes inland from the north coast of
Yucatan the rainfall increases. The bushes become taller and denser, trees
twenty feet high become numerous, and many rise thirty or forty feet or
even higher. This is the jungle. Its smaller portions suggest a second
growth of timber in the deciduous forests of the United States fifteen or
twenty years after the cutting of the original forest, but here there is
much more evidence of rapid growth. A few species of bushes and trees may
remain green throughout the year, but during the dry season most of the
jungle plants lose their leaves, at least in part.

With every mile that one advances into the more rainy interior, the jungle
becomes greener and fresher, the density of the lower growths increases,
and the proportion of large trees becomes greater until finally jungle
gives place to genuine forest. There many of the trees remain green
throughout the year. They rise to heights of fifty or sixty feet even on
the borders of their province, and at the top form a canopy so thick that
the ground is shady most of the time. Even in the drier part of the year
when some of the leaves have fallen, the rays of the sun scarcely reach
the ground until nine or ten o’clock in the morning. Even at high noon the
sunlight straggles through only in small patches. Long, sinuous lianas,
often queerly braided, hang down from the trees; epiphytes and various
parasitic growths add their strange green and red to the complex variety
of vegetation. Young palms grow up almost in a day and block a trail which
was hewn out with much labor only a few months before. Wherever the death
of old trees forms an opening, a thousand seedlings begin a fierce race to
reach the light. Everywhere the dominant note is intensely vigorous life,
rapid growth, and quick decay.

In their effect on man, the three forms of tropical forest are very
different. In the genuine rain forest agriculture is almost impossible.
Not only does the poor native find himself baffled in the face of Nature,
but the white man is equally at a loss. Many things combine to produce
this result. Chief among them are malaria and other tropical diseases.
When a few miles of railroad were being built through a strip of tropical
forest along the coast of eastern Guatemala, it was impossible to keep the
laborers more than twenty days at a time; indeed, unless they were sent
away at the end of three weeks, they were almost sure to be stricken with
virulent malarial fevers from which many died. An equally potent enemy of
agriculture is the vegetation itself. Imagine the difficulty of
cultivating a garden in a place where the weeds grow all the time and
where many of them reach a height of ten or twenty feet in a single year.
Perhaps there are people in the world who might cultivate such a region
and raise marvelous crops, but they are not the indolent people of
tropical America; and it is in fact doubtful whether any kind of people
could live permanently in the tropical forest and retain energy enough to
carry on cultivation. Nowhere in the world is there such steady, damp heat
as in these shadowy, windless depths far below the lofty tops of the rain
forest. Nowhere is there greater disinclination to work than among the
people who dwell in this region. Consequently in the vast rain forests of
the Amazon basin and in similar small forests as far north as Central
America, there are today practically no inhabitants except a mere handful
of the poorest and most degraded people in the world. Yet in ancient times
the northern border of the rain forest was the seat of America’s most
advanced civilization. The explanation of this contradiction will appear
later. *

Tropical jungle borders the rain forest all the way from southern Mexico
to southern Brazil. It treats man far better than does the rain forest. In
marked contrast to its more stately neighbor, it contains abundant game.
Wild fruits ripen at almost all seasons. A few banana plants and palm
trees will well-nigh support a family. If corn is planted in a clearing,
the return is large in proportion to the labor. So long as the population
is not too dense, life is so easy that there is little to stimulate
progress. Hence, although the people of the jungle are fairly numerous,
they have never played much part in history. Far more important is the
role of those living in the tropical lands where scrub is the prevailing
growth. In our day, for example, few tropical lowlands are more
progressive than the narrow coastal strip of northern Yucatan. There on
the border between jungle and scrub the vegetation does not thrive
sufficiently to make life easy for the chocolate-colored natives. Effort
is required if they would make a living, yet the effort is not so great as
to be beyond the capacity of the indolent people of the tropics.

Leaving the forests, let us step out into the broad, breezy grass-lands.
One would scarcely expect that a journey poleward out of the forest of
northern Canada would lead to an improvement in the conditions of human
life, yet such is the case. Where the growing season becomes so short that
even the hardiest trees disappear, grassy tundras replace the forest. By
furnishing food for such animals as the musk-ox, they are a great help to
the handful of scattered Indians who dwell on the northern edge of the
forest. In summer, when the animals grow fat on the short nutritious
grass, the Indians follow them out into the open country and hunt them
vigorously for food and skins to sustain life through the long dreary
winter. In many cases the hunters would advance much farther into the
grass-lands were it not that the abundant musk-oxen tempt the Eskimo of
the seacoast also to leave their homes and both sides fear bloody
encounters.

With the growth of civilization the advantage of the northern grass-lands
over the northern forests becomes still more apparent. The domestic
reindeer is beginning to replace the wild musk-ox. The reindeer people,
like the Indian and Eskimo hunters, must be nomadic. Nevertheless their
mode of life permits them to live in much greater numbers and on a much
higher plane of civilization than the hunters. Since they hunt the
furbearing animals in the neighboring forests during the winter, they
diminish the food supply of the hunters who dwell permanently in the
forest, and thus make their life still more difficult. The northern
forests bid fair to decline in population rather than increase. In this
New World of ours, strange as it may seem, the almost uninhabited forest
regions of the far north and of the equator are probably more than twice
as large as the desert areas with equally sparse population.

South of the tundras the grass-lands have a still greater advantage over
the forests. In the forest region of the Laurentian highland abundant snow
lasts far into the spring and keeps the ground so wet and cold that no
crops can be raised. Moreover, because of the still greater abundance of
snow in former times, the largest of ice sheets, as we have seen,
accumulated there during the Glacial Period and scraped away most of the
soil. The grassy plains, on the contrary, are favored not only by a deep,
rich soil, much of which was laid down by the ice, but by the relative
absence of snow in winter and the consequent rapidity with which the
ground becomes warm in the spring. Hence the Canadian plains from the
United States boundary northward to latitude 57 degrees contain a
prosperous agricultural population of over a million people, while the far
larger forested areas in the same latitude support only a few thousand.

The question is often asked why, in a state of nature, trees are so scarce
on the prairies—in Iowa, for instance—although they thrive
when planted. In answer we are often told that up to the middle of the
nineteenth century such vast herds of buffaloes roamed the prairies that
seedling trees could never get a chance to grow. It is also said that
prairie fires sweeping across the plains destroyed the little trees
whenever they sprouted. Doubtless the buffaloes and the fires helped to
prevent forest growth, but another factor appears to be still more
important. All the States between the Mississippi River and the Rocky
Mountains receive much more rain in summer than in winter. But as the soil
is comparatively dry in the spring when the trees begin their growth, they
are handicapped. They could grow if nothing else interfered with them,
just as peas will grow in a garden if the weeds are kept out. If peas,
however, are left uncared for, the weeds gain the upper hand and there are
no peas the second year. If the weeds are left to contend with grass, the
grass in the end prevails. In the eastern forest region, if the grass be
left to itself, small trees soon spring up in its midst. In half a century
a field of grass goes back to forest because trees are especially favored
by the climate. In the same way in the prairies, grass is especially
favored, for it is not weakened by the spring drought, and it grows
abundantly until it forms the wonderful stretches of waving green where
the buffalo once grew fat. Moreover the fine glacial soil of the prairies
is so clayey and compact that the roots of trees cannot easily penetrate
it. Since grasses send their roots only into the more friable upper layers
of soil, they possess another great advantage over the trees.

Far to the south of the prairies lie the grass-lands of tropical America,
of which the Banos of the Orinoco furnish a good example. Almost
everywhere their plumed grasses have been left to grow undisturbed by the
plough, and even grazing animals are scarce. These extremely flat plains
are flooded for months in the rainy season from May to October and are
parched in the dry season that follows. As trees cannot endure such
extremes, grasses are the prevailing growth. Elsewhere the nature of the
soil causes many other grassy tracts to be scattered among the tropical
jungle and forest. Trees are at a disadvantage both in porous, sandy
soils, where the water drains away too rapidly, and in clayey soil, where
it is held so long that the ground is saturated for weeks or months at a
time. South of the tropical portion of South America the vast pampas of
Argentina closely resemble the North American prairies and the drier
plains to the west of them. Grain in the east and cattle in the west are
fast causing the disappearance of those great tussocks of tufted grasses
eight or nine feet high which hold among grasses a position analogous to
that of the Big Trees of California among trees of lower growth.

