Traditions Respecting Other. Discoveries

Whence came these dusky inhabitants of our land? is an unanswered and seemingly unanswerable question. Out of isolated facts--facts like the following--bold theories have been formed. Remains of fortifications like those of ancient European nations have been discovered. An idol, composed of clay and gypsum, representing a man without arms, resembling one found in Southern Russia, was dug up near Nashville, in Tennessee. A Roman coin was found in Missouri; a Persian coin in Ohio; a bit of silver in the Genesee country, New York, with the year of our Lord 600 engraved on it; split wood and ashes, thirty feet below the surface of the earth, at Fredonia, New York; a silver cup, finely gilded, within an ancient mound near Marietta, Ohio, and in a tomb near Montevideo, in South America, two ancient swords, a helmet and shield, with Greek inscriptions upon them, showing that they were made in the time of Alexander the Great, more than three hundred years before Christ. The mysterious mounds found in various parts of our country have made strange revelations: such as weapons and utensils of copper; catacombs with mummies; ornaments of silver, brass, and copper; stones with Hebrew inscriptions; traces of iron utensils wholly reduced to dust; mirrors of isinglass and glazed pottery, and other evidences of the existence of a race here far more civilized than the tribes found by Europeans. And nearly all of these modern Indian nations have traditions respecting their origin. Some of them told of a partial or universal deluge; and some said their particular progenitor came in a bark canoe after that terrible event.

These facts have been the texts of long argumentative discourses. One theorist tells you that they came originally from Phonecia; another that they are Egyptians, Hindoos or Chinese; while others insist with great pertinacity that they are the descendants of the ten "Lost Tribes of Israel," who made their way from Asia to our Continent, over the Aleutian Islands or across Behring's Straits. Others dismiss the question with the positive assertion that they are the products of this continent alone--that they originated here as did the plants and trees. "The land you sleep on is ours," said a Micmac chief, in Nova Scotia, to Colonel Cornwallis, of the British army, a century and a quarter ago. "We sprung out of the Earth like the trees, the grass and the flowers." Who knows? Ethnology, history, revelation and reason are all dumb before the questioner concerning these mysteries. The pious and superstitious parson, Cotton Mather, of Boston, who wrote more than one hundred and fifty years ago, took a short method of solving the question by shrewdly guessing that "the Devil [whom he called the old usurping landlord of America] decoyed these miserable salvages hither, in hopes that the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ would never come here to destroy or disturb his absolute empire over them." But the mounds and their contents, the relics and the theories have not solved the great question. The mounds scattered all over the continent--huge interrogation points of deep significance--and the mound-builders are yet the subjects of sharp speculation; and we might show wisdom if we should follow the example of Parson Mather, who, when the delusion of witchcraft had made him ridiculous, declared that the subject was "too deep for ordinary comprehension," and referred its decision "to the day of judgment." We can afford to dwell, without further inquiry for the present, in the dim light reflected by Bryant's soliloquy: