HISTORY OF

THE UNITED STATES

I

THE FIRST AMERICANS

T happened to the writer more than once, during the American Civil War, to sail up some great Southern river that was to all appearance unvisited by the ships of man. It might well have been the entrance to a newly discovered continent. No light-house threw its hospitable gleam across the dangerous bar, no floating buoys marked the intricacies of the channel; the lights had been extinguished, the buoys removed, and the whole coast seemed to have gone back hundreds of years, reverting to its primeval and unexplored condition. There was commonly no sound except the light plash of waves or the ominous roll of heavy surf. Once only, I remember, when at anchor in a dense fog off St. Simon's Island, in Georgia, I heard a low, continuous noise from the unseen distance, more wild and desolate than anything else in my memory can parallel. It came from within the vast girdle of mist, and seemed as if it might be the cry of lost souls out of some Inferno of Dante; yet it was but the sound of innumerable sea-fowl at the entrance

of the outer bay. Amid such experiences I was for the first time enabled to picture to myself the American continent as its first European visitors saw it.

Lonely as the land may have seemed, those early voyagers always came upon the traces, ere long, of human occupants. Who were those men and women, what was their origin, what their mode of life? Every one who explores the mounds of the Ohio Valley, or gazes on the ruins of Yucatan, or looks into the wondrous narratives of the Spanish conquerors, must ask himself this question. For many years there seemed no answer to it. Facts came in faster and faster, and every new fact made the puzzle seem more hopeless, so long as no one could offer the solution. These various prehistoric races, so widely sundered, threw no light upon one another; they only deepened one another's darkness. Indians, Aztecs, Mayas, Mound-builders, seemed to have no common origin, no visible analogy of life or habits. The most skilful student was hardly in advance of the least skilful as to any real comprehension of the facts; nor could this possibly be otherwise, so long as the clew to the labyrinth was not found. It is only some fifty years since it may be said to have been discovered; only some thirty since it has been resolutely and persistently used. Let us see what results it has yielded.

When, in 1852, Lieutenant J. H. Simpson, of the United States army, gave to the world the first detailed description of the vast ruined pueblos of New Mexico, and of the other pueblos still occupied, he did not know that he was providing the means for rewriting all the picturesque tales of the early conquerors. All their legends of cisatlantic emperors

and empires were to be read anew in the light of that discovery. These romances had been told in good faith, or something as near it as the narrator knew,

and the tales had passed from one to another, each building on what his predecessor had laid down. The accounts were accepted with little critical revision by modern writers; they filled the attractive

pages of Prescott; even Hubert Bancroft did not greatly modify them; but the unshrinking light of a new theory was to raise questions as to them all. And with them were to be linked also Stephens's dreams of vast cities, once occupied by an immense population, and now remaining only as unexplored ruins amid the forests of Central America. The facts he saw were confirmed, but his impressions had to be tested by a wholly new interpretation. And, after all, these various wonders were only to be exchanged for new marvels, as interesting as the old ones, and more intelligible and coherent.

From the publication of Lewis H. Morgan's remarkable essay, entitled "Montezuma's Dinner," in the North American Review for April, 1876, the new interpretation took a definite form. The vast accumulation of facts in regard to the early American races then began to be classified and simplified; and with whatever difference as to details, the general opinion of scholars now inclines to the view which, when Morgan first urged it, was called startling and incredible. That view is still, in a sense, a theory, as Darwin's "origin of species" is still a theory; but Morgan's speculations, like Darwin's, began a new era for the science to which they relate. He held that there never was a prehistoric American civilization, properly so called, but only an advanced and wonderfully skilful barbarism, or semi-civilization at the utmost. He maintained that the aboriginal races, except perhaps the Eskimo, were essentially one in their social structure, however they may have varied in development. In his view there never was an Aztec or Maya empire, but only a league of free tribes, appointing their own chiefs, and