It is often said that America has no real deserts. This is true in the
sense that there are no regions such as are found in Asia and Africa where
one can travel a hundred miles at a stretch and scarcely see a sign of
vegetation-nothing but barren gravel, graceful wavy sand dunes, hard
wind-swept clay, or still harder rock salt broken into rough blocks with
upturned edges. In the broader sense of the term, however, America has an
abundance of deserts—regions which bear a thin cover of bushy
vegetation but are too dry for agriculture without irrigation. On the
north such deserts begin in southern Canada where a dry region abounding
in small salt lakes lies at the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. In
the United States the deserts lie almost wholly between the Sierra Nevada
and the Rocky Mountain ranges, which keep out any moisture that might come
from either the west or the east. Beginning on the north with the
sagebrush plateau of southern Washington, the desert expands to a width of
seven hundred miles in the gray, sage-covered basins of Nevada and Utah.
In southern California and Arizona the sage-brush gives place to smaller
forms like the saltbush, and the desert assumes a sterner aspect. Next
comes the cactus desert extending from Arizona far south into Mexico. One
of the notable features of the desert is the extreme heat of certain
portions. Close to the Nevada border in southern California, Death Valley,
250 feet below sea-level, is the hottest place in America. There alone
among the American regions familiar to the writer does one have that
feeling of intense, overpowering aridity which prevails so often in the
deserts of Arabia and Central Asia. Some years ago a Weather Bureau
thermometer was installed in Death Valley at Furnace Creek, where the only
flowing water in more than a hundred miles supports a depressing little
ranch. There one or two white men, helped by a few Indians, raise alfalfa,
which they sell at exorbitant prices to deluded prospectors searching for
riches which they never find. Though the terrible heat ruins the health of
the white men in a year or two, so that they have to move away, they have
succeeded in keeping a thermometer record for some years. No other
properly exposed, out-of-door thermometer in the United States, or perhaps
in the world, is so familiar with a temperature of 100 degrees F. or more.
During the period of not quite fifteen hundred days from the spring of
1911 to May, 1915, a maximum temperature of 100 degrees F. or more was
reached on five hundred and forty-eight days, or more than one-third of
the time. On July 10, 1913, the mercury rose to 134 degrees F. and touched
the top of the tube. How much higher it might have gone no one can tell.
That day marks the limit of temperature yet reached in this country
according to official records. In the summer of 1914 there was one night
when the thermometer dropped only to 114 degrees F., having been 128
degrees F. at noon. The branches of a peppertree whose roots had been
freshly watered wilted as a flower wilts when broken from the stalk.

East and south of Death Valley lies the most interesting section of the
American desert, the so-called succulent desert of southern Arizona and
northern Mexico. There in greatest profusion grow the cacti, perhaps the
latest and most highly specialized of all the great families of plants.
There occur such strange scenes as the “forests” of suhuaros, whose giant
columns have already been described. Their beautiful crowns of large white
flowers produce a fruit which is one of the mainstays of the Papagos and
other Indians of the regions. In this same region the yucca is highly
developed, and its tall stalks of white or greenish flowers make the
desert appear like a flower garden. In fact this whole desert, thanks to
light rains in summer as well as winter, appears extraordinarily green and
prosperous. Its fair appearance has deceived many a poor settler who has
vainly tried to cultivate it.

Farther south the deserts of America are largely confined to plateaus like
those of Mexico and Peru or to basins sheltered on all sides from
rain-bearing winds. In such basins the suddenness of the transition from
one type of vegetation to another is astonishing. In Guatemala, for
instance, the coast is bordered by thick jungle which quickly gives place
to magnificent rain forest a few miles inland. This continues two or three
score miles from the coast until a point is reached where mountains begin
to obstruct the rain-bearing trade-winds. At once the rain forest gives
place to jungle; in a few miles jungle in its turn is replaced by scrub;
and shortly the scrub degenerates to mere desert bush. Then in another
fifty miles one rises to the main plateau passing once more through scrub.
This time the scrub gives place to grass-lands diversified by deciduous
trees and pines which give the country a distinctly temperate aspect. On
such plateaus the chief civilization of the tropical Latin-American
countries now centers. In the past, however, the plateaus were far
surpassed by the Maya lowlands of Yucatan and Guatemala.

We are wont to think of deserts as places where the plants are of few
kinds and not much crowded. As a matter of fact, an ordinary desert
supports a much greater variety of plants than does either a forest or a
prairie. The reason is simple. Every desert contains wet spots near
springs or in swamps. Such places abound with all sorts of water-loving
plants. The deserts also contain a few valleys where the larger streams
keep the ground moist at all seasons. In such places the variety of trees
is as great as in many forests. Moreover almost all deserts have short
periods of abundant moisture.

At such times the seeds of all sorts of little annual plants, including
grasses, daisies, lupines, and a host of others, sprout quickly, and give
rise to a carpet of vegetation as varied and beautiful as that of the
prairie. Thus the desert has not only its own peculiar bushes and
succulents but many of the products of vegetation in swamps, grasslands,
and forests. Though much of the ground is bare in the desert, the plants
are actually crowded together as closely as possible. The showers of such
regions are usually so brief that they merely wet the surface. At a depth
of a foot or more the soil of many deserts never becomes moist from year’s
end to year’s end. It is useless for plants to send their roots deep down
under such circumstances, for they might not reach water for a hundred
feet. Their only recourse is to spread horizontally. The farther they
spread, the more water they can absorb after the scanty showers. Hence the
plants of the desert throttle one another by extending their roots
horizontally, just as those of the forest kill one another by springing
rapidly upward and shutting out the light.

Vegetation, whether in forests, grasslands, or deserts, is the primary
source of human sustenance. Without it man would perish miserably; and
where it is deficient, he cannot rise to great heights in the scale of
civilization. Yet strangely enough the scantiness of the vegetation of the
deserts was a great help in the ascent of man. Only in dry regions could
primitive man compete with nature in fostering the right kind of
vegetation. In such regions arose the nations which first practised
agriculture. There man became comparatively civilized while his
contemporaries were still nomadic hunters in the grasslands and the
forests.

CHAPTER V. THE RED MAN IN AMERICA

When the white man first explored America, the parts of the continent that
had made most progress were by no means those that are most advanced
today. * None of the inhabitants, to be sure, had risen above barbarism.
Yet certain nations or tribes had advanced much higher than others. There
was a great contrast, for example, between the well-organized barbarians
of Peru and the almost completely unorganized Athapascan savages near
Hudson Bay.

In the northern continent aboriginal America reached its highest
development in three typical environments. The first of these regions
centered in the valley of Mexico where dwelt the Aztecs, but it extended
as far north as the Pueblos in Arizona and New Mexico. The special feature
of the environment was the relatively dry, warm climate with the chief
rainfall in summer. The Indians living in this environment were notable
for their comparatively high social organization and for religious
ceremonials whose elaborateness has rarely been surpassed. On the whole,
the people of this summer rain or Mexican type were not warlike and
offered little resistance to European conquest. Some tribes, to be sure,
fought fiercely at first, but yielded within a few years; the rest
submitted to the lordly Spaniards almost without a murmur. Their
civilization, if such we may call it, had long ago seen its best days. The
period of energy and progress had passed, and a time of inertia and decay
had set in. A century after the Spaniards had overcome the aborigines of
Mexico, other Europeans—French, English, and Dutch—came into
contact with a sturdier type of red man, best represented by the Iroquois
or Five Nations of central New York. This more active type dwelt in a
physical environment notable for two features—the abundance of
cyclonic storms bringing rain or snow at all seasons and the deciduous
forest which thickly covered the whole region. Unlike the Mexican, the
civilization of the Iroquois was young, vigorous, and growing. It had not
learned to express itself in durable architectural forms like those of
Mexico, nor could it rival the older type in social and religious
organization. In political organization, however, the Five Nations had
surpassed the other aboriginal peoples of North America. When the white
man became acquainted with the Iroquois in the seventeenth century, he
found five of their tribes organized into a remarkable confederation whose
avowed object was to abolish war among themselves and to secure to all the
members the peaceful exercise of their rights and privileges. So well was
the confederation organized that, in spite of war with its enemies, it
persisted for at least two hundred years. One of the chief characteristics
of the Iroquois was their tremendous energy. They were so energetic that
they pursued their enemies with an implacable relentlessness similar to
the restless eagerness with which the people of the region from New York
to Chicago now pursue their business enterprises. This led the Iroquois to
torture their prisoners with the utmost ingenuity and cruelty. Not only
did the savages burn and mutilate their captives, but they sometimes added
the last refinement of torture by compelling the suffering wretches to eat
pieces of flesh cut from their own bodies. Energy may lead to high
civilization, but it may also lead to excesses of evil. The third
prominent aboriginal type was that of the fishermen of the coast of
British Columbia, especially the Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands.
The most important features of their environment were the submerged coast
with its easy navigation, the mild oceanic climate, and the dense pine
forests. The Haidas, like the Iroquois, appear to have been a people who
were still advancing. Such as it was, their greatness was apparently the
product of their own ingenuity and not, like that of the Mexicans, an
inheritance from a greater past. The Haidas lacked the relentless energy
of the Iroquois and shared the comparatively gentle character which
prevailed among all the Indians along the Pacific Coast. They were by no
means weaklings, however. Commercially, for instance, they seem to have
been more advanced than any North American tribe except those in the
Mexican area. In architecture they stood equally high. We are prone to
think of the Mexicans as the best architects among the aborigines, but
when the white man came even the Aztecs were merely imitating the work of
their predecessors. The Haidas, on the contrary, were showing real
originality. They had no stone with which to build, for their country is
so densely forested that stone is rarely visible. They were remarkably
skillful, however, in hewing great beams from the forest. With these they
constructed houses whose carved totem poles and graceful facades gave
promise of an architecture of great beauty. Taking into account the
difficulties presented by a material which was not durable and by tools
which were nothing but bits of stone, we must regard their totem poles and
mural decorations as real contributions to primitive architecture.

