History of the United States, Volume 1 | Page 5

belief in the destruction of the world by fire, and so on, are
nearly all found the world over, the spontaneous creations of our
common human intelligence.
The original American peoples, various and unlike as they were, agreed
in four traits, three of them physical, one mental, which mark them off
as in all likelihood primarily of one stock after all, and as different from
any Old World men: (1) They had low, retreating foreheads. (2) Their
hair was black. (3) It was also of a peculiar texture, lank, and
cylindrical in section, never wavy. And (4) their languages were
polysynthetic, forming a class apart from all others in the world. The
peoples of America, if from Asia, must date back to a time when
speech itself was in its infancy.
[Illustration: Temple Mound In Mexico.]
The numerous varieties of ancient Americans reduce to two distinct
types --the Dolicocephalous or long-skulled, and the Brachycephalous
or short-skulled. Morton names these types respectively the Toltecan
and the American proper. The Toltecan type was represented by the

primitive inhabitants of Mexico and by the Mound-builders of our
Mississippi Valley; the American proper, by the Indians. The Toltecans
made far the closer approach to civilization, though the others
possessed a much greater susceptibility therefor than the modern
Indians of our prairies would indicate.
Of the Mound-builders painfully little is known. Many of their mounds
still remain, not less mysterious or interesting than the pyramids of
Egypt, perhaps almost equally ancient. The skeletons exhumed from
them often fly into dust as soon as exposed to air, a rare occurrence
with the oldest bones found in Europe. On the parapet-crest of the Old
Fort at Newark, 0., trees certainly five hundred years old have been cut,
and they could not have begun their growth till long after the
earth-works had been deserted. In some mounds, equally aged trees
root in the decayed trunks of a still anterior growth.
Much uncertainty continues to shroud the design of these mounds.
Some were for military defence, others for burial places, others for
lookout stations, others apparently for religious uses. Still others, it is
supposed, formed parts of human dwellings. That they proceeded from
intelligence and reflection is clear. Usually, whether they are squares or
circles, their construction betrays nice, mathematical exactness,
unattainable save by the use of instruments. Many constitute
effigies--of birds, fishes, quadrupeds, men. In Wisconsin is a mound
135 feet long and well proportioned, much resembling an elephant; in
Adams County, 0., a gracefully curved serpent, 1,000 feet long, with
jaws agape as if to swallow an egg-shaped figure in front; in Granville,
in the same State, one in the form of a huge crocodile; in Greenup
County, Ky., an image of a bear, which seems leaning forward in an
attitude of observation, measuring 53 feet from the top of the back to
the end of the foreleg, and 105-1/2 feet from the tip of the nose to the
rear of the hind foot.
[Illustration: Big Elephant Mound, Wisconsin.]
The sites of towns and cities were artfully selected, near navigable
rivers and their confluences, as at Marietta, Cincinnati, and in Kentucky
opposite the old mouth of the Scioto. Points for defence were chosen

and fortified with scientific precision. The labor expended upon these
multitudinous structures must have been enormous, implying a vast
population and extensive social, economic, and civil organization. The
Cahokia mound, opposite St. Louis, is 90 feet high and 900 feet long.
The Mound-builders made elegant pottery, of various design and
accurate shapes, worked bone and all sorts of stones, and even forged
copper. There are signs that they understood smelting this metal. They
certainly mined it in large quantities, and carried it down the
Mississippi hundreds of miles from its source on Lake Superior. They
must have been masters of river navigation, but their mode of
conveying vast burdens overland, destitute of efficient draft animals as
they apparently were, we can hardly even conjecture.
The Mound-builders, as we have said, were related to the antique
populations of Mexico and Central America, and the most probable
explanation of their departure from their Northern seats is that in face
of pestilence, or of some overpowering human foe, they retreated to the
Southwest, there to lay, under better auspices, the foundations of new
states, and to develop that higher civilization whose relics, too little
known, astound the student of the past, as greatly as do the stupendous
pillars of Carnac or the grotesque animal figures of Khorsabad and
Nimrud.
So much has been written about the American Indians that we need not
discuss them at length. They were misnamed Indians by Columbus,
who supposed the land he had discovered to be India. At the time of his
arrival not more than two hundred thousand of them lived east of