Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/106

86 with the aborigines. It is taken for granted that the opportunity would have favored the acquisition of some positive and helpful knowledge which has since failed. It is very doubtful, however, whether the lapse of the last four centuries has really deepened what was then the obscurity that covered these inquiries. What are supposed to be the oldest crania and other human relics on the continent generally crumble to dust when exposed to light and air. One of our archæologists tells us that some bones of the mastodon, antedating the age of the Mound Builders, when excavated from a peat-swamp, yielded gelatinous matter for constituting a rich soup. But there are no such juices left here in the relics of primeval man. It was only after long intervals of time that different longitudinal and latitudinal sections of this northern half of our continent were reached by white men. About a century intervened between the first intercourse of the Spaniards with the southern tribes and that of the French with the northern tribes. Cabeza de Vaca, of the company of Narvaez, is accredited as the first European who stood on the banks of the Mississippi, and crossed the continent from sea to sea, in 1528. The Sieur Nicolet was the first of Frenchmen who, in 1639, reached the waters of that river from the north. The first pueblo captured in Mexico by Cortes was in 1520. Coronado's expedition against the “Seven Cities of Cibola” was in 1540. Some Village Indians in New Mexico are thought to be in the present occupancy of the adobe houses of their predecessors at the Conquest. This term, “Village Indians,” is expressive of a distinction gradually coming to the knowledge of the whites between sedentary and roving tribes of the aborigines. Our information is very scanty as to the characteristics of difference, in gross and in detail, between various tribes of Indians originally, and immediately subsequent to their first intercourse with the whites. We know but little of the conditions of proximity,