In addition to these three highest types of the red man there were many
others. Each, as we shall see, owed its peculiarities largely to the
physical surroundings in which it lived. Of course different tribes
possessed different degrees of innate ability, but the chief differences
in their habits and mode of life arose from the topography, the climate,
the plants, and the animals which formed the geographical setting of their
homes.

In previous chapters we have gained some idea of the topography of the New
World and of the climate in its relation to plants and animals. We have
also seen that climate has much to do with human energy. We have not,
however, gained a sufficiently clear idea of the distribution of climatic
energy. A map of the world showing how energy would be distributed if it
depended entirely upon climate clarifies the subject. The dark shading of
the map indicates those regions where energy is highest. It is based upon
measurements of the strength of scores of individuals, upon the scholastic
records of hundreds of college students, upon the piecework of thousands
of factory operatives, and upon millions of deaths and births in a score
of different countries. It takes account of three chief climatic
conditions—temperature, humidity, and variability. It also takes
account of mental as well as physical ability. Underneath it is a map of
the distribution of civilization on the basis of the opinion of fifty
authorities in fifteen different countries. The similarity of the two maps
is so striking that there can be little question that today the
distribution of civilization agrees closely with the distribution of
climatic energy. When Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome were at the
height of their power this agreement was presumably the same, for the
storm belt which now gives variability and hence energy to the thickly
shaded regions in our two maps then apparently lay farther south. It is
generally considered that no race has been more closely dependent upon
physical environment than were the Indians. Why, then, did the energizing
effect of climate apparently have less effect upon them than upon the
other great races? Why were not the most advanced Indian tribes found in
the same places where white civilization is today most advanced? Climatic
changes might in part account for the difference, but, although such
changes apparently took place on a large scale in earlier times, there is
no evidence of anything except minor fluctuations since the days of the
first white settlements. Racial inheritance likewise may account for some
of the differences among the various tribes, but it was probably not the
chief factor. That factor was apparently the condition of agriculture
among people who had neither iron tools nor beasts of burden. Civilization
has never made much progress except when there has been a permanent
cultivation of the ground. It has been said that “the history of
agriculture is the history of man in his most primitive and most permanent
aspect.” If we examine the achievements and manner of life of the Indians
in relation to the effect of climate upon agriculture and human energy, as
well as in relation to the more obvious features of topography and
vegetation, we shall understand why the people of aboriginal America in
one part of the continent differed so greatly from those in another part.
In the far north the state of the inhabitants today is scarcely different
from what it was in the days of Columbus. Then, as now, the Eskimos had
practically no political or social organization beyond the family or the
little group of relatives who lived in a single camp. They had no
permanent villages, but moved from place to place according to the season
in search of fish, game, and birds. They lived this simple life not
because they lacked ability but because of their surroundings. Their
kayaks or canoes are marvels of ingenuity. With no materials except bones,
driftwood, and skins they made boats which fulfilled their purpose with
extraordinary perfection. Seated in the small, round hole which is the
only opening in the deck of his canoe, the Eskimo hunter ties his skin
jacket tightly outside the circular gunwale and is thus shut into a
practically water-tight compartment. Though the waves dash over him,
scarcely a drop enters the craft as he skims along with his double paddle
among cakes of floating ice. So, too, the snowhouse with its anterooms and
curved entrance passage is as clever an adaptation to the needs of
wanderers in a land of ice and snow as is the skyscraper to the needs of a
busy commercial people crowded into great cities. The fact that the
oilburning, soapstone lamps of the Eskimo were the only means of producing
artificial light in aboriginal America, except by ordinary fires, is
another tribute to the ingenuity of these northerners. So, too, is the
fire-drill by which they alone devised a means of increasing the speed
with which one stick could be twirled against another to produce fire. In
view of these clever inventions it seems safe to say that the Eskimo has
remained a nomadic savage not because he lacks inventive skill but partly
because the climate deadens his energies and still more because it forbids
him to practice agriculture.

Southward and inland from the coastal homes of the Eskimo lies the great
region of the northern pine forests. It extends from the interior of
Alaska southeastward in such a way as to include most of the Canadian
Rockies, the northern plains from Great Bear Lake almost to Lake Winnipeg,
and most of the great Laurentian shield around Hudson Bay and in the
peninsula of Labrador. Except among the inhabitants of the narrow Pacific
slope and those of the shores of Labrador and the St. Lawrence Valley, a
single type of barbarism prevailed among the Indians of all the vast pine
forest area. Only in a small section of the wheat-raising plains of
Alberta and Saskatchewan have their habits greatly changed because of the
arrival of the white man. Now as always the Indians in these northern
regions are held back by the long, benumbing winters. They cannot practice
agriculture, for no crops will grow. They cannot depend to any great
extent upon natural vegetation, for aside from blueberries, a few lichens,
and one or two other equally insignificant products, the forests furnish
no food except animals. These lowly people seem to have been so occupied
with the severe struggle with the elements that they could not even
advance out of savagery into barbarism. They were homeless nomads whose
movements were determined largely by the food supply.

Among the Athapascans who occupied all the western part of the northern
pine forests, clothing was made of deerskins with the hair left on. The
lodges were likewise of deer or caribou skins, although farther south
these were sometimes replaced by bark. The food of these tribes consisted
of caribou, deer, moose, and musk-ox together with smaller animals such as
the beaver and hare. They also ate various kinds of birds and the fish
found in the numerous lakes and rivers. They killed deer by driving them
into an angle formed by two converging rows of stakes, where they were
shot by hunters lying in wait. Among the Kawchodinne tribe near Great Bear
Lake hares were the chief source of both food and clothing. When an
unusually severe winter or some other disaster diminished the supply, the
Indians believed that the animals had mounted to the sky by means of the
trees and would return by the same way. In 1841 owing to scarcity of hares
many of this tribe died of starvation, and numerous acts of cannibalism
are said to have occurred. Small wonder that civilization was low and that
infanticide, especially of female children, was common. Among such people
women were naturally treated with a minimum of respect. Since they were
not skilled as hunters, there was relatively little which they could
contribute toward the sustenance of the family. Hence they were held in
low esteem, for among most primitive people woman is valued largely in
proportion to her economic contribution. Her low position is illustrated
by the peculiar funeral custom of the Takulli, an Athapascan tribe on the
Upper Frazer River. A widow was obliged to remain upon the funeral pyre of
her husband till the flames reached her own body. When the fire had died
down she collected the ashes of her dead and placed them in a basket,
which she was obliged to carry with her during three years of servitude in
the family of her husband. At the end of that time a feast was held, when
she was released from thraldom and permitted to remarry if she desired.

Poor and degraded as the people of the northern forests may have been,
they had their good traits. The Kutchins of the Yukon and Lower Mackenzie
regions, though they killed their female children, were exceedingly
hospitable and kept guests for months. Each head of a family took his turn
in feasting the whole band. On such occasions etiquette required the host
to fast until the guests had departed. At such feasts an interesting
wrestling game was played. First the smallest boys began to wrestle. The
victors wrestled with those next in strength and so on until finally the
strongest and freshest man in the band remained the final victor. Then the
girls and women went through the same progressive contest. It is hard to
determine whether the people of the northern pine forest were more or less
competent than their Eskimo neighbors. It perhaps makes little difference,
for it is doubtful whether even a race with brilliant natural endowments
could rise far in the scale of civilization under conditions so highly
adverse.

