The Bolivar bulletin. [volume] (Bolivar, Hardeman County, Tenn.) 1865-1888, 1879-10-02


might yield no returns, while upon the
mounds themselves the harvest would be
excellent. The inference seems obvious
that the alluvial accumulatiOns were
made for the better cultivation of maize,
which was doubtless the staple article
of ancient husbandry in the Mississippi
Valley.
Notwithstanding the variety of form
presented in the multitudinOus struct-
ures dispersed throughout NorCh Amer
lea, Mr.. GOnant thinks we can =distin-
guish such signs of growth as would be
looked for In the slow development of a
national life, whether generated among
the people themselves, or helped for
ward by occasional and accidental inn
pulses from without Such htful and
apparently incOnsiderable accessiOns of
stimulus from superior but alien civil
iZation might have been received in
divers ways. 1t is not necessary to lay
much stress on the story of Atlantis, or
on PhBnecian and Carthaginian legends,
or on the pretensions of the Basques and
Dieppois- although some of these claims
of discovery and settlement appear to be
supported by facts, which, to say the
least, are curious-Or on Irish and
Welsh traditions, although Humboldt
considered these well worthy of atten-
ton. De Quatrefages, however, has no
doubt that between the years 1000 and
1900 a number of unehrOnicled
Morse colonies must have found their
way to the American coasts, following
the track of Left and Thorfinn from the
Scandinavian settlements in Greenland.
To such offshOots from the AFyan stock
he does not hesitate to refer the g white
Esquimax'' described by Charieveix,
the fair-haired men of Pierre Martyr,
the fair men spoken of in some Mexican
traditions, and the I" White Savage
Chief whom the Spaniards met with in
their CibOla expedition. So much for
the Atlantic coast, while for the Pacific
side De Quatrefages has collected am
pie evidence to attest fine occasional adj
vent of Chinese or Japanese missiona-
ries and traders But while these infre-
quent visitors have impaired some leav-
ening influence as Legislators and educa-
tors, De Quantrefages eOncurs with
the majority of psychologists in believ-
ing the peOpling of America to have re-
suited from successive migratiOns of
savage nations from the northern re-
gions of Asia by way of Behring's
Straits.
Mr.. Commits researches have led him
| to the conclusion that this influx from
| the north split into two slowly moving
streams, the most important fork trend
| ing toward the east of the Mississippi,
the other passing through the territory
west of the same river. This southwark
| drift of a vast people seems to have
! been arrested in the valley of the Ohio
! for a