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Their amusements were dances to a rude sort of mu- CHAPTER sic, with a song or recitative, and having a pantomimic and dramatic character, in which a certain resemblance may be traced to what we are told of the origin of the Greek and Roman drama. Such, especially, was the war dance, representing a whole history of the departure, the exploits, and the return of a war party. They observed, also, certain fasts and festivals of a religious char

Some of the tribes had a great wigwam, a rude sort of temple, for the celebration of their religious ceremonies. The young men were often initiated into manhood by cruel rites, intended apparently to test their powers of endurance. They practiced, for sport and exercise, several athletic games, among which foot-ball was a favorite. They had also games of chance, and were much addicted to gambling.

The scanty and uncertain supply of food, and more especially the hardships and severe labors to which the Indian women were subjected, contributed to keep the population in check. Few exceeded the number of three or four children. As a general rule, the Indians were not long lived. Many perished prematurely by consump tion and fevers, to which the sudden vicissitudes of the climate and their habits of life particularly exposed them. Toothache, one of the endemic disorders of the United States, is noticed by an early observer as a very com mon affliction, bringing tears into the eyes of the stoutest warriors. Whole tribes were sometimes swept away by famine or pestilential disorders. Europeans introduced the small-pox and other diseases, which proved very fatal.

The earlier visitors to North America formed very exaggerated notions of the number of the native inhabitants. From the sea-coast, back to the falls of the rivers,

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CHAPTER seems to have been by far the most populous part of the continent. This district had a resource in abundant supplies of fish, for the most part wanting in the interior. Great tracts among and beyond the mountains seem to have been destitute of resident inhabitants, serving as occasional hunting-grounds for distant tribes. The prairies of the Far West did not originally possess those herds of wild horses which have added so much to the pleasure and the power, and probably, also, to the numbers of the Western tribes. The most powerful confederacies, the Iroquois or Five Nations, the Cherokees, the Creeks, the Choctaws, the Chippewas of Lake Superior, never could boast more than three, four, or five thousand warriors, and the warriors were usually reckoned a fourth part of the whole number. From the more accurate knowledge we possess of existing tribes, compared with the facts stated by the earlier observers, we have no reason to suppose that the total Indian population within the territory of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, at any time subsequent to the discovery of America, exceeded, if indeed it even reached, three hundred thousand individuals.

Such was the state of the aboriginal population when North America first became known to Europeans. Yet there exist remarkable proofs, scattered through the whole extent of the Valley of the Mississippi, of the former occupation of that region by a far more numerous, and, in some respects, a different people. These memorials consist of embankments of earth and stone, exhibiting undeniable evidences of design and labor, sometimes of very great extent. Some of them, along the brows of hills or the precipitous edges of ravines, inclosing a greater or less space of table land, were evidently intended as works of defense. Others, still more numerous, extensive, and

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elaborate, seem most probably to have been connected CHAPTER religious ideas. Occupying often the fertile botthe junction of rivers, sites selected for towns present inhabitants, they present in some places basso relievos, birds, beasts, reptiles, and even it more generally, in the Valley of the Ohio, es of various sorts, often curiously complicated, circles and perfect squares, and parallel lines of xtent, the embankments being from five to thirty h, and the inclosures from one to fifty, and often ed or two hundred, and sometimes four hundred extent. Other classes of monuments, often conwith those just mentioned, but often separate, and sing in number toward the south, are conical and nidal structures, from a few yards to a thousand or thousand feet in diameter, and from ten to ninety high, sometimes terraced like the Mexican teocallis. e of these mounds were evidently for sepulchral pures, and others apparently mounds of sacrifice. Conted with these ancient monuments have been found nants of pottery, weapons and utensils of stone, axes ornaments of copper, but nothing which affords any sive evidence of a state of civilization superior to of the present Indians. Yet the extent and numof these earth-erections, of which there are but few s east of the Alleganies-the most populous region orth America when it first became known to Europeans evince the combined labor of many hands, of a sort of which no traces appeared among the tribes found in possession by Europeans.

A closer examination of those tribes might show some. striking and curious peculiarities; but the institutions and the social condition of all the aborigines north of the Gulf of Mexico present a strong general resemblance in extreme simplicity and primitive rudeness.

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Extending our glance for a moment to the rest of the new world, we find in the West Indies, and throughout the whole wide western slope of South America, different languages indeed, and some differences of customs. and habits, occasioned by differences of climate and natural productions, but a social condition, a state of primitive ignorance and poverty, and on the continent a paucity of population, the same with that of the northern tribes. It was only on the table land of Mexico, the isthmus of Central America, the elevated plateaus of Bogota, Quito, and Peru, circumscribed spots, peculiarly favored by nature, enjoying most of the advantages, and escaping many of the inconveniences of both the torrid and the temperate zones, that the American race had made any onward steps in the career of civilization. Here were populous communities, supported by regular labors of agriculture; the art of weaving cotton cloth; the employment of copper, which they knew how to subject to a peculiar hardening process, as a substitute for iron; the knowledge of gold, and the art of working it; the mass of the people, as in so many Eastern countries, in the condition of serfs; a nobility; a priesthood, not without learning; an elaborate mythology; architecture on a gigantic scale; large cities; despotic monarchs in Mexico, a cruel and bloody system, over which the god of war presided, to whom was offered the horrible but consistent worship of human sacrifices: in Peru, a superstition comparatively mild, and a government comparatively paternal, administered by the Incas, children of the Sun. It is much to be lamented that the jealous fanaticism of the early Spanish conquerors, followed by apathy and neglect in their descendants, has resulted in the loss of memorials which might have enabled us more accurately to estimate the character, per

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haps to trace the progress of this aboriginal American CHAPTER civilization, which seems, indeed, to have been but a development of the ruder system of the other tribes, and still bearing many traces of its origin. It is certain, at all events, that the native Mexicans and Peruvians, who still constitute the mass of the population in those countries, are of the same race or type with our North American Indians. From Patagonia to Hudson's Bay, the aboriginal inhabitants of America presented a resemblance sufficient to mark them as a separate and peculiar race, and obvious to the most careless observer. It was only about the Arctic seas that a departure from this uniform type was observed; that region being inhabited by the Esquimaux, of the same race apparently with the polar inhabitants of the Eastern continent. A similar conformity also prevailed as to all the animal inhabitants. of that region.

When the aborigines of North America first came in contact with voyagers from Europe, struck with their superiority in arts and knowledge, they inclined to regard them as supernatural beings, to be received with unbounded hospitality, veneration, and confidence. This trust and good will were cruelly repaid. The practice of kidnapping the Indians, to sell them into slavery, as we have seen, was early commenced-a business regularly carried on for the benefit of the Spanish settlements in the West Indies. Nor did adventurers of other nations hesitate to seize the unsuspecting natives as trophies of the voyage, or to serve as guides for future expeditions. By most of the early navigators, to murder the natives in cold blood, upon the slightest provocation, seems to have been thought quite a matter of course. Can we wonder that confidence was soon replaced by distrust and hatred; that, in accordance with their ideas,

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