History of Westchester County, New York, Volume 1. Frederic Shonnard

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of accumulated riches, inhabited only by savage races who possessed no gold and silver or other valuable property, enjoyed no civilization, offered no commodities to commerce except the ordinary products of the soil and the chase, and could communicate nothing definite respecting more substantial wealth farther to the west. The ancient civilizations of Mexico, Central America, and rem having been subverted by the Spanish conquistadores, and their stores of precious metals largely absorbed, it was fondly hoped that the unpenetrated wilds of the north might contain new realms with similar abundant treasures. Narvaez, in 1528, and De Soto, in 1539, led finely appointed expeditions from the Florida coast into the interior in quest of the imagined eldorados— emprises which proved absolutely barren of encouraging results and from which only a few miserable survivors returned to tell the disillusioning tale of dreadful wilderness marches, appalling sufferings, and fruitless victories over wretched tribes owning no goods worth carrying away. The impressive record of these disastrous failures, in connection with the uniformly unflattering accounts of the lands farther north, deterred all European nations from like pompous adventurings. The poverty of the native inhabitants of North America saved them from the swift fate which overtook the rich peoples of the south, and for a century preserved them even from intrusion, except of the most fugitive kind. This fact of their complete poverty is by far the most conspicuous aspect of the original comparative condition, in both economic and social regards, of the North American Indians, as well as of the history of their gradual expulsion and extirpation. Possessing nothing but land and the simplest concomitants of primitive existence, they did not present to the European invaders an established and measurably advanced and affluent organization of society, inviting speedy and comprehensive overthrow and the immediate substitution on a general scale of the supremacy and institutions of the subjugators. Dispersed through the primeval forests in small communities, they did not confront the stranger foe with formidable masses of population requiring to be dealt with by the summary methods of formal conquest; and skilled in but few industries and arts, which they practiced not acquisitively but only to serve the most necessary ends of daily life, and maintaining themselves in a decidedly struggling and adventitious fashion by a rude agriculture and the pursuits of hunting and fishing, their numbers in the aggregate, following well-known laws of population, were, indeed, comparatively few. Yet the same conditions made them the ruggedest, bravest, and most independent of races, and utterly unassimilable. Thus, as found by the Europeans, while because of their poverty provoking no programme of systematic conquest and dispossession, they were foredoomed to inevitable progressive dislodgement and ultimate extermination or segregation. The cultivated and numerous races of Mexico and Peru, on the other hand, exciting the cupidity of the Spaniards by their wealth, were reduced to subjection at a blow. Put though ruthlessly slaughtered by the most bloody and cruel conquerors known to the criminal annals of history, these more refined people of the south had reserved for them a less melancholy destiny than that of the untutored children of the wilderness. Their survivors readily gave themselves to the processes of absorption, and their descendants to-day are coheirs, in all degrees of consanguinity, with the progeny of the despoiler.

      The origin of the native races of America is. in the present state of knowledge, a problem of peculiar difficulty. Nothing is contributed toward its solution by any written records now known to exist. None of the aboriginal inhabitants of either of the Americas left any written annals. The opinion is held by some scholars, who favor the theory of Asiatic origin, that when the as yet unpublished treasures of ancient Chinese literature come to be spread before the world definite light may be cast upon the subject. There is a strong probability that the civilization of the Aztecs was either of direct Mongolian derivation or partially a development from early .Mongolian transplantations. This view is sustained, first, by certain superficial resemblances, and, second by various details in old Chinese manuscripts suggestive of former intercourse with the shores of Mexico and South America. The belief that man's initial appearance on this hemisphere was as a wanderer from Asia finds plausible support in the fact of the very near approach of the American land mass to Asia at the north, the two being separated by a narrow strait, while a continuous chain of steppingstone islands reaches from coast to coast not far below. Accepting the Darwinian theory of man's evolution from the lower orders, the idea of his indigenous growth in America seems to be precluded; for no traces have been found of the existence at any time of his proximate ancestors— the higher species of apes, from which alone he could have come, having no representatives here in the remains of bygone times.

      The question of man's relative antiquity on the Western hemisphere is also a matter of pure speculation. Here again the absence of all written records prevents any assured historical reckonings backward. Ancient remains, including those of the Aztecs and their associated races, the cliff-dwellers of Arizona and the mound-builders of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, are abundant and highly interesting, but their time connections are lacking. Yet while the aspects of the purely historical progress of man in the New World are most unsatisfactory, anthropological studies proper are attended by much more favorable conditions in the Americas than in Europe. In the Old World, occupied and thickly settled for many historic ages by man in the various stages of civilized development, most of the vestiges of prehistoric man have been destroyed by the people; whereas these still have widespread existence in the New.

      In the immediate section of the country to which the County of Westchester belongs such traces of the ancient inhabitants as have boon found are in no manner reducible to system. There are no venerable monumental ruins, nor are there any of the curious " mounds " of the west. Various sites of villages occupied by the Indians at the time of the arrival of the Europeans are known, as also of some of their forts and burial -rounds. Great heaps of oyster and clam shells here and there on tin'' coast remain as landmarks of their abiding places. Aside from such features, which belong to ordinary historical association rather than to the department of archaeological knowledge, few noteworthy "finds" have been made. Several years ago much was made in the New York City newspaper press of certain excavations by Mr. Alexander C. Chenoweth, at Inwood, on Manhattan Island, a short distance below Spuyten Duyvil. Mr. Chenoweth unearthed a variety of interesting objects, including Indian skeletons, hearthstones blackened by lire, implements, and utensils. There can be no doubt that these remains were from a period antedating the European discovery. But they possessed no importance beyond that fact. With all the other traces of the more ancient inhabitants which have been found in this general region, they show that hereabouts Indian conditions as known to history did not differ sharply, in the way either of improvement or of degeneration, from those which preceded the beginning of authentic records.

      Verrazano, the French navigator, who sailed along the coast of North America in 1524, entering the harbor of New York and possibly ascending the river a short distance, speaks of the natives whom he met there as " not differing much " from those with whom he had held intercourse elsewhere, " being dressed out with the feathers of birds of various colors." " They came forward toward us," he adds, " with evident delight, raising loud shouts of admiration and showing us where we could most securely land with our boat." In similar words Henry Hudson describes the savages whom he first took on board his vessel in the lower New York Bay. They came, he says, " dressed in mantles of feathers and robes of fur, the women clothed in hemp, red copper tobacco pipes, and other things of copper did they wear about their necks." Their attitude was entirely amicable, for they brought no arms with them. On his voyage up the river to the head of navigation, Hudson was everywhere received by the Indian chiefs of both banks with friendliness, and lie found the various tribes along whose borders he passed to possess the same general characteristics of appearance, customs, and disposition.

      Ruttenber, the historian of the Hudson River Indians, in his general classification of the different tribes distributed along the banks, summarizes the situation as follows: At the time of discovery the entire eastern bank, from an indefinable point north of Albany to the sea, including Long Island, was held, under numerous sub-tribal divisions, by the Mohicans (also written Mahicans and Mohegans). The dominion of the Mohicans extended eastward to the Connecticut, where they were joined by kindred tribes, and on the west bank ran as far down as Catskill, reaching westward to Schenectady. Adjoining them on the west was the territory of the Mohawks, and on the south their neighbors were chieftaincies of the Minsis, a totemic tribe of the Lenni Lenapes. The latter exercised control thence СКАЧАТЬ