Part 5 (1/2)
”It is equally clear that they were not the work of the Indians. Until the Senecas, who are renowned for their national vanity, had seen the attention of the Americans attracted to these erections, and had invented the fabulous account of which I have spoken, the Indians of the present day did not pretend to know any thing about their origin. They were beyond the reach of all their traditions, and were lost in the abyss of unexplored antiquity.”
At the Bull shoals, east branch of White river in Missouri, several feet below the surface of the banks, _reliqua_ were found which indicated that this spot had formerly been the seat of metalurgical operations. The alloy appeared to be lead united with silver. Arrow-heads cut out of flint, and pieces of earthen pots which had evidently undergone the action of fire, were also found here. The period of time at which these operations were carried on in this place must have been very remote, as the present banks have been since entirely formed by alluvial deposits.
Near the _Teel-te-nah_ (or dripping-fork), which empties itself into the La Platte, and not far distant from its junction with that river, there is an extensive cavern, in which are deposited several mummies. Some tribes which roam this region have a tradition, that the first Indian ascended through this aperture, and settled on the earth's surface.
A few years since, on the Merrimac river in St. Louis county, a number of pigmy graves were discovered. The coffins were of stone; and the length of the bodies which they contained, judging from that of the coffins, could not have been more than from three feet and a half to four feet. The graves were numerous, and the skeletons in some instances nearly entire.
In the month of June (1830), a party of gentlemen, whilst in pursuit of wild turkeys, in Hart county, Kentucky, discovered, on the top of a small knoll, a hole sufficiently large to admit a man's body. Having procured lights, they descended, and at the depth of about sixty feet, entered a cavern, sixteen or eighteen feet square, apparently hewn out of solid rock. The whole chamber was filled with human skeletons, which they supposed, _from the size_, to be those of women and children. The place was perfectly dry, and the bones were in a state of great preservation.
They wished to ascertain how deep the bones lay, and dug through them between four and seven feet, but found them quite as plentiful as at the top: on coming to this depth, dampness appeared, and an unpleasant effluvia arising, obliged them to desist. There was no outlet to the cavern. A large snake, which appeared to be perfectly docile, pa.s.sed several times round the apartment whilst they remained.
In a museum at New York, I saw one of those mummies alluded to, which appeared to be remarkably small; but I had not an opportunity of examining it minutely. Those that have been found in the most perfect state of preservation were deposited in nitrous caves, and were enveloped in a manner so different from the practices of the Indians, that the idea cannot be entertained of their being the remains of the ancestors of the present race. Flint gives the following description of one of them which he carefully examined. He says, ”The more the subject of the past races of men and animals in this region is investigated, the more perplexed it seems to become. The huge bones of the animals indicate them to be vastly larger than any that now exist on the earth. All that I have seen and heard of the remains of the men, would seem to shew that they were smaller than the men of our times. All the bodies that have been found in that high state of preservation, in which they were discovered in nitrous caves, were considerably smaller than the present ordinary stature of men. The two bodies that were found in the vast limestone cavern in Tennessee, one of which I saw at Lexington, were neither of them more than four feet in height. It seems to me that this must have been nearly the height of the living person. The teeth and nails did not seem to indicate the shrinking of the flesh from them in the desiccating process by which they were preserved. The teeth were separated by considerable intervals; and were small, long, white, and sharp, reviving the horrible images of nursery tales of ogres' teeth. The hair seemed to have been sandy, or inclining to yellow. It is well known that nothing is so uniform in the present Indian as his lank black hair. From the pains taken to preserve the bodies, and the great labour of making the funeral robes in which they were folded, they must have been of the 'blood-royal,' or personages of great consideration in their day. The person that I saw, had evidently died by a blow on the skull. The blood had coagulated there into a ma.s.s, of a texture and colour sufficiently marked to shew that it had been blood. The envelope of the body was double. Two splendid blankets, completely woven with the most beautiful feathers of the wild turkey, arranged in regular stripes and compartments, encircled it. The cloth on which these feathers were woven, was a kind of linen of neat texture, of the same kind with that which is now woven from the fibres of the nettle.
The body was evidently that of a female of middle age, and I should suppose that her majesty weighed, when I saw her, six or eight pounds.”
The silly attempts that have been made to establish an oriental origin for the North American Indians, have never produced any other conviction in an unbiased mind, than that the _facts_ brought forward to support that theory existed only in the imaginations of those who advanced them. The colour, the form, the manners, habits, and propensities of the Indians, all combine to establish that they are a distinct race of human beings, and could never have emanated from any people of European, Asiatic, or African origin. The notion that climate would be sufficient to produce an essential change in the appearance of any number of individuals, cannot now be maintained; since from the discovery of America, Europeans, Africans, and Indians have inhabited all regions of this vast continent, without undergoing the slightest characteristic change from the descendants of the original stock, who have remained in their primitive locations. The Power that induces the existence of plants and lower animals indigenous to the different sections of the earth, seems also to induce the existence of a race of men peculiar to the regions in which they are found.
The languages of America are radically different from those of the old world; and no similitude can be traced between the tongues of the red men, and those of any other people hitherto known. Jarvis, in his Paper on the Religion of the Indian Tribes of North America, says, ”The best informed writers agree, that there are, exclusive of the Karalit or Esquimaux, three radical languages spoken by the Indians of North America.