The Eskimos of the northern coasts and the people of the pine forests were
not the only aborigines whose development was greatly retarded because
they could not practice agriculture. All the people of the Pacific coast
from Alaska to Lower California were in similar circumstances.
Nevertheless those living along the northern part of this coast rose to a
much higher level than did those of California. This has sometimes been
supposed to show that geographical environment has little influence upon
civilization, but in reality it proves exactly the opposite.

The coast of British Columbia was one of the three chief centers of
aboriginal America. As The Encyclopaedia Britannica * puts it: “The Haida
people constituted with little doubt the finest race and that most
advanced in the arts of the entire west coast of North America.” They and
their almost equally advanced Tlingit and Tsimshian neighbors on the
mainland displayed much mechanical skill, especially in canoe-building,
woodcarving, and the working of stone and copper, as well as in making
blankets and baskets. To this day they earn a considerable amount of money
by selling their carved objects of wood and slate to traders and tourists.
Their canoes were hollowed out of logs of cedar and were often very large.
Houses which were sometimes 40 by 100 feet were built of huge cedar beams
and planks, which were first worked with stone and were then put together
at great feasts. These correspond to the “raising bees” at which the
neighbors gathered to erect the frames of houses in early New England.
Each Haida house ordinarily had a single carved totem pole in the middle
of the gable end which faced toward the beach. Often the end posts in
front were also carved and the whole house was painted. Another evidence
of the fairly advanced state of the Haidas was their active commercial
intercourse with regions hundreds of miles away. At their “potlatches,” as
the raising bees were called by the whites, trading went on vigorously.
Carved copper plates were among the articles which they esteemed of
highest value. Standing in the tribe depended on the possession of
property rather than on ability in war, in which respect the Haidas were
more like the people of today than were any of the other Indian tribes.

Slavery was common among the Haidas. Even as late as 1861, 7800 Tlingits
held 828 slaves. Slavery may not be a good institution in itself, but it
indicates that people are well-to-do, that they dwell in permanent abodes,
and that they have a well-established social order. Among the more
backward Iroquois, captives rarely became genuine slaves, for the social
and economic organization was not sufficiently developed to admit of this.
The few captives who were retained after a fight were adopted into the
tribe of the captors or else were allowed to live with them and shift for
themselves—a practice very different from that of the Haidas.

Another feature of the Haidas’ life which showed comparative progress was
the social distinctions which existed among them. One of the ways in which
individuals maintained their social position was by giving away quantities
of goods of all kinds at the potlatches which they organized. A man
sometimes went so far as to strip himself of nearly every possession
except his house. In return for this, however, he obtained what seemed to
him an abundant reward in the respect with which his fellow-tribesmen
afterward regarded him. At subsequent potlatches he received in his turn a
measure of their goods in proportion to his own gifts, so that he was
sometimes richer than before. These potlatches were social as well as
industrial functions, and dancing and singing were interspersed with the
feasting. One of the amusements was a musical contest in which singers
from one tribe or band would contend with one another as to which could
remember the greatest number of songs or accurately repeat a new song
after hearing it for the first time. At the potlatches the children of
chiefs were initiated into secret societies. They had their noses, ears,
and lips pierced for ornaments, and some of them were tattooed. This great
respect for social position which the Haidas manifested is doubtless far
from ideal, but it at least indicates that a part of the tribe was
sufficiently advanced to accumulate property and to pass it on to its
descendants—a custom that is almost impossible among tribes which
move from place to place. The question suggests itself why these coast
barbarians were so much in advance of their neighbors a few hundred miles
away in the pine woods of the mountains. The climate was probably one
reason for this superiority. Instead of being in a region like the center
of the pine forests of British Columbia where human energy is sapped by
six or eight months of winter, the Haidas enjoyed conditions like those of
Scotland. Although snow fell occasionally, severe cold was unknown. Nor
was there great heat in summer. The Haidas dwelt where both bodily
strength and mental activity were stimulated. In addition to this
advantage of a favorable climate these Indians had a large and steady
supply of food close at hand. Most of their sustenance was obtained from
the sea and from the rivers, in which the runs of salmon furnished
abundant provisions, which rarely failed. In Hecate Strait, between the
Queen Charlotte Islands and the mainland, there were wonderfully
productive halibut fisheries, from which a supply of fish was dried and
packed away for the winter, so that there was always a store of provisions
on hand. The forests in their turn furnished berries and seeds, as well as
bears, mountain goats, and other game.

Moreover the people of the northwest coast had the advantage of not being
forced to move from place to place in order to follow the fish. They lived
on a drowned shore where bays, straits, and sounds are extraordinarily
numerous. The great waves of the Pacific are shut out by the islands so
that the waterways are almost always safe for canoes. Instead of moving
their dwellings in order to follow the food supply, as the Eskimo and the
people of the pine forest were forced to do, the Haidas and their
neighbors were able without difficulty to bring their food home. At all
seasons the canoes made it easy to transport large supplies of fish from
places even a hundred miles away. Having settled dwellings, the Haidas
could accumulate property and acquire that feeling of permanence which is
one of the most important conditions for the development of civilization.
Doubtless the Haidas were intellectually superior to many other tribes,
but even if they had not been greatly superior, their surroundings would
probably have made them stand relatively high in the scale of
civilization. Southward from the Haidas, around Puget Sound and in
Washington and Oregon, there was a gradual decline in civilization. The
Chinook Indians of the lower Columbia, beyond the limits of the great
northern archipelago, had large communal houses occupied by three or four
families of twenty or more individuals. Their villages were thus fairly
permanent, although there was much moving about in summer owing to the
nature of the food supply, which consisted chiefly of salmon, with roots
and berries indigenous to the region. The people were noted as traders not
only among themselves but with surrounding tribes. They were extremely
skillful in handling their canoes, which were well made, hollowed out of
single logs, and often of great size. In disposition they are described as
treacherous and deceitful, especially when their cupidity was aroused.
Slaves were common and were usually obtained by barter from surrounding
tribes, though occasionally by successful raids. These Indians of Oregon
by no means rivaled the Haidas, for their food supply was less certain and
they did not have the advantage of easy water communication, which did so
much to raise the Haidas to a high level of development.

Of the tribes farther south an observer says: “In general rudeness of
culture the California Indians are scarcely above the Eskimo, and whereas
the lack of development of the Eskimo on many sides of their nature is
reasonably attributable in part to their difficult and limiting
environment, the Indians of California inhabit a country naturally as
favorable, it would seem, as it might be. If the degree of civilization
attained by a people depends in any large measure on their habitat, as
does not seem likely, it might be concluded from the case of the
California Indians that natural advantages were an impediment rather than
an incentive to progress.” In some of the tribes, such as the Hupa, for
example, there existed no organization and no formalities in the
government of the village. Formal councils were unknown, although the
chief might and often did ask advice of his men in a collected body. In
general the social structure of the California Indians was so simple and
loose that it is hardly correct to speak of their tribes. Whatever
solidarity there was among these people was due in part to family ties and
in part to the fact that they lived in the same village and spoke the same
dialect. Between different groups of these Indians, the common bond was
similarity of language as well as frequency and cordiality of intercourse.
In so primitive a condition of society there was neither necessity nor
opportunity for differences of rank. The influence of chiefs was small and
no distinct classes of slaves were known. Extreme poverty was the chief
cause of the low social and political organization of these Indians. The
Maidus in the Sacramento Valley were so poor that, in addition to
consuming every possible vegetable product, they not only devoured all
birds except the buzzard, but ate badgers, skunks, wildcats, and mountain
lions, and even consumed salmon bones and deer vertebrae. They gathered
grasshoppers and locusts by digging large shallow pits in a meadow or
flat. Then, setting fire to the grass on all sides, they drove the insects
into the pit. Their wings being burned off by the flames, the grasshoppers
were helpless and were thus collected by the bushel. Again of the
Moquelumne, one of the largest tribes in central California, it is said
that their houses were simply frameworks of poles and brush which in
winter were covered with earth. In summer they erected cone-shaped lodges
of poles among the mountains. In favorable years they gathered large
quantities of acorns, which formed their principal food, and stored them
for winter use in granaries raised above the ground. Often, however, the
crop was poor, and the Indians were left on the verge of starvation.

