Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/382

378 —and together with the Scotch-Irish settled the frontier valleys of the Blue Ridge. These were the peoples—Teutonic with a Celtic infusion—that traversed the wide gap of the Atlantic and planted a civilization on its farther fringe.

It was what these people brought with them, as qualities of mind, traditions and habits of life, and the way they looked at things, that interest us most. There could be no adaptation to a wilderness life like that of the aboriginal inhabitants of this fringe-land. Here were men and women, the product of centuries of civilization, suddenly confronted with the bare fact of existence on the edge of an inhospitable and unknown forest. This transit of civilized peoples is one of the amazing events of history. Tillers of the land for generations, they brought with them the old-world grains and food plants, their household goods, farm implements and cattle, and with these a bundle of curious ideas and superstitions which had a deep and widespread rootage in the ancestral soil of Europe. The forest held nothing for them save fuel and material for shelter. Fish, flesh and fowl were to be had in abundance, but of the wild food-plants that were indigenous to the soil and which the native peoples had used for ages these immigrants from civilization knew little or nothing. Dependent from a remote antiquity upon agriculture, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the first comers to the new land were at times sorely put to it for food, as the early records relate.

The effect of this fringe-land upon its native inhabitants was apparent in the low state of their culture. The aboriginal Atlantic tribes were unacquainted with the use of iron, which, as Ratzel has remarked, is a characteristic of all fringe-land peoples. Their agriculture was of the rudest sort—the planting of maize, squashes and tobacco, with little or no tillage, hunting and fishing producing their chief food supply. The very primitive condition of these Indian peoples was further evinced by such customs as mother-right and other ancient forms of the social state. The Atlantic fringe-land as a whole was thinly populated. Where many millions of Europeans now dwell on a sound basis of agriculture, the aboriginal population seemed barely able to hold its own, living as it were from hand to mouth. This failure to advance culturally and increase numerically through intelligent use of the soil is the underlying fact in all backward peoples, and their backwardness is, in large measure, the result of environment. Undoubtedly one of the factors in this environment is isolation, through many generations, in a forest region, though we must also remember those inherent racial traits that tend to depress whole bodies of people, relegating them to the less desirable regions—overwhelming forests, unfertile tracts and fringe-lands. A non-agricultural people can not wrest a civilization out of the wilderness. It can only be accomplished by agricultural peoples with a well developed instinct to clear