Chapter I

OF AMERICA BEFORE ITS DISCOVERY IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

B. C.-1000 A. D.

America older than Europe, Asia, or Africa.—Chronic Errors on the
Subject.—Europe presented to America.—Truth vindicated.—Proofs of our
Superior Antiquity.—Luxurious Civilization of the Races who stocked
this Continent before the Indians.—Amount of Coal left by them
unburned.—Large supplies of Fish packed away safely in our
Mountains.—Fish Culture Measure of Human Culture.—Fossil
Cran-iology.—Laughable Blunders of Former Historians and
Ethnologists.—Ancient Nations, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek,
Ten Lost Tribes, etc., trickling through, appearing on this Side of
the Earth.—Instances cited.—Mythologies of Greece and Rome originated
here.—Proofs and Reproofs.—American Nests well feathered Ages
ago.—Large Stocks for Future Use.

Hitherto not only foreign writers, but even our own people, have ignored the existence of America prior to what is popularly called its discovery, a phenomenon which might be more appropriately denominated a return of the descendants of the old stock to the haunts of their forefathers. That event—reserved until the close of the fifteenth century of the Christian era, after the invention of gunpowder had exploded numerous obstructions in the path of progress, and just before the Lutheran Reformation came in with its fresh needs for more room—turned up an Old World for new uses.

Of course the newly ventilated space thus rediscovered excited much talk at the time, and created a sensation in that unsensational age. The first Europeans who were presented to America were as much elated, as Americans now at their presentation to European courts; as if America, like those courts, had not existed and had not had its shows, jewels, follies, history, and _fêtes_, centuries before they were shown up to it. Has not this sensation lasted quite long enough? Is it not time—now that nearly four hundred years have allowed the first ardor and surprise to cool off—to vindicate the claim of the Western Continent against the long-suffered error of mistaking what they were new to for what was itself new?

The arrogant pretensions of what is pleased to call itself the Old World have quite long enough kept back our bashful and blushing claims.

Indeed, in our chronic modesty, we are allowing our country to get somewhat mature in speaking of itself as new; while even children now know that ours is, in fact, the elder continent. Agassiz is not gassing us when he picks our ancient Alleghany flints and tells us, that the camp-fires in the Lackawanna, Schuylkill, and Lehigh valleys blazed away long before those at Newcastle and in the English Black Country were lit up. The Rocky Mountains got up their vertebrated backs ages before Mont Blanc put on such cool airs and carried its head so loftily over the more modest chignon of our Orizaba and Long’s Peak. The Mississippi got down to its delta long before the Rhone or Rhine reached even their alpha. Let us then henceforth assert the dignity of our superior antiquity; and commiserate the other half of the globe in being so long unknown to our older America.

What was the precise height, the fashionable color of hair and eyes, the modish vices, the sartorial virtues, of the races which stocked our prairies, and hunted plesiosauria, and megalosauria, and other tall game along our wide valleys, and across the granite peaks of our long mountain ranges, we have not now at hand any plates or photographs to show; but well do we know that we are very much obliged to them for leaving unburned such lots of good coal, snugly stowed away in dry, ample cellars; and that those cellars were placed in such a peaceable Quaker State as Pennsylvania, where we can go and help ourselves by the cart-load without getting into a stew. How beautifully, too, they—those young Americans—packed away their fish; so well that they—the fish—are now just as fresh as when Noah performed his maritime adventure, Moses was fished up by the banks of the Nile, or Jonah became cargo in the deeply laden whale.

What large provisions those jolly dwellers on this hemisphere, long ages ago, must have made, when we find such abundance of funny finny things, so carefully stowed away in layers, all over the continent, from the icy plains around the North Pole, down through the Isthmus belt, and along the saw-shaped ridges of South America, to the farthermost cape. Now, if we had no other proof of the high civilization, we may truthfully say, the dainty and luxurious refinement, of those pre-Columbian inhabitants of this hemisphere, the existence of these fish, so beautifully canned,—better disposed, in fact, than if they had been arranged in layers by the accomplished herring-packers of Scotland or Holland,—we might safely rest there the well-digested argument; knowing well, as all our readers do, that the love of fish was one of the peculiar features that marked the highest point of Assyrian, Egyptian, and Persian civilization; remembering that in the time of Pericles, the polished Athenian left the charming music of his flowing speech, when he heard the bell in the Agora announce that the fish auction had begun; and further recalling the fact that the fish-ponds of Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, and the millionnaire Romans, gauged, like yard-sticks, the intellectual culture of Rome.

Fossil cranes have also been found ingeniously tucked away in appropriate crusts,—a cran-iological development not to be overlooked; although upon this head we forbear to enlarge. The Hadrosaurus—now restored to us by strangely unsubstantial Water-house Hawkins—shows that in his (i. e. the former H.’s) production what countless ages must have been exhausted and for his sustenance what numberless lives consumed, which, if unslaughtered, might have gone on, and after centuries of growth developed to be not only men, but even American voters.