Mr. Heckwelder denominates them the Iroquois, the Lenape, and the Floridian. The Iroquois is spoken by the Six Nations, the Wyandots, or Hurons, the Nandowessies, the a.s.siniboils, and other tribes beyond the St.
Lawrence. The Lenape, which is the most widely extended language on this side the Mississippi, was spoken by the tribes now extinct, who formerly inhabited Nova Scotia and the present state of Maine, the Abenakis, Micmacs, Canibas, Openangos, Socc.o.kis, Etchemins, and Souriquois; dialects of it are now spoken by the Miamis, the Potawatomies, Missisangoes, and Kickapoos; the Eonestogas, Nantic.o.kes, Shawanese, and Mohicans; the Algonquins, Knisteneaux, and Chippeways. The Floridian includes the languages of the Creeks, or Muskohgees, Chickesaws, Choctaws, Pascagoulas, Cherokees, Seminolese, and several other tribes in the southern states and Florida. These three languages are primitive; that is to say, are so distinct as to have no perceivable affinity. All, therefore, cannot be derived from the Hebrew; for it is a contradiction in terms to speak of three languages radically different, as derived from a common source.
Which, then, we may well ask, is to be selected as the posterity of the Israelites: the Iroquois, the Lenape, or the southern Indians?
”Besides, there is one striking peculiarity in the construction of American languages, which has no counterpart in the Hebrew. Instead of the ordinary division of genders, they divide into animate and inanimate. It is impossible to conceive that any nation, in whatever circ.u.mstances they might be placed, could depart in so remarkable a manner from the idioms of their native language.”
M. Duponceau, a Frenchman settled at Philadelphia, who is perhaps one of the first philologists of the age, concludes a treatise on the same subject with the following deductions:
1.--”That the American languages, in general, are rich in words and in grammatical forms; and that in their complicated construction, the greatest order, method, and regularity prevail.”
2.--”That these complicated forms, which I call polysinthetic, appear to exist in all those languages, from Greenland to Cape Horn.”[8]
3.--”That these forms appear to differ essentially from those of the ancient and modern languages of the old hemisphere.”
We intended to proceed direct from the banks of the Mississippi to Edwardsville, which lies in a north-easterly direction from St. Louis, but unfortunately got on the wrong track, an occurrence by no means uncommon on the prairies, and by this casualty visited Troy, a _town_ containing two houses, namely, a ”groggery,” and a farm-house, both owned by the one person. The only resemblance this trans-Atlantic Ilium can possibly bear to the city of the ten years' siege, lies in the difficulty of ascertaining its location; for had we not been informed that here stood the town of Troy, we should have pa.s.sed through this, as we did through many others, without ever suspecting the fact. Town-making is quite a speculation in the western country; and the first thing a man does after purchasing a few hundred acres of ground, is to ”lay off a town lot:” this causes the maps to be studded with little circular dots, and great big names attached to them, which would lead one to suppose the population to be much greater than it is in reality.
From Edwardsville, we proceeded by Ripley and Greenville, to Vandalia, the seat of government of the state.
The prairies had lost much of the brilliant green colour which they possessed when we before crossed them, and they were now a.s.suming rather a burnt appearance. Towards the close of autumn the gra.s.s generally becomes so dry as to be easily ignited, which formerly took place by accident, or otherwise, almost every year. The sight must be grand indeed; and we almost regretted that we were not so fortunate as to be in danger of being burnt alive--the sight would be worth the risk. There is a penalty attached to the firing of the woods or prairies, as the plantations are now becoming too numerously scattered over the country, and property is likely to be injured by these conflagrations.
Towards the latter end of October, the season peculiar to this country, denominated the ”Indian summer,” commences, and lasts for some weeks. At this period, the atmosphere is suffused with a vapour which at a distance has the appearance of smoke, arising as it were from fires in the forest.
The air is always calm and mild on those days, and the sun's disk a.s.sumes a broad, reddish appearance.
Vandalia is the capital of Illinois, and is seated on the Kaskaskia river, which is only navigable to this point during the ”freshets” in autumn and spring. The positions of the capitals are chosen for their centrality alone, and not with reference to any local advantages they may possess.
Illinois is a free state, and its const.i.tution is but a counterpart of those of Ohio and Indiana. The extent is 380 miles from north to south, and about 140 miles from east to west: area, 52,000 square miles, or 33,280,000 acres. The population in 1810, was 12,282; in 1820, 55,211: white males, 29,401; white females, 24,387; slaves, 917; militia in 1821, 2,031. The present population is, according to the last census, 157,575.
The increase within the last ten years has been nearly 186 per cent.
This state is better circ.u.mstanced than any other in the west. It is bounded on the north by the north-west territory; on the south by the Ohio; on the east by the Wabash and Lake Michigan; and on the west by the Mississippi. The Illinois river is navigable at almost all seasons to very nearly its head waters; and by means of a very short portage a communication is established between it and Lake Michigan. A ca.n.a.l is contemplated between this lake and the Wabash.
The heath-hen (_tetrao cupido_), or as it is here called, the 'Prairie-hen,' abounds on the prairies, particularly in the neighbourhood of barrens. This species of grouse, I believe, is not to be met with in Europe; nor has it been accurately described by any ornithologist before Wilson. One habit of the male of this bird is remarkable: at the season of incubation, the c.o.c.ks a.s.semble every morning just before day-break, outside the wood, and there exercise themselves tilting until the sun appears, when they disperse. Hunters have not failed to note the circ.u.mstance, and take advantage of it.