History of the United States, Volume 1 | Page 6

the
Mississippi, though they were doubtless far more numerous West and
South. Whence they came, or whether, if this was a human deed at all,
they or another race now extinct drove out the Mound-builders, none
can tell.
Of arts the red man had but the rudest. He made wigwams, canoes,
bone fish-hooks with lines of hide or twisted bark, stone tomahawks,
arrow-heads and spears, clothing of skins, wooden bows, arrows, and
clubs. He loved fighting, finery, gambling, and the chase. He
domesticated no animals but the dog and possibly the hog. Sometimes

brave, he was oftener treacherous, cruel, revengeful. His power of
endurance on the trail or the warpath was incredible, and if captured, he
let himself be tortured to death without a quiver or a cry. Though
superstitious, he believed in a Great Spirit to be worshipped without
idols, and in a future life of happy hunting and feasting.
Whether, at the time of which we now speak, the Indians were an old
race, already beginning to decline, or a fresh race, which contact with
the whites balked of its development, it is difficult to say. Their career
since best accords with the former supposition. In either case we may
assume that their national groupings and habitats were nearly the same
in 1500 as later, when these became accurately known. In the
eighteenth century the Algonquins occupied all the East from Nova
Scotia to North Carolina, and stretched west to the Mississippi. At one
time they numbered ninety thousand. The Iroquois or Five Nations had
their seat in Central and Western New York. North and west of them
lived the Hurons or Wyandots. The Appalachians, embracing
Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles and a number of
lesser tribes, occupied all the southeastern portion of what is now the
United States. West of the Mississippi were the Dakotas or Sioux.
Since the white man's arrival upon these shores, very few changes have
occurred among the brute inhabitants of North America. A few species,
as the Labrador duck and the great auk, have perished. America then
possessed but four animals which had appreciable economic value; the
dog, the reindeer at the north, which the Mound-builders used as a draft
animal but the Indians did not, and the llama and the paco south of the
equator. Every one of our present domestic animals originated beyond
the Atlantic, being imported hither by our ancestors. The Indians of the
lower Mississippi Valley, when De Soto came, had dogs, and also what
the Spaniards called hogs, perhaps peccaries, but neither brute was of
any breed now bred in the country. A certain kind of dogs were native
also to the Juan Fernandez and the Falkland Islands.
Mr. Edward John Payne is doubtless correct in maintaining, in his
"History of the New World called America," that the backwardness of
the American aborigines was largely due to their lack of animals

suitable for draft or travel or producing milk or flesh good for food.
From the remotest antiquity Asiatics had the horse, ass, ox and cow,
camel and goat--netting ten times the outfit in useful animals which the
Peruvians, Mexicans, or Indians enjoyed.
The vegetable kingdom of Old America was equally restricted, which
also helps explain its low civilization. At the advent of the Europeans
the continent was covered with forests. Then, though a few varieties
may have since given out and some imported ones run wild, the
undomesticated plants and trees were much as now. Not so the
cultivated kinds. The Indians were wretched husbandmen, nor had the
Mound-builders at all the diversity of agricultural products so familiar
to us. Tobacco, Indian corn, cocoa, sweet potatoes, potatoes, the
custard apple, the Jerusalem artichoke, the guava, the pumpkin and
squash, the papaw and the pineapple, indigenous to North America, had
been under cultivation here before Columbus came, the first four from
most ancient times. The manioc or tapioca-plant, the red-pepper plant,
the marmalade plum, and the tomato were raised in South America
before 1500. The persimmon, the cinchona tree, millet, the Virginia and
the Chili strawberry are natives of this continent, but have been brought
under cultivation only within the last three centuries.
The four great cereals, wheat, rye, oats, and rice, constituting all our
main food crops but corn, have come to us from Europe. So have
cherries, quinces, and pears, also hops, currants, chestnuts, and
mushrooms. The banana, regarded by von Humboldt as an original
American fruit, modern botanists derive from Asia. With reference to
apples there may be some question. Apples of a certain kind flourished
in New England so early after the landing of the Pilgrims that it is
difficult to suppose the fruit not to have been indigenous to this
continent. Champlain, in 1605 or 1606, found the Indians about the
present sites of