Chapter XV: The Red Men of Our Own Country in the Stone Age

Last summer a little boy went to visit his grandfather who lived near one of the beautiful lakes in the northern part of our own land. The family doctor was very kind to the boy and often took him on long walks into the country.

One day, as they were going through the woods together, the boy said to his friend, "Grandpa says that when he first came here, red men lived all about him, and that they made their houses of skins and called them wigwams. Afterwards the red men were all moved to the west and given land there. But grandpa says that for years after they went away, he used to find their arrow heads and stone axes as he turned up the ground in plowing. I wish that I could find an arrow head!"

As the doctor walked on he pointed to a pebble half buried in the sand beside the path. The boy stooped; there was a beautiful arrow head! He was very glad. Seeing that he was pleased, the doctor took him to his office and showed him hundreds of arrow heads. Some of them were small and finely chipped.

"These are bird arrows," the doctor said.

Then he showed large arrows.

"These are for killing buffalo and other big game."

And there were stone axes and hammers. Lastly, the doctor showed him something that looked like a little, very old hatchet. The boy turned it over and over and looked at it. It was all weather stained, and reddish-brown and green.

"This is not stone," the boy said at last.

"No," said the doctor, "that is a copper hatchet. I was very glad to get that because there are not many of them found now. You know that when Columbus came to our country, red men lived all over the land. They were in what we call the Stone Age; that is, they made their tools and weapons of stone. But there are great lumps of copper beside one of our lakes here. Now copper, you know, is a rather soft metal, and the red men about here learned to pound it into shape for weapons. They called both their stone hatchets and copper hatchets 'tomahawks.'

"Red men never learned to melt iron and make tools of it as we do, though there was plenty of iron in the mountains among which many tribes lived. The red men never got beyond the Stone Age and into the Iron Age as white men did."

"Where did you get all these beautiful stone things?" the boy asked after a while, looking at them with longing eyes.

"I have been years in getting them together," the doctor said. "Many of them I found myself, on my walks through the country. Others I bought from the people who found them."

"You must love them very much," said the boy.

"I do," said his friend, "and some day I shall give them all to a museum where they will be kept for people to see."