Sir Daniel Wilson

“ So far the picture is true to nature; but no dream of a millennial era for the Red Man, in which all were thenceforth to live together as brothers, can have fashioned itself in the mind of Indian seer. The Sioux, the Crees, and the Blackfeet, still continued to nurse the same feud of ages, and thirsted for each other’s blood, while European emigrants crowd in to take possession of their vast prairies, destined to become the granaries of the world. ”

“ No people, however rude or debased be their state, have yet been met with so degraded to the level of the brutes as to entertain no notion of a Supreme Being, or no anticipation of a future state. Some more or less defined idea of a retributive future is found in the wildest savage creed, developing itself in accordance with the rude virtues to which the barbarian aspires. While the luxurious Asiatic dreams of the sensual joys of his Mohammedan elysium, the Red Indian warrior looks forward to the range of ampler hunting-grounds, and the enjoyment of unfailing victory on the war-path. ”

“ Everywhere the explorer wanders, and the agriculturist follows, turning up the soil, or digging deeper as he drains and builds; but only to disturb the grave of the savage hunter. The Mound-Builders of its great river-valleys have indeed left there their enduring earthworks, wrought at times in regular geometrical configuration on a gigantic scale, strangely suggestive of some overruling and informing mind guiding the hand of the earthworker. But their mounds and earthworks disclose only implements of bone and flint or stone, with here and there an equally rude tool of hammered native copper. ”

“ The human hand is not only the symbol of the intelligent artificer, “the hand of the master,” the sign and epitome of the lord and ruler; it is the instrument of the will alike for good and evil deeds. The idea of it as the active participator in every act embodies itself in all vocabularies. The imperial mandate, the lordly manumission, the skilled manufacturer, the handy tool, the unhandy workman, the left-handed stroke, the handless drudge, with other equally familiar terms, all refer to the same ever-ready exponent of the will ”

“ On the lofty table-land which lies between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, at an elevation of nearly seven thousand five hundred feet, the valley of Mexico lies engirdled by its ramparts of porphyritic rock, like a vast fortress provided by nature for guarding the infancy of American civilisation. ”

“ Like an unwonted tide, the flood of Roman invasion swept beyond its natural limits, disturbing and unsettling many things long unaffected by change. But the tide ebbed as rapidly as it had flowed, and at most only helped to prepare the soil for a new growth. Neither the manners, the faith, nor the social habits of these foreign occupants of the country could be at all acceptable to the natives, though their superior arts and military skill would not fail to be appreciated, and must have been turned to good account. ”

“ The comparative isolation of Central America, and the character of its climate and productions, all favoured a more settled life; with, as genuine results, its architecture, sculpture, metallurgy, hieroglyphics, writing, and all else that gives so novel a character to the memorials of the Central American nations. But great as is their contrast with the wild tribes of the continent, the highest phases of native civilisation will not compare with the arts of Egypt, in centuries before Cadmus taught letters to the rude shepherds of Attica, or the wolf still suckled her cubs on the Palatine hill. ”

“ Among the old Scandinavian nations, and in Iceland, where the language of their runic literature is still a living tongue, as well as in France, and throughout the whole Germanic races of the Continent, all memory of the restoration of this divine gift of the metals has utterly passed away. In England only—towards which we see the galleys of the elder inheritors of civilisation winging their way in quest of its metallic treasures with the first glimpse we catch of it as it emerges out of the night of time—the mythic legend has retained vitality till now. ”

“ The study of man’s condition and progress in Europe’s prehistoric centuries reveals him as a savage hunter, armed solely with weapons of flint and bone, frequenting the lake and river margins of a continent clothed in primeval forests and haunted by enormous beasts of prey. Displaced by intrusive migrations, this rude pioneer disappears, and his traces are overlaid or erased by the improved arts of his supplanters. The infancy of the historic nations begins. Metallurgy, architecture, science, and letters follow, effacing the faint records of Europe’s nomadic pioneers ”

“ But when the whale haunted the shores to which the hunters of the Perigord resorted, it is doubtful if Britain was an island. In that age of the mammoth and the reindeer of the Pyrenees, when art flourished in the valley of the Vézère, and men, scarcely less strange than the long-extinct fauna on which they preyed, sheltered in their rock-dwellings from the ice and snow, the relative levels of sea and land, and the lines of the Atlantic coast, bore no relation to their present aspect; for the old region of ice and snow was what is now familiar to us as the vine-clad sunny land of France. ”

