which had passed away entirely, ages before the discovery of the New World by Columbus. The numerous and well authenticated antiquities found in various parts of our country clearly demonstrate that there was once a people civilized, and even highly cultivated, occupying the broad surface of our Continent; but the date of their occupancy is so remote that all traces of their history, progress, and decay, lie buried in the deepest obscurity. Nature, at the time that Columbus came, had asserted her original dominion over the earth; the forests were all in their full luxuriance, the growth of many centuries; and nought existed to point out who and what they were who formerly lived, and loved, and labored, and died, on the Continent of America. The Indian tribes could give no account of their predecessors; they knew nothing whatever on the subject; and so, probably, as respects these the question must ever remain doubtful, if not wholly inexplicable.
As to the Indians themselves it will be sufficient, for the present, to note, that in some points there was soon discovered to be a very general resemblance among all the various tribes. They all partook of the same reddish hue of the skin, their hair was found to be black, lank, and straight, with little or no beard; the cheek-bones were high, the jaw-bone prominent, and the forehead narrow and sloping. Their figure, untrammeled in every movement, was lithe, agile, and often graceful, but they were inferior in muscular strength to the European. Their intellectual faculties were also more limited, and their moral sensibilities, from want of cultivation, less lively. They seemed to be characterized by an inflexibility of organization, which rendered them almost incapable of receiving foreign ideas, or amalgamating with more civilized nations—constituting them, in short, a people that might be broken, but could not be bent. This peculiar organization, too, together with the circumstances in which they were placed, moulded the character of their domestic and social condition.
Columbus, in a letter sent to Ferdinand and Isabella, spoke enthusiastically of those natives whom he encountered on his first voyage. "I swear to your majesties," said he, "that there is not a better people in the world than these, more affectionate, affable, or mild. They love their neighbours as themselves: their language is the sweetest, the softest, and the most cheerful; for they always speak smiling; and although they go naked, let your majesties believe me, their customs are very becoming; and their king, who is served with great majesty, has such engaging manners, that it gives great pleasure to see him, and also to consider the great retentive faculty of that people, and their desire of knowledge, which incites them to ask the causes and the effects of things." A larger acquaintance with the Indians showed that their dwellings were of the simplest and rudest character. On some pleasant spot by the banks of a river, or near a sweet spring, they raised their groups of wigwams, constructed of the bark of trees, and easily taken down and removed to another spot. The abodes