Finally in the far south, in the peninsula of Lower California, the tribes
were “probably the lowest in culture of any Indians in North America, for
their inhospitable environment which made them wanderers, was unfavorable
to the foundation of government even of the rude and unstable kind found
elsewhere.” The Yuman tribes of the mountains east of Santiago wore
sandals of maguey fiber and descended from their own territory among the
mountains “to eat calabash and other fruits” that grew beside the Colorado
River. They were described as “very dirty on account of the much mescal
they eat.” Others speak of them as “very filthy in their habits. To
overcome vermin they coat their heads with mud with which they also paint
their bodies. On a hot day it is by no means unusual to see them wallowing
in the mud like pigs.” They were “exceedingly poor, having no animals
except foxes of which they had a few skins. The dress of the women in
summer was a shirt and a bark skirt. The men appear to have been
practically unclothed during this season. The practice of selling children
seems to have been common. Their sustenance was fish, fruits, vegetables,
and seeds of grass, and many of the tribes were said to have been
dreadfully scorbutic.” A little to the east of these degraded savages the
much more advanced Mohave tribe had its home on the lower Colorado River.
The contrast between these neighboring tribes throws much light on the
reason for the low estate of the California Indians. “No better example of
the power of environment to better man’s condition can be found than that
shown as the lower Colorado is reached. Here are tribes of the same family
(as those of Lower California) remarkable not only for their fine physical
development, but living in settled villages with well-defined tribal
lines, practising a rude, but effective, agriculture, and well advanced in
many primitive Indian arts. The usual Indian staples were raised except
tobacco, these tribes preferring a wild tobacco of their region to the
cultivated.” *

This quotation is highly significant. With it should be compared the fact
that there is no evidence that corn or anything else was cultivated in
California west of the Rio Colorado Valley. California is a region famous
throughout America for its agriculture, but its crops are European in
origin. Even in the case of fruits, such as the grape, which have American
counterparts, the varieties actually cultivated were brought from Europe.
Wheat and barley, the chief foodstuffs for which California and similar
subtropical regions are noted, were unknown in the New World before the
coming of the white man. In pre-Columbian America corn was the only
cultivated cereal. The other great staples of early American agriculture
were beans and pumpkins. All three are preeminently summer crops and need
much water in July and August. In California there is no rain at this
season. Though the fall rains, which begin to be abundant in October and
November, do not aid these summer crops, they favor wheat and barley. The
winter rains and the comparatively warm winter weather permit these grains
to grow slowly but continuously. When the warm spring arrives, there is
still enough rain to permit wheat and barley to make a rapid growth and to
mature their seeds long before the long, dry summer begins. The
comparatively dry weather of May and June is just what these cereals need
to ripen the crop, but it is fatal to any kind of agriculture which
depends on summer rain.

Crops can of course be grown during the summer in California by means of
irrigation, but this is rarely a simple process. If irrigation is to be
effective in California, it cannot depend on the small streams which
practically dry up during the long, rainless summer, but it must depend on
comparatively large streams which flow in well-defined channels. With our
modern knowledge and machinery it is easy for us to make canals and
ditches and to prepare the level fields needed to utilize this water. A
people with no knowledge of agriculture, however, and with no iron tools
cannot suddenly begin to practice a complex and highly developed system of
agriculture. In California there is little or none of the natural summer
irrigation which, in certain parts of America, appears to have been the
most important factor leading to the first steps in tilling the ground.
The lower Colorado, however, floods broad areas every summer. Here, as on
the Nile, the retiring floods leave the land so moist that crops can
easily be raised. Hence the Mohave Indians were able to practice
agriculture and to rise well above their kinsmen not only in Lower
California but throughout the whole State.

In the Rocky Mountain region of the United States, just as on the Pacific
coast, the condition of the tribes deteriorated more and more the farther
they lived to the south. In the regions where the rainfall comes in
summer, however, and hence favors primitive agriculture, there was a
marked improvement. The Kutenai tribes lived near the corner where Idaho,
Montana, and British Columbia now meet. They appear to have been of rather
high grade, noteworthy for their morality, kindness, and hospitality. More
than any other Indians of the Rocky Mountain region, they avoided
drunkenness and lewd intercourse with the whites. Their mental ability was
comparatively high, as appears from their skill in buffalo-hunting, in
making dugouts and bark canoes, and in constructing sweat-houses and
lodges of both skins and rushes. Even today the lower Kutenai are noted
for their water-tight baskets of split roots. Moreover the degree to which
they used the plants that grew about them for food, medicine, and
economical purposes was noteworthy. They also had an esthetic appreciation
of several plants and flowers—a gift rare among Indians. These
people lived in the zone of most stimulating climate and, although they
did not practice agriculture and had little else in their surroundings to
help them to rise above the common level, they dwelt in a region where
there was rain enough in summer to prevent their being on the verge of
starvation, as the Indians of California usually were. Moreover they were
near enough to the haunts of the buffalo to depend on that great beast for
food. Since one buffalo supplies as much food as a hundred rabbits, these
Indians were vastly better off than the people of the drier parts of the
western coast.

South of the home of the Kutenai, in eastern Oregon, southern Idaho,
Nevada, Utah, and neighboring regions dwelt the Utes and other Shoshoni
tribes. In this region the rainfall, which is no greater than that of
California, occurs chiefly in winter. The long summer is so dry that,
except by highly developed methods of irrigation, agriculture is
impossible. Hence it is not surprising to find a traveler in 1850
describing one tribe of the Ute family as “without exception the most
miserable looking set of human beings I ever saw. They have hitherto
subsisted principally on snakes, lizards, roots.” The lowest of all the
Ute tribes were those who lived in the sage-brush. The early explorer,
Bonneville, found the tribes of Snake River wintering in brush shelters
without roofs merely heaps of brush piled high, behind which the Indians
crouched for protection from wind and snow. Crude as such shelters may
seem, they were the best that could be constructed by people who dwelt
where there was no vegetation except little bushes, and where the soil was
for the most part sandy or so salty that it could not easily be made into
adobe bricks.

The food of these Utes and Shoshonis was no better than their shelters.
There were no large animals for them to hunt; rabbits were the best that
they could find. Farther to the east, where the buffalo wandered during
part of the year and where there are some forests, the food was better,
the shelters were more effective, and, in general, the standard of living
was higher, although racially the two groups of people were alike. In this
case, as in others, the people whose condition was lowest were apparently
as competent as those whose material conditions were much better. Today,
although the Ute Indians, like most of their race, are rather slow, some
tribes, such as the Payutes, are described as not only “peaceful and
moral,” but also “industrious.” They are highly commended for their good
qualities by those who have had the best opportunities for judging. While
not as bright in intellect as some of the prairie tribes whom we shall
soon consider, they appear to possess more solidity of character. By their
willingness and efficiency as workers they have made themselves necessary
to the white farmers and have thus supplied themselves with good clothing
and many of the comforts of life. They have resisted, too, many of the
evils coming from the advance of civilization, so that one agent speaks of
these Indians as presenting the singular anomaly of improving by contact
with the whites. Apparently their extremely low condition in former times
was due merely to that same handicap of environment which kept back the
Indians of California.

Compare these backward but not wholly ungifted Utes with the Hopi who
belonged to the same stock. The relatively high social organization of the
latter people and the intricacy and significance of their religious
ceremonials are well known. Mentally the Hopi seem to be the equal of any
tribe, but it is doubtful whether they have much more innate capacity than
many of their more backward neighbors. Nevertheless they made much more
progress before the days of the white man, as can easily be seen in their
artistic development. Every one who has crossed the continent by the Santa
Fe route knows how interesting and beautiful are their pottery, basketry,
and weaving. Not only in art but also in government the Hopi are highly
advanced. Their governing body is a council of hereditary elders together
with the chiefs of religious fraternities. Among these officials there is
a speaker chief and a war chief, but there seems never to have been any
supreme chief of all the Hopi. Each pueblo has an hereditary chief who
directs all the communal work, such as the cleaning of the springs and the
general care of the village. Crimes are rare. This at first sight seems
strange in view of the fact that no penalty was inflicted for any crime
except sorcery, but under Hopi law all transgressions could be reduced to
sorcery. One of the most striking features of Hopi life was its rich
religious development. The Hopi recognized a large number of supernatural
beings and had a great store of most interesting and poetic mythological
tales. The home of the Hopi would seem at first sight as unfavorable to
progress as that of their Ute cousins, but the Hopi have the advantage of
being the most northwesterly representatives of the Indians who dwell
within the regions of summer rain. Fortunately for them, their country is
too desert and unforested for them to subsist to any great degree by the
chase. They are thus forced to devote all their energy to agriculture,
through which they have developed a relatively high standard of living.
They dwell far enough south to have their heaviest rainfall in summer and
not in winter, as is the case in Utah, so that they are able to cultivate
crops of corn and beans. Where such an intensive system of agriculture
prevails, the work of women is as valuable as that of men. The position of
woman is thus relatively high among the Hopi, for she is useful not only
for her assistance in the labors of the field but also for her skill in
preserving the crops, grinding the flour, and otherwise preparing the
comparatively varied food which this tribe fortunately possesses.

