PREHISTORIC ABORIGINES OF MINNESOTA 207 



THE PREHISTORIC ABORIGINES OF MINNESOTA AND 



THEIR MIGRATIONS 1 



BY n. h. winchell 



MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. 



IT would have been considered an act of great temerity twenty-five or 

 thirty years ago to enter upon an investigation of the Indians of 

 Minnesota in prehistoric time. But, thanks to the rapid progress that 

 has been made in aboriginal research in North America, chiefly under 

 the guidance of the late J. W. Powell and his associates in the Bureau 

 of Ethnology at Washington, it is now necessary only to apply to 

 Minnesota some of the great truths that have been established as to the 

 Indians at large, and to designate under those principles what Indian 

 stocks and tribes have inhabited the state in some of the centuries that 

 preceded the advent of the whites. 



In order to clear the field at the outset by the removal of any 

 obstacles that we may have inherited from earlier conceptions of the 

 aborigines, it will be well to repeat some of the important results that 

 have been reached within recent years, viz. : 



1. The origin of the ancestors of the Indians was so remote that 

 nothing yet discovered indicates its date or the source from which they 

 came. 



2. There are between fifty and sixty Indian stock languages, some 

 of which are as distantly related as the languages of the various Aryan 

 nations, but most of which are as distinct as the English from the 

 Semitic. 



3. This shows that the aborigines, if they came at all to America, 

 must have come from a great many directions, or that their coming 

 was so remote that they must have developed these differences amongst 

 themselves by long periods of isolated residence in North America. 



4. The Indian stock languages can not be connected, at least have 

 not been connected as yet, with any convincing bond of relationship, 

 with either European or Asiatic languages. The Eskimo are here not 

 included, as that stock ranges from Greenland through North America 

 into Siberia. 



5. The aborigines, therefore, are indigenous to the soil of America 

 in the same sense that the Mongolian and Caucasian are indigenous 

 in the lands of the Eastern continent. 



6. The " moundbuilders," that fabulous race of Squier and Davis, 



1 An address before the Minnesota Historical Society, February 9, 1907. 



