﻿XO. 19 NORSE VISITS TO NORTH AMERICA — BABCOCK 5 



advanced Indian population 1 in the Ohio valley and beyond. These 

 " mound-builders," of debated tribal and linguistic affiliations, appear 

 to have worked up the great rivers from the south and remained a 

 long time in distinct and differing nations or communities, at last 

 withdrawing or being scattered rather mysteriously. It is well known 

 that they left great earthworks behind them and other notable 

 vestiges ; but they may not have been known on the seaboard more 

 definitely than they are to-day. 



The Athapascan, Shoshonean, Muskhogean, and other remote 

 stocks are clearly beyond our field of vision. Mr. Lloyd 2 would put 

 the Iroquois also at the time we are considering too far away in the 

 northwest : but according to Dr. McGee's Chesapeake tidewater theory 

 they were much nearer. 3 Still, no one places them on or near the sea- 

 board in northern latitudes. The Sioux may have been in force along 

 the eastern watershed of the Appalachian mountains, where we find 

 them later, apparently losing ground ; but they probably never crossed 

 the Delaware. This narrows the field to the Eskimo, the Beothuk, the 

 Algonquian tribes, and possible unknown predecessors, for the stretch 

 of coast between Baffin-Land and the Chesapeake. 



Below the Gulf of St. Lawrence we find this shore occupied in the 

 early seventeenth century, and apparently in the fifteenth and six- 

 teenth, by different tribes of the Algonquian family, the Micmac or 

 Souriquois extending farthest to the northeast as they do now. On 

 the island of Newfoundland 4 were the quite distinct and puzzling 

 Beothuk, doubtfully struggling to hold their ground against the 

 encroachments of the Eskimo on the north and of the Micmac on the 

 southwest. 



There are some indications that these islanders had previously 

 occupied parts of Maine and Nova Scotia. They appear with the air 

 of people in misfortune, clinging to their last refuge and sharing some 

 characteristics of their oppressors on both sides. A fuller under- 

 standing of their earlier history might be helpful in the solution of 

 divers northeastern problems in ethnology. But there seems to be 

 nothing to indicate that they ever established themselves far below the 



1 X. S. Shaler : Nature and Man in America, p. 81. 



2 Lloyd's notes in L. H. Morgan's ''The League of the Iroquois," p. 188. 



3 W J McGee : The Siouan Indians, 15th Ann. Rep. Bur. Amer. EthnoL p. 189. 



4 D. G. Brinton : The American Race (1901), p. 67. Cf. Capt. Cartwright 

 and his Journal. Repub. 1911. First 20 pages. (Ed. by C. W. Townsend). 

 Also Whitbourne. Cormack and others hereinafter cited. 