From northern New Mexico and Arizona to Mexico City summer rains, dry
winters, and still drier springs, are the rule. Forests are few, and much
of the country is desert. The more abundant the rains, the greater the
number of people and the greater the opportunities for the accumulation of
wealth, and thus for that leisure which is necessary to part of a
community if civilization is to make progress. That is one reason why the
civilization of the summer rain people becomes more highly developed as
they go from north to south. The fact that the altitude of the country
increases from the United States border southward also tends in the same
direction, for it causes the climate to be cooler and more bracing at
Mexico City than at places farther north.

The importance of summer rains in stimulating growth and in facilitating
the early stages of agriculture is noteworthy. Every one familiar with
Arizona and New Mexico knows how the sudden summer showers fill the
mountain valleys with floods which flow down upon the plain and rapidly
spread out into broad, thin sheets, often known as playas. There the water
stands a short time and then either sinks into the ground or evaporates.
Such places are favored with the best kind of natural irrigation, and
after the first shower it is an easy matter for the primitive farmer to go
out and drop grains of corn into holes punched with a stick. Thereafter he
can count on other showers to water his field while the corn sprouts and
grows to maturity. All that he needs to do is to watch the field to
protect it from the rare depredations of wild animals. As time goes on the
primitive farmer realizes the advantage of leading the water to
particularly favorable spots and thus begins to develop a system of
artificial irrigation. In regions where such advantageous conditions
prevail, the people who live permanently in one place succeed best, for
the work that they do one year helps them the next. They are not greatly
troubled by weeds, for, though grasses grow as well as corn in the places
where the water spreads out, the grasses take the form of little clumps
which can easily be pulled up. In the drier parts of the area of summer
rain, it becomes necessary to conserve the water supply to the utmost. The
Hopi consider sandy fields the best, for the loose sand on top acts as a
natural blanket to prevent evaporation from the underlying layers.
Sometimes in dry seasons the Hopi use extraordinary methods to help their
seeds to sprout. For instance, they place a seed in a ball of saturated
mud which they bury beneath several inches of sand. As the sand prevents
evaporation, practically all the water is retained for the use of the
seed, which thereupon sprouts and grows some inches by the time the first
summer floods arrive.

The Indians of the Great Plains lived a very different life from that of
the natives of either the mountains or the Pacific coast. In the far
north, to be sure, the rigorous climate caused all the Indians to live
practically alike, whether in the Rockies, the plains, or the Laurentian
highland. South of them, in that great central expanse stretching from the
latitude of Lake Winnipeg to the Rio Grande River, the Indians of the
plains possessed a relatively uniform type of life peculiar to themselves.
This individuality was due partly to the luxuriant carpet of grass which
covered the plains and partly to the supply of animal food afforded by the
vast herds of buffaloes which roamed in tens of thousands throughout the
whole territory. The grass was important chiefly because it prevented the
Indians from engaging in agriculture, for it must never be forgotten that
the Indians had neither iron tools nor beasts of burden to aid them in
overcoming the natural difficulties in the way of agriculture. To be sure,
they did occasionally pound meteoric iron into useful implements, but this
substance was so rare that probably not one Indian in a hundred had ever
seen a piece. The Indians were quite familiar with copper, but there is
not the slightest evidence that they had discovered any means of hardening
it. Metals played no real part in the life of any of the Indians of
America, and without such tools as iron spades and hoes it was impossible
for them to cultivate grassland. If they burned the prairie and dropped
seeds into holes, the corn or beans which they thus planted were sure to
be choked by the quickly springing grass. To dig away the tough sod around
the hole for each seed would require an almost incredible amount of work
even with iron tools. To accomplish this with wooden spades, rude hoes
made of large flakes of flint, or the shoulder blades of the buffalo, was
impossible on any large scale. Now and then in some river bottom where the
grass grew in clumps and could be easily pulled up, a little agriculture
was possible. That is all that seems to have been attempted on the great
grassy plains.

The Indians could not undertake any widespread cultivation of the plains
not only because they lacked iron tools but also because they had no draft
animals. The buffalo was too big, too fierce, and too stupid to be
domesticated. In all the length and breadth of the two Americas there was
no animal to take the place of the useful horse, donkey, or ox. The llama
was too small to do anything but carry light loads, and it could live only
in a most limited area among the cold Andean highlands. Even if the
aboriginal Americans could have made iron ploughs, they could not have
ploughed the tough sod without the aid of animals. Moreover, even if the
possession of metal tools and beasts of burden had made agriculture
possible in the grass-lands, it would have been difficult, in the absence
of wood for fences, to prevent the buffalo from eating up the crops or at
least from tramping through them and spoiling them. Thus the fertile land
of the great plains remained largely unused until the white man came to
the New World bringing the iron tools and domestic animals that were
necessary to successful agriculture.

Although farming of any sort was almost as impossible in the plains as in
the dry regions of winter rains farther west, the abundance of buffaloes
made life much easier in many respects. It is astonishing to see how many
purposes these animals served. An early traveler who dwelt among one of
the buffalo-hunting tribes, the Tonkawa of central Texas, says: “Besides
their meat it [the buffalo] furnishes them liberally what they desire for
conveniences. The brains are used to soften skins, the horns for spoons
and drinking cups, the shoulder blades to dig up and clear off the ground,
the tendons for threads and bow strings, the hoofs to glue the
arrow-feathering. From the tail-hair they make ropes and girths, from the
wool, belts and various ornaments. The hide furnishes… shields, tents,
shirts, footwear, and blankets to protect them from the cold.” *

The buffalo is a surprisingly stupid animal. When a herd is feeding it is
possible for a man to walk into the midst of it and shoot down an animal.
Even when one of their companions falls dead, the buffaloes pay no
attention to the hunter provided he remains perfectly still. The wounded
animals are not at first dangerous but seek to flee. Only when pursued and
brought to bay do they turn on their pursuers. When the Indians of an
encampment united their forces, as was their regular habit, they were able
to slaughter hundreds of animals in a few days. The more delicate parts of
the meat they ate first, often without cooking them. The rest they dried
and packed away for future use, while they prepared the hides as coverings
for the tents or as rugs in which to sleep.

Wherever the buffaloes were present in large numbers, the habits of the
Indians were much the same. They could not live in settled villages, for
there was no assurance that the buffalo would come to any particular place
each year. The plains tribes were therefore more thoroughly nomadic than
almost any others, especially after the introduction of horses. Because
they wandered so much, they came into contact with other tribes to an
unusual degree, and much of the contact was friendly. Gradually the
Indians developed a sign language by which tribes of different tongues
could communicate with one another. At first these signs were like
pictographs, for the speaker pointed as nearly as possible to the thing
that he desired to indicate, but later they became more and more
conventional. For example, man, the erect animal, was indicated by
throwing up the hand, with its back outward and the index finger extending
upward. Woman was indicated by a sweeping downward movement of the hand at
the side of the head with fingers extended to denote long hair or the
combing of flowing locks.

Among the plains Indians, the Dakotas, the main tribe of the Sioux family,
are universally considered to have stood highest not only physically but
mentally, and probably morally. Their bravery was never questioned, and
they conquered or drove out every rival except the Chippewas. Their
superiority was clearly seen in their system of government. Personal
fitness and popularity determined chieftainship more than did heredity.
The authority of the chief was limited by the Band Council, without whose
approbation little or nothing could be accomplished. In one of the Dakota
tribes, the Tetons, the policing of a village was confided to two or three
officers who were appointed by the chief and who remained in power until
their successors were appointed. Day and night they were always on the
watch, and so arduous were their labors that their term of service was
necessarily short. The brevity of their term, however, was atoned for by
the greatness of their authority, for in the suppression of disturbances
no resistance was suffered. Their persons were sacred, and if in the
execution of their duty they struck even a chief of the second class they
could not be punished.

The Dakotas, who lived in the region where their name is still preserved,
inhabited that part of the great plain which is climatically most
favorable to great activity. It is perhaps because of their response to
the influence of this factor of geographical environment that they and
their neighbors are the best known of the plains tribes. Their activity in
later times is evident from the fact that the Tetons were called “the
plundering Arabs of America.” If their activities had been more wisely
directed, they might have made a great name for themselves in Indian
history. In the arts they stood as high as could be expected in view of
the wandering life which they led and the limited materials with which
they had to work. In the art of making pictographs, for instance, they
excelled all other tribes, except perhaps the Kiowas, a plains tribe of
Colorado and western Kansas. On the hides of buffalo, deer, and antelope
which formed their tents, the Dakotas painted calendars, which had a
picture for each year, or rather for each winter, while those of the
Kiowas had a summer symbol and a winter symbol. Probably these calendars
reveal the influence of the whites, but they at least show that these
people of the plains were quickwitted.

