The Greatest Story in the World, Period 3 by Horace G. Hutchinson

The story of the New World before the coming of the Spaniards may be / told shortly because we know so little of it.

At its far north-westerly corner the Continent of America is divided / from Asia by a narrow strait. It is a shallow strip of ocean, and / there is no doubt that there was a time when it did not exist as a / dividing barrier, and that animals -- man among the rest -- poured into / America from Asia at what was then a point of junction between them.

It is therefore generally thought that it was from the great / birthplace and nursery of the human race, the central and northern / parts of Asia, that the American continent was populated. The / so-called Indian tribes which still exist both in North and South / America are supposed to be the descendants of those Asiatic / immigrants. One might almost say of them that they have no story, in / the sense of any record along the lines of what we know as human / progress in other parts of the world. Apart from what they have / learnt from the white man since the year 1500 -- and unhappily they / learned from him much evil, as well as good -- they still represent / what we imagine mankind generally to have been in nearly the earliest / days of his existence as man and as something better than the apes. / They represent man in the hunting phase: that is to say before he / passed into the second {15} of the three recognised phases and became / pastoral, a keeper of flocks and herds.

[Sidenote: The Red Indian]

Some historians and students of man's story tell us that a principal / reason why the Indians of America had gone so little way in / civilisation was because that great country had been so ill-supplied / by nature with the species of animals which man has domesticated to / his service. It has been said that America has no animals that could / serve to develop the pastoral phase, no sheep or cattle. It may be / so, yet I scarcely think that we can build the explanation very / confidently on that as a foundation, for we do not know what man / might or might not have done, in course of many generations, in / domesticating some of the native animals of America. The only one / that he does seem to have domesticated is the dog, and the dog he may / have brought with him from Asia, or may have domesticated from one or / other species of the American wolf. He had no horses before the / Spaniards came, and it has been conjectured that one of the reasons / why the Indians were conquered so easily is that they then saw for / the first time a man on horseback, and thought that they were meeting / some supernatural creature of unknown powers.

But America had its bison, commonly called buffalo, in countless / numbers. Who can say that they might not have been trained to do / service for man as readily as the wild cattle of Asia? America has / its caribou, a kind of deer closely akin to the reindeer which is the / invaluable servant of the Laplanders. There are native mountain / sheep, and in the south there are the llama and the vicuna, which are / species intermediate between the sheep and the camels.

Therefore it is difficult to be sure that it was any lack of animals / capable of domestication that prevented the early inhabitants of / America from passing into the pastoral stage.

And then, most interestingly and most strangely, it appears that / there were certain places in which, even before the Spaniards came, / the Indians had cultivated plants -- notably that maize, sometimes / called Indian corn, which certainly seems as if it must have been / imported into North America from the south.

Moreover, when the Spaniards came to Mexico, and again, and yet more / strikingly, when they came to Peru, they found evidence of a / civilization very much higher than that to which the great majority / of {17} the inhabitants of the country had attained. They found / finely worked treasures of silver and gold; they found large stone / monuments. One circular stone which I have myself seen in the City / of Mexico, called "The Calendar Stone," was engraved with signs which / showed that the Mexicans had a system of reckoning time and the / seasons of the year. They had a means of communicating thoughts and / of recording facts by picture writing. They had large works in / stone, for the conduct of water and for irrigation. When the / Spaniards came to know something of the ways of thought and of the / religion of the people, they found that the sun was the great god of / their worship. They also had the hideous practice, but a practice / which we saw in the first volume of this Greatest Story to be a very / ancient and universal one, of sacrificing human victims, with the / idea that the blood received into the ground would dispose the Earth / deity to grant them good harvests.

[Sidenote: Egypt and Mexico]

These are ideas and practices which must recall very strikingly much / of what we know about the religion of the ancient Egyptians; and in / Peru, particularly, were found other practices which might be thought / to point to Egypt as their source. Is it at all possible that they / really may have come thence? There is a theory about man's story in / the world which would answer "yes," and it is a theory which seems to / be gaining adherents.