TIME STOCKING AMERICA.
(p. 59)
]

“Perhaps in scaly armor, up and down those ancient seas,
Roamed he with an appetite that nothing could appease;
Crushing shoals and hosts of being, every one of whom that ran
Would, in course of time and season, have developed up to man;
But _fata sic profulgent_, and we only may bewail
Our dear relations slaughtered when this monster curled his tail.”

From what has already been said it is clear that many of the aboriginal settlers in this half of the world died game to the last.

After mention of these higher arguments of our elder civilization, we shall not weaken the proofs by an exhibition of later American antiquities, such as the sculptured temples found in Yucatan and Central America; the time-coated, swallow-tailed fanes of the Peruvians; the exaggerated structures of the dwarfed Aztecs; or the tall earth-mounds which, scattered from Lake Erie through the Mississippi Valley, and forced through the tight-set lips of the Isthmus, are at last swallowed up by Venezuela.

Many doubtless are the swarms that have hived here through the busy centuries which preceded the Egyptian Pharaohs, the comparatively modern empires of Assyria, Persia, and China, and the still later kingdoms of Agamemnon and Priam; empires and kingdoms that stand on the dim frontis-pages of our ordinary histories. These hives, overflowing their quarters, have sent out superfluous swarms across the ice bridge over our northern strait into the plains of Asia, and thence into Africa and Europe.

Laughable indeed is the exhibition which erudite European historians, ethnologists, and others have made of themselves in deducing from Asia, as the mother-swarm, the colonies that have peopled the world; when in truth Asia was only the half-way house, the luncheon-place of our trampers, on their march into their foggy countries and chronicles.

Thus it is now ascertained by late researches that there is a great resemblance between the languages of the Mongols and Japanese, and those of Equador and New Granada. Hopes are entertained that antiquarians may discover some ancient precedents for our Yankee tongues and words derived from sources whose authoritative beginnings now puzzle us.

So, too, no doubt, migrations homeward have taken place from the faded and colorless scenes of these exploring raids.

Hitherward trickled, probably, the ten Israelitish tribes, hitherto supposed to be lost, diffusing themselves wanderingly for the past two thousand five hundred and eighty-nine years, and now collecting in pools in our towns and cities, and around our stock-exchanges.

Here, too, have reappeared, after going in on the other side, the broken pieces of the empire of Nineveh, mixed up with fragments of its gates of brass, which fused in the transmission, have veneered the faces of those who pulled through, forming in their descendants the race of brazen-faced itinerant pedlers, auctioneers, and plumbers among us.

So the ancient empire of Egypt, shivered up by Cæsar, percolating through, at last dripped into that stalagmite, the Tombs of New York, with its newly formed but not reformed Cæsars and Pompeys inside.

In a word, most of the old kingdoms, and even cities, such as Troy, Rome, Syracuse, Alexandria, Macedon, Athens, Sparta, and others, disappearing from sight on the other and newer hemisphere, and straining through into ours, have come out on our side condensed by the pressure in small spots, but with similar names,—spots smaller but just as smart and big-feeling as their larger selves. This, too, accounts for our sudden expansions, whether in crinoline or credit; the compressed and squeezed germ reasserting often its chance for pristine greatness in sudden and unexpected ways.

Now that we have started the train of thought, each of our readers can easily turn engineer and stoker, and by applying a little fuel of his own, can drive it over all the various tracks which run from his metropolitan, central brain.

“No wonder,” each one will exclaim, “that our people are so thin after so much pressing of their ancestors; no wonder at our new-minted words, the old ones having been fused at a red heat in the central fires.”

Here, too, is the secret of our burning eloquence. This is the source of our extraordinary architecture, borrowed, like an actor’s costume at a fancy ball, from huddled heaps of clothing made for others, and brought together in party-colored, but ill-sorted union. Looked at from this angle, we can account, too, for our mythological tendencies,—the invocations to Jove, when surprised; the devotion to Apollo in our magazines; the frequent use of the lyre in our trade; the love for bare shoulders, like Junos, in our divine assemblages; our leanings at night to Bacchus; and other customs and habits that creep out even from under pan-taletes. Greece at first took her Olympus from us; and we in the course of time have, like affectionate parents, borrowed it back again.

From these varied proofs it is manifest that, before Columbus brought over to America specimens of the European stock existing in his time, our hemisphere had been hard at work firing up at Popocatepetl; scooping out harbors on our coasts; creasing our valleys in fluvial grooves for our fast-running craft and boats; feathering the future nests of a later posterity with materials for use; and in general laying in a large stock for a successful business to be taken up and carried on afterwards by those who should come back from their migrations to become large dealers in universal notions, general purveyors, forwarders and advancers on all kinds of property, from continents to a spool of cotton, from polar Alaska ice to West India warming-pans and peppery troches.

How long it took them to flutter back to these old deserted nests, how many were lost before they had fairly got settled in them, and what broods now chirp, sing, and crow, through branches new and old, honest or brittle, these pages are full fledged to show.