Farther south the tribes of the plains stood on a much lower level than
the Dakotas. The Spanish explorer, Cabeza de Vaca, describes the Yguases
in Texas, among whom he lived for several years, in these words: “Their
support is principally roots which require roasting two days. Many are
very bitter. Occasionally they take deer and at times fish, but the
quantity is so small and the famine so great that they eat spiders and
eggs of ants, worms, lizards, salamanders, snakes, and vipers that kill
whom they strike, and they eat earth and all that there is, the dung of
deer, things I omit to mention and I earnestly believe that were there
stones in that land they would eat them. They save the bones of the fish
they consume, the snakes and other animals, that they may afterward beat
them together and eat the powder.” During these painful periods, they bade
Cabeza de Vaca “not to be sad. There would soon be prickly pears, although
the season of this fruit of the cactus might be months distant. When the
pears were ripe, the people feasted and danced and forgot their former
privations. They destroyed their female infants to prevent them being
taken by their enemies and thus becoming the means of increasing the
latter’s number.”

East of the Great Plains there dwelt still another important type of
Indians, the people of the deciduous forests. Their home extended from the
Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. As we have already seen, the Iroquois
who inhabited the northern part of this region were in many respects the
highest product of aboriginal America. The northern Iroquois tribes,
especially those known as the Five Nations, were second to no other Indian
people north of Mexico in political organization, statecraft, and military
prowess. Their leaders were genuine diplomats, as the wily French and
English statesmen with whom they treated soon discovered. One of their
most notable traits was the reverence which they had for the tribal law.
The wars that they waged were primarily for political independence, for
the fundamental principle of their confederation was that by uniting with
one another they would secure the peace and welfare of all with whom they
were connected by ties of blood. They prevented blood feuds by decreeing
that there should be a price for the killing of a co-tribesman, and they
abstained from eating the flesh of their enemies in order to avoid future
strife. So thoroughly did they believe in the rights of the individual
that women were accorded a high position. Among some of the tribes the
consent of all the women who had borne children was required before any
important measure could be taken. Candidates for a chiefship were
nominated by the votes of the mothers, and, as lands and houses were the
property of the women, their power in the tribe was great.

The Iroquois were sedentary and agricultural, and depended on the chase
for only a small part of their existence. The northern tribes were
especially noted for their skill in building fortifications and houses.
Their so-called castles were solid wooden structures with platforms
running around the top on the inside. From the platforms stones and other
missiles could be hurled down upon besiegers. According to our standards
such dwellings were very primitive, but they were almost as great an
advance upon the brush piles of the Utes as our skyscrapers are upon them.
Farther south in the Carolinas, the Cherokees, another Iroquoian tribe,
stand out prominently by reason of their unusual mental ability. Under the
influence of the white man, the Cherokees were the first to adopt a
constitutional form of government embodied in a code of laws written in
their own language. Their language was reduced to writing by means of an
alphabet which one of their number named Sequoya had devised. Sequoya and
other leaders, however, may not have been pure Indians, for by that time
much white blood had been mixed with the tribe. Yet even before the coming
of the white man the Cherokees were apparently more advanced in
agriculture than the Iroquois were, but less advanced in their form of
government, in their treatment of women, and in many other respects. In
general, as we go from north to south in the region of deciduous forests,
we find that among the early Indians agriculture became more and more
important and the people more sedentary, though not always more
progressive in other ways. The Catawbas, for instance, in South Carolina
were sedentary agriculturists and seem to have differed little in general
customs from their neighbors. Their men were brave and honest but lacking
in energy. In the Muskhogean family of Indians, comprising the Creeks,
Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles, who occupied the Gulf States from
Georgia to Mississippi, all the tribes were agricultural and sedentary and
occupied villages of substantial houses. The towns near the tribal
frontiers were usually palisaded, but those more remote from invasion were
unprotected. All these Indians were brave but not warlike in the violent
fashion of the Five Nations. The Choctaws would fight only in
self-defense, it was said, but the Creeks and especially the Chickasaws
were more aggressive. In their government these Muskhogean tribes appear
to have attained a position corresponding to their somewhat advanced
culture in other respects. Yet their confederacies were loose and flimsy
compared with that of the Five Nations. Another phase of the life of the
tribes in the southern part of the region of deciduous forests is
illustrated by the Natchez of Mississippi. These people were strictly
sedentary and depended chiefly upon agriculture for a livelihood. They
possessed considerable skill in the arts. For instance, they wove a cloth
from the inner bark of the mulberry tree and made excellent pottery. They
also constructed great mounds of earth upon which to erect their dwellings
and temples. Like a good many of the other southern tribes, they fought
when it was necessary, but they were peaceable compared with the Five
Nations. They had a form of sun-worship resembling that of Mexico, and in
other ways their ideas were like those of the people farther south. For
instance, when a chief died, his wives were killed. In times of distress
the parents frequently offered their children as sacrifice.

Many characteristics of the Natchez and other southern tribes seem to
indicate that they had formerly possessed a civilization higher than that
which prevailed when the white man came. The Five Nations, on the
contrary, apparently represent an energetic people who were on the upward
path and who might have achieved great things if the whites had not
interrupted them. The southern Indians resemble people whose best days
were past, for the mounds which abound in the Gulf States appear to have
been built chiefly in pre-Columbian days. Their objects of art, such as
the remarkable wooden mortars found at Key Marco and the embossed copper
plates found elsewhere in Florida, point to a highly developed artistic
sense which was no longer in evidence at the coming of the white man.

It is interesting to see the way in which climatic energy tended to give
the Five Nations a marked superiority over the tribesmen of the South,
while agriculture tended in the opposite direction. There has been much
discussion as to the part played by agriculture among the primitive
Americans, especially in the northeast. Corn, beans, and squashes were an
important element in the diet of the Indians of the New England region,
while farther south potatoes, sunflower seeds, and melons were also
articles of food. The New England tribes knew enough about agriculture to
use fish and shells for fertilizer. They had wooden mattocks and hoes made
from the shoulder blades of deer, from tortoise shells, or from conch
shells set in handles. They also had stone hoes and spades, while the
women used short pickers or parers about a foot long and five inches wide.
Seated on the ground they used these to break the upper part of the soil
and to grub out weeds, grass, and old cornstalks. They had the regular
custom of burning over an old patch each year and then replanting it.
Sometimes they merely put the seeds in holes and sometimes they dug up and
loosened the ground for each seed. Clearings they made by girdling the
trees, that is, by cutting off the bark in a circle at the bottom and thus
causing the tree to die. The brush they hacked or broke down and burned
when it was dry enough.

There is much danger of confusing the agricultural condition of the Indian
after the European had modified his life with his condition before the
European came to America. For instance, in the excellent article on
agriculture in the “Handbook of American Indians,” conditions prevailing
as late as 1794 in the States south of the Great Lakes are spoken of as if
typical of aboriginal America. But at that time the white man had long
been in contact with the Indian, and iron tools had largely taken the
place of stone. The rapidity with which European importations spread may
be judged by the fact that as early as 1736 the Iroquois in New York not
only had obtained horses but were regularly breeding them. The use of the
iron axe of course spread with vastly greater rapidity than that of the
horse, for an axe or a knife was the first thing that an Indian sought
from the white man. In the eighteenth century agriculture had thus become
immeasurably easier than before, yet even then the Indians still kept up
their old habit of cultivating the same fields only a short time. The
regular practice was to cultivate a field five, ten, and sometimes even
twenty or more years, and then abandon it. *

What hindered agriculture most in the northern part of the deciduous
forest was the grass. Any one who has cultivated a garden knows how
rapidly the weeds grow. He also knows that there is no weed so hard to
exterminate as grass. When once it gets a foothold mere hoeing seems only
to make it grow the faster. The only way to get rid of grass when once it
has become well established is to plow the field and start over again, but
this the Indians could not do. When first a clearing was made in the midst
of the forest, there was no grass to be contended with. Little by little,
however, it was sure to come in, until at length what had been a garden
was in a fair way to become a meadow. Then the Indians would decide that
it was necessary to seek new fields.