“ Close to the site of Glasgow's ancient City Cross, and immediately adjoining what was once the Tolbooth of the burgh—more memorable from the fancied associations with which genius has endowed it, than for the stern realities of human misery which were its true attributes—there stands a quaint, but not inelegant building, adorned with an arcade curiously decorated with grim or grotesque masks on the keystone of each arch. ”

“ It is not always easy to determine the characteristics of some of the most famous monuments of Mexican art. The ruined city of Aztalan, on the western prairies: after filling the imagination with glowing fancies of a Baalbek or Palmyra of the New World, from whence the Aztecs had transplanted the arts of an obliterated civilisation to the Mexican plateau, shrunk before the gaze of a truthful surveyor into a mere group of mounds and earthworks, presenting no other analogies than those which class them with the works of the American Mound-Builders. ”

“ The ambition of the old Babel-builders was well directed for this world. There are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality. It is well to have not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld all the days of their life. ”

“ The physical geography of the New World presents fewer barriers to be surmounted. But if the student of North American ethnology spread before him a map of the continent, and trace out the wanderings of the Huron-Iroquois, he must revert in fancy to that remote era when confederated Iroquois and Algonkins swept in triumphant fury through the wasted valley of the Ohio, and repeated there what Goth and Hun did for Europe, in Rome’s decline and fall. ”

“ The Indian does not believe in the superiority of the white man. The difference between them is only such as he discerns between the social, constructive beaver, and the solitary, cunning fox. The Great Spirit implanted in each his peculiar faculties; why should the one covet the nature of the other? Hence one element of the unhopeful Indian future. The progress of the white man offers even less incentive to his ambition than the cunning of the fox, or the architectural instincts of the beaver. ”

“ It is vain to urge such dubious evidence as the fancied traces of a mould-ridge, or the solitary example of a casting of uncertain age, in proof of a knowledge of the furnace and the crucible among any North American tribe. Everywhere in Europe the soil yields not only its buried relics of gold, copper, and bronze, but also stone and bronze moulds in which implements and personal ornaments were cast. ”

“ In this view of the case, the canoe of America is the type of a developed instinct pregnant with many suggestive thoughts for us; and the traces of the primeval ship-builder’s art accumulate wonderfully so soon as attention is drawn to it. On the banks of the Clyde, the voyager from the New World looks with peculiar interest on the growing fabrics of those huge steamers, which have made the ocean, that proved so impassable a barrier to the men of the fifteenth century, the easy highway of commerce and pleasure for us. ”

“ The war-songs of the Northmen shew that such expeditions were the paths to honour as well as to wealth; nor was it till the milder tenets of Christianity had superseded the warrior-creed of Thor, that their plundering voyages came to an end. But unlike the British and Irish, the Scandinavians have a Pagan literature, contemporary with those scenes of adventure and bold deeds of arms: and so much the more valuable that it preserves a picture of the period uninfluenced by that corporate spirit which detracts so much from the contemporary monkish annals of our own and other countries. ”

“ But, tracing in legendary fashion the early steps of Indian progress, the poet represents the mythic reformer mourning how all things perish and pass into oblivion. Even the great achievements and the traditions of their people fade away from the memory of the old men. And so he inaugurates the method of recording events, which in reality we recognise as the natural product of the human mind in the exercise of that imitative faculty which the discoveries of comparatively recent years have revealed to us as in full activity among the men of Europe’s remote Post-Glacial era. ”

“ Viewed in this light the frequent occurrence of such relics in the cist, or under the memorial cairn, may be pregnant with a far higher meaning than the mere ornamental fibula or amulet. When found with the spear and sword, the ring may indicate the grave of the warrior-priest or lawgiver,—a union of offices so consistent with society in a primitive state; while, in the female barrow, amid the bracelets and necklaces which once adorned the primitive British matron, the curious relic may, with no undue indulgence of fancy, be looked upon as the spousal pledge, and the literal wedding-ring. ”

“ In all that relates to the history of man in the New World, we have ever to reserve ourselves for further truths. There are languages of living tribes, of which we have neither vocabulary nor grammar. There are nations of whose physical aspect we scarcely know anything; and areas where it is a moot point even now, whether the ancient civilisation of central America may not be still a living thing. The ossiferous caves of England have only revealed their wonders during the present century, and the works of art in the French drift lay concealed till our own day. ”

“ But far to the southward are the ancient pueblos, the casas grandes, the cliff dwellings, of a race not yet extinct: timid, unaggressive, living wholly on the defensive, gathered in large communities like ants or bees; industrious, frugal, and manifesting ingenious skill in their pottery and other useful arts; but, they too, in no greatly advanced stage. Still farther to the south we come at length to the seats of an undoubted native American civilisation. ”