Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/200

 dotted with hamlets, which grew to towns, and these in time to cities. The intervals between them were covered with grain-fields and orchards, of which the growth was so luxuriant that it seemed to prove the soil to be now for the first time opened to the sunlight. Thus several generations passed; but in time the invading hosts pressed through the great natural water-gap, which once connected the Hudson with the lakes, or crossed the Alleghanies from Pennsylvania and Virginia, and took possession of the basin of the Ohio. Here they entered their promised land—the valley of the Mississippi—a region which by its broad topographical unity, its universal fertility, its network of navigable waters, and its unequaled mineral resources, is without a rival on the earth's surface in its fitness to become the home of a great nation. Here, too, the wandering and stealthy savage was in full possession, and resisted the invasion of his hunting-grounds with his characteristic ferocity.

Ultimately, however, he was compelled to yield to the superior numbers and intelligence of the whites, and, within fifty years from the first struggle on the "dark and bloody ground" of Kentucky, he had practically abandoned all the territory east of the Mississippi.

When the forests were opened in this region, it was for the first time discovered that the nomadic Indian was not autochthonous, and that he had been preceded by a sedentary and partially civilized people, who had cultivated the soil, worked the mines, and left behind them a vast series of monuments which extended from the Alleghanies to the prairies, from the Lakes to the Gulf. These monuments consisted of mounds, walls, fortifications, and other structures composed of earth or rough stone, and among them the mounds (chiefly sepulchral) were so conspicuous from their numbers and size that the people by whom they were constructed—and whose name and history had been utterly lost—for want of other designation were called the Mound-builders.

The records of this ancient people, with the lessons they teach in regard to their degree and kind of culture and their ethnical relations, will be referred to again. Meantime we will pass to notice a still more extensive and interesting series of monuments which attest the ancient occupation of America by civilized man.

Long before the Northern whites had entered the valley of the Mississippi, and had discovered the first traces of the moundbuilders, the Spaniards who invaded Mexico and Peru found there a civilization in many respects superior to their own—a civilization which extended throughout Mexico, the Isthmus, and the west coast of South America to the frontiers of Chili; that had produced cities that rivaled in extent and in the magnificence of their buildings those of the Old World—cities that were lighted