FOWKE— INFLUENCE OF GEOLOGY 



As families increased in numbers, and united, and grew into clans, 

 the hunting life, unsupplemented, was no longer possible. The amount 

 of game was not sufficient to provide them with food, and agriculture 

 became a necessity. 



But it was only in exceptional situations that agriculture could be 

 expanded into proportions beyond the extent demanded for the re- 

 quirements of a village or small town. All work had to be done by 

 hand with crude implements. There being no plows, the soil must be 

 prepared with sticks tipped with stone or bone. As there were no iron 

 tools for cultivating crops, only a limited amount of produce could 

 be cultivated by one person, no matter at what expenditure of labor. 

 The men were still compelled to go in search of game, and to con- 

 stantly increasing distances as they remained for years in any given 

 locality. They had no time to cultivate crops, so this toil fell to the 

 women. The farther afield the men carried their excursions, the 

 greater was the certainty of coming in contact with men from other 

 settlements, with whom they must fight. Injuries to either side led 

 to reprisals; and in this way were engendered animosities that led to 

 perpetual enmities and unceasing conflict. Disdaining to work at 

 raising crops, which they had come to consider as woman's work, 

 the men in the intervals when game was not in season turned their 

 attention to the pursuit of enemies. In the vast forests every man 

 was a foe who could not prove himself a friend. Thus was kept alive 

 and fanned into greater activity the instinct to destroy, which had 

 its origin in the killing of animals, until the warrior's greatest claim 

 to glory was the number of scalps he had taken. He must exceed in 

 shrewdness, skill, and endurance the men and the animals which he 

 had to slay in order to live. He was free, independent, untrammeled, 

 subject to no law but his own will or the force of circumstances, and 

 the natural foe of every man who did not belong to his own clan. 



The Indian of the central United States was the equal if not the 

 superior, intellectually and physically, of any race that ever existed 

 in a like stage of culture. In situations where natural advantages were 

 somewhat in his favor, he showed what he was capable of accomplish- 

 ing. The tribal organizations of the Five Nations compares favorably 

 with the beginning of the Roman empire. The great works of the 

 Aztec, Maya, and Natchez, of the builders of the Cahokia group of 

 mounds, of the Ohio mound-builders; the settled life of the Creeks, 

 Cherokees, and others, in addition to those just mentioned; the polit- 

 ical combinations effected by Tecumseh and Pontiac; the masterful 

 retreat of Chief Joseph through the tortuous defiles of the Rocky 

 mountains, a feat as worthy of a great epic as the escape of the Ten 



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