BACKWASH OF THE FRONTIER—HALLOWELL 455 
dian nor his culture has completely vanished from our midst. The 
question arises, have the Indian cultures of the postfrontier period com- 
pletely ceased to influence us? The answer is no. One effect of the 
reservation system has been the conservation of those aspects of the 
native cultures that had survived all the vicissitudes of previous con- 
tacts with the white race. A new potential source of influence on our 
20th-century culture was created. Before we can turn to the nature 
of this influence, however, it is necessary to obtain the wider historic 
perspective that a more systematic consideration of the older lines of 
influence will provide us. 
In the first place, it could have been predicted that, as a result 
of the colonization of the New World, loan words would appear in 
various Indo-European languages that could be traced to aboriginal 
American languages. Besides the nouns borrowed to designate objects 
unknown in England, there are many expressions in American English 
that reflect Indian influence—burying the hatchet, Indian summer, 
Indian giver, happy hunting ground, and war paint, used by the 
American woman. Puck as a slang expression for dollar harks back 
to the Indian fur trade when prices had reference to beavers or buck- 
skins. Place names of Indian origin are, of course, legion—the names 
of 26 States, 18 of our largest cities, thousands of small towns, most 
of the long rivers and large lakes, and a few of the highest mountains 
are of Indian derivation. 
Having come to a country new to them, it was inevitable that the 
colonists, whose traditional culture had not prepared them to live as 
they had to live here, should be influenced by those aspects of Indian 
culture that had immediate practical advantages in daily life. In 
any case, the determinative importance of the fact that this was not 
in any sense a virgin land must not be forgotten. The countless 
generations of Indians had left their imprints upon the landscape. 
Without the plow, the soil had been cultivated, and the raising of 
native crops was as typical over wide areas as was hunting and fishing. 
It is still debatable how far the actual virgin terrain had been radically 
modified by burning, girdling, and tilling. There were narrow forest 
trails, trodden by moccasined feet, that were already old, and the 
whites made use of them in their own system of overland communica- 
tion, developing some of them into highways eventually connecting 
great centers of American civilization. Then there were the earth- 
works of an older Indian population in the Old Northwest Territory 
which influenced the patterning of some early white settlements. The 
“pilgrims” who founded Marietta, Ohio, found it convenient to moor 
their flatboats “at the foot of a raised terrace the Mound Builders had 
once used as an avenue between their temple and the river.” Circle- 
ville takes its name from the fact that in the laying out of the original 
