Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/26

6 obscurity which they have for us, had they drawn attention and investigation from the first and most intelligent of the Europeans who came into contact with the natives of the soil. But in this, as in so many other cases, it would have been easier to ask questions than to obtain satisfactory answers to them. It is utterly impossible for us now to reach anything more than proximate and conjectural estimates of the probable number of the aborigines, of their distribution over the continent, the density of the population in some favored spots, the extent of wholly lonely and uninhabited expanses, and the length of time during which any one tribe or confederacy of tribes had occupied the same regions. No satisfactory information is on record of anything more than the most trivial traditionary account of the fortunes of any tribe among them covering more than two generations previous to those then in life. Of course many of the questions which we are prompted to ask concerning the primitive and prehistoric races on this continent, as if it were a fresh and wholly independent field of inquiry, are problems equally for the dwellers on the old continents themselves, with all their histories and monuments. The theory of the development or evolution of the human race from a lower order of animal is to be subjected to the same tests, illustrated by the same analogies, and met by the same arresting difficulties and challenges wherever specimens of that race are found. It is to be observed also that the first white comers here seem to have assumed what has ever since been substantially taken for granted, — that, though diversities of climate and of natural features and products over the breadth and length of the continent might result in differences of resource and advancement among various tribes, all the aborigines were essentially homogeneous in type, character, and condition of life.

Let us for a moment seize and hold in our minds the gorgeous dream of wealth and glory by which this continent was opened to Europeans, and improve it by an added touch