One might suppose that under such circumstances the Indians would merely
clear another patch of forest not far from the village and so continue to
live in the old place. This, however, they did not do because the labor of
making a clearing with stone axes and by the slow process of girdling and
burning the trees was so great that it was possible only in certain
favored spots where by accident the growth was less dense than usual. When
once a clearing became grassy, the only thing to do was to hunt for a new
site, prepare a clearing, and then move the village. This was apparently
the reason why the Iroquois, although successful in other ways, failed to
establish permanent towns like those of the Pueblos and the Haidas. Their
advancement not only in architecture but in many of the most important
elements of civilization was for this reason greatly delayed. There was
little to stimulate them to improve the land to which they were attached,
for they knew that soon they would have to move.

Farther south the character of the grassy vegetation changes, and the
condition of agriculture alters with it. The grass ceases to have that
thick, close, turfy quality which we admire so much in the fields of the
north, and it begins to grow in bunches. Often a southern hillside may
appear from a distance to be as densely covered with grass as a New
England hayfield. On closer examination, however, the growth is seen to
consist of individual bunches which can easily be pulled up, so that among
the southern tribes the fields did not become filled with grass as they
did in the north, for the women had relatively little difficulty in
keeping out this kind of weed as well as others.

In this survey of aboriginal America we have been impressed by the
contrast between two diverse aspects of the control of human activities by
physical environment. We saw, in the first place, that in our own day the
distribution of culture in America is more closely related to climatic
energy than to any other factor, because man is now so advanced in the
arts and crafts that agricultural difficulties do not impede him, except
in the far north and in tropical forests. Secondly, we have found that,
although all the geographical factors acted upon the Indian as they do
today, the absence of metals and beasts of burden compelled man to be
nomadic, and hence to remain in a low stage of civilization in many places
where he now can thrive. In the days long before Columbus the distribution
of civilization in the Red Man’s Continent offered still a third aspect,
strikingly different both from that of today and from that of the age of
discovery. In that earlier period the great centers of civilization were
south of their present situation. In the southern part of North America
from Arizona to Florida there are abundant evidences that the Indians whom
the white man found were less advanced than their predecessors. The
abundant ruins of Arizona and New Mexico, their widespread distribution,
and the highly artistic character of the pottery and other products of
handicraft found in them seem to indicate that the ancient population was
both denser and more highly cultured than that which the Europeans finally
ousted. In the Gulf States there is perhaps not much evidence that there
was a denser population at an earlier period, but the excellence of the
pre-Columbian handicrafts and the existence of a decadent sun worship
illustrate the way in which the civilization of the past was higher than
that of later days. The Aztecs, who figure so largely in the history of
the exploration and conquest of Mexico, were merely a warlike tribe which
had been fortunate in the inheritance of a relatively high civilization
from the past. So, too, the civilization found by the Spaniards at places
such as Mitla, in the extreme south of Mexico, could not compare with that
of which evidence is found in the ruins. Most remarkable of all is the
condition of Yucatan and Guatemala. In northern Yucatan the Spaniards
found a race of mild, decadent Mayas living among the relics of former
grandeur. Although they used the old temples as shrines, they knew little
of those who had built these temples and showed still less capacity to
imitate the ancient architects. Farther south in the forested region of
southern Yucatan and northern Guatemala the conditions are still more
surprising, for today these regions are almost uninhabitable and are
occupied by only a few sickly, degraded natives who live largely by the
chase. Yet in the past this region was the scene of by far the highest
culture that ever developed in America. There alone in this great
continent did men develop an architecture which, not only in massiveness
but in wealth of architectural detail and sculptural adornment, vies with
that of early Egypt or Chaldea. There alone did the art of writing
develop. Yet today in those regions the density of the forest, the
prevalence of deadly fevers, the extremely enervating temperature, and the
steady humidity are as hostile to civilization as are the cold of the far
north and the dryness of the desert.

The only explanation of this anomaly seems to be that in the past the
climatic zones of the world have at certain periods been shifted farther
toward the equator than they are at present. Practically all the
geographers of America now believe that within the past two or three
thousand years climatic pulsations have taken place whereby places like
the dry Southwest have alternately experienced centuries of greater
moisture than at present and centuries as dry as today or even drier.
During the moist centuries greater storminess prevailed, so that the
climate was apparently better not only for agriculture but for human
energy. At such times the standard of living was higher than now not only
in the Southwest but in the Gulf States and in Mexico. In periods when the
deserts of the southwestern United States were wet, the Maya region of
Yucatan and Guatemala appears to have been relatively dry. Then the dry
belt which now extends from northern Mexico to the northern tip of Yucatan
apparently shifted southward. Such conditions would cause the forests of
Yucatan and Guatemala to become much less dense than at present. This
comparative deforestation would make agriculture easily possible where
today it is out of the question. At the same time the relatively dry
climate and the clearing away of the vegetation would to a large degree
eliminate the malarial fevers and other diseases which are now such a
terrible scourge in wet tropical countries. Then, too, the storms which at
the present time give such variability to the climate of the United States
would follow more southerly courses. In its stimulating qualities the
climate of the home of the Mayas in the days of their prime was much more
nearly like that which now prevails where civilization rises highest.

From first to last the civilization of America has been bound up with its
physical environment. It matters little whether we are dealing with the
red race, the black, or the white. Nor does it matter whether we deal with
one part of the continent or another. Wherever we turn we can trace the
influence of mountains and plains, of rocks and metals from which tools
are made, of water and its finny inhabitants, of the beasts of the chase
from the hare to the buffalo, of domestic animals, of the native forests,
grass-lands, and deserts, and, last but not least, of temperature,
moisture, and wind in their direct effects upon the human body. At one
stage of human development the possibilities of agriculture may be the
dominant factor in man’s life in early America. At another, domestic
animals may be more important, and at still another, iron or waterways or
some other factor may be predominant. It is the part of the later history
of the American Continent to trace the effect of these various factors and
to chronicle the influence that they have had upon man’s progress.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Although many books deal with the physical features of the Western
Hemisphere and many others with the Indians, few deal with the two in
relation to one another. One book, however, stands out preeminent in this
respect, namely, Edward John Payne’s “History of the New World Called
America,” 2 vols. (1892-99). This book, which has never been finished,
attempts to explain the conditions of life among the American aborigines
as the result of geographical conditions, especially of the food supply.
Where the author carries this attempt into the field of special customs
and religious rites, he goes too far. Nevertheless his work is uncommonly
stimulating and deserves the careful attention of the reader who would
gain a broad grasp of the relation of geography to the history of the New
World.

Two other good books which deal with the relation of geography to American
history are Miss Ellen C. Semple’s “American History and its Geographical
Conditions” (1903) and A. P. Brigham’s “Geographic Influences in American
History” (1903). Both of these books interpret geography as if it included
little except the form of the land. While they bring out clearly the
effect of mountain barriers, indented coasts, and easy routes whether by
land or water, they scarcely touch on the more subtle relationships
between man on the one hand and the climate, plants, and animals which
form the dominant features of his physical environment on the other hand.

In their emphasis on the form of the land both Semple and Brigham follow
the lead of W. M. Davis. In his admirable articles on America and the
United States in “The Encyclopaedia Britannica” (11th edition) and in The
International Geography edited by H. R. Mill (1901), Davis has given an
uncommonly clear and vivid description of the main physical features of
the New World. Living beings, however, play little part in this
description, so that the reader is not led to an understanding of how
physical geography affects human actions.

Other good descriptions of the North American continent are found in the
following books: I. C. Russell’s “North America” (1904), Stanford’s
“Compendium of Modern Geography and Travel,” including the volumes on
Canada, the United States, and Central America, and the great volumes on
America in “The Earth and its Inhabitants” by Elise Reclus, 19 vols.
(1876-1894). Russell’s book is largely physiographic but contains some
good chapters on the Indians. In Stanford’s “Compendium” the purpose is to
treat man and nature in their relation to one another, but the
relationships are not clearly brought out, and there is too much emphasis
on purely descriptive and encyclopedic matter. So far as interest is
concerned, the famous work by Elise Reclus holds high rank. It is an
encyclopedia of geographical facts arranged and edited in such a way that
it has all the interest of a fine book of travel. Like most of the other
books, however, it fails to bring out relationships.

As sources of information on the Indians, two books stand out with special
prominence. “The American Race,” by D. G. Brinton (1891), is a most
scholarly volume devoted largely to a study of the Indians on a linguistic
basis. It contains some general chapters, however, on the Indians and
their environment, and these are most illuminating. The other book is the
“Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico,” edited by F. W. Hodge, and
published by the United States Bureau of Ethnology (Washington, 1897,
1910, 1911). Its two large volumes are arranged in encyclopedic form. The
various articles are written by a large number of scholars, including
practically all the students who were at work on Indian ethnology at the
time of publication. Many of the articles are the best that have been
written and will not only interest the general reader but will contribute
to an understanding of what America was when the Indians came here and
what it still is today.