378 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



sheds — and together with the Scotch-Irish settled the frontier valleys of 

 the Blue Eidge. These were the peoples — Teutonic with a Celtic in- 

 fusion — that traversed the wide gap of the Atlantic and planted a 

 civilization on its farther fringe. 



It was what these people brought with them, as qualities of mind, 

 traditions and habits of life, and the way they looked at things, that 

 interest us most. There could be no adaptation to a wilderness life 

 like that of the aboriginal inhabitants of this fringe-land. Here were 

 men and women, the product of centuries of civilization, suddenly 

 confronted with the bare fact of existence on the edge of an inhospitable 

 and unknown forest. This transit of civilized peoples is one of the 

 amazing events of history. Tillers of the land for generations, they 

 brought with them the old-world grains and food plants, their house- 

 hold goods, farm implements and cattle, and with these a bundle of 

 curious ideas and superstitions which had a deep and widespread root- 

 age in the ancestral soil of Europe. The forest held nothing for them 

 save fuel and material for shelter. Fish, flesh and fowl were to be had 

 in abundance, but of the wild food-plants that were indigenous to the 

 soil and which the native peoples had used for ages these immigrants 

 from civilization knew little or nothing. Dependent from a remote 

 antiquity upon agriculture, it is scarcely to be wondered at that the 

 first comers to the new land were at times sorely put to it for food, 

 as the early records relate. 



The effect of this fringe-land upon its native inhabitants was ap- 

 parent in the low state of their culture. The aboriginal Atlantic tribes 

 were unacquainted with the use of iron, which, as Eatzel has remarked, 

 is a characteristic of all fringe-land peoples. Their agriculture was of 

 the rudest sort — the planting of maize, squashes and tobacco, with little 

 or no tillage, hunting and fishing producing their chief food supply. 

 The very primitive condition of these Indian peoples was further 

 evinced by such customs as mother-right and other ancient forms of 

 the social state. The Atlantic fringe-land as a whole was thinly 

 populated. Where many millions of Europeans now dwell on a sound 

 basis of agriculture, the aboriginal population seemed barely able to 

 hold its own, living as it were from hand to mouth. This failure to 

 advance culturally and increase numerically through intelligent use 

 of the soil is the underlying fact in all backward peoples, and their 

 backwardness is, in large measure, the result of environment. Un- 

 doubtedly one of the factors in this environment is isolation, through 

 many generations, in a forest region, though we must also remember 

 those inherent racial traits that tend to depress whole bodies of people, 

 relegating them to the less desirable regions — overwhelming forests, 

 unfertile tracts and fringe-lands. A non-agricultural people can not 

 wrest a civilization out of the wilderness. It can only be accom- 

 plished by agricultural peoples with a well developed instinct to clear 



