Book Description

Excerpt from The Passing of the Indian and Buffalo Indian history begins with the advent of the white people upon this continent. Much of what has been written about the pre-columbian period is but a repetition of old fancies, legends and traditions. There are a few mounds or graves with their contents some inscriptions and some pottery resembling pres ent tools and implements common to the world. Excepting these and his descendants and their legends the pre-columbian Aboriginal stands a mythe. The mounds or earth works found in New York, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and elsewhere were for defence, residence or burial places. Built along streams they were frequently in the vicinity of rich alluvial soil where corn or other crops were easily raised. The cave and cliff dwellings of the rivers and canyons of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona and the ruined towns or pueblos on the plains in the same regions, were also for defence and residence. Some of the ancient ruins which have been restored on paper from the foundation lines are deemed to have been communal houses. These three grades or kinds of structures each conforming to the demand of climate were found by the Europeans on their first settlement in what were the Colonies of England, France and Spain. The antiquity of these structures was not determined by them. The ruined cave towns and cliff dwellings on the plains or along streams in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona and in some cases adjacent to the present Pueblos have long been peopled by romance with legends of a race anterior to the ancestors of the present Indians. They have been maped, plated, described, painted and photographed until nothing new can be said about them. Investigation shows tha tthe Pueblos were built of adobe or sundried bricks or stone blocks broken from the sandstone, adjacent or bowlders taken from the rivers or streams and never of dressed stone as known to the whites, that they were the homes of the ancestry of the present Indians of the towns of the vicinity and a part of the American race. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.