﻿NO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA BABCOCK 3 



in various stages of development, whom we habitually call Indians 

 by misnomer, although " Amerind " * has won a place in scientific 

 writing. These, or the dominant racial elements of them, appear to 

 have come into North America from the regions near and behind 

 these natural crossing-places above Japan, where tribes are yet found, 2 

 chiefly in mountainous insulated or nearly insulated homes of refuge, 

 so like our wild native people that we should call them Indian without 

 question if bodily shifted here. Whether this eastward human wave 

 preceded, followed, or accompanied the Eskimo ; what their reciprocal 

 action and relations may have been until the first known distribution 

 of races and territory was established ; and whether the tribes of 

 Saghalien and Kamchatka above referred to were left behind or have 

 forced their way through the Eskimo and across the sea to their 

 present seats, 3 are matters debatable which need not concern us here. 

 These Indians could not have been on the ground for a very great 

 number of centuries or the population would have been denser, the 

 linguistic stocks more plentiful. In the immense area between the 

 Arctic Ocean, the Rocky Mountains, the Gulf of Mexico, and the 

 Atlantic there were barely a half dozen principal linguistic families 4 

 — the Athapascan, Shoshonean, Algonquian, Siouan, Iroquoian, and 

 Muskogean. These people, however, had undergone varied experi- 

 ences ; 5 therefore they differed widely here and there : yet they were 

 enough alike to give us the accepted ideal Indian of our coinage. 

 These few vigorous groups have made nearly all of North American 

 history on the Indian side. 



The long list of languages in North America, so often insisted on, 

 include some that appear to be but of minor flecks and patches on 

 the western border of our linguistic map, resembling nothing so much 

 as the debris of waves that had struck without force to pass on, and 

 of human fragments in the mountain nooks above the Isthmus. They 

 all have their own abundant interest, but it does not concern our 



1 Other substitutes will hardly do. Red Indian, for example, has meant 

 Beothuk specifically. Even American Indian means Passamaquoddy, but not 

 Micmac, on Grand Manan. 



2 C. H. Hawes : In the Uttermost East, p. 35. Cf. Geo. Kennan : Tent Life 

 in Siberia, p. 171. Also his Siberia and the Exile System vol. 2, p. 400; and 

 Mythology of the Koryak (Jochelson). Amer. Anthrop. (1904), vol. 6, p. 413. 



3 A. F. Chamberlain: Origin of American Aborigines. — Linguistics. Amer. 

 Anthrop. (1912), vol. 14, p. 55. 



4 See map in Bulletin 30, pt. 1, Bureau of American Ethnology. 



5 See Notes to Chapter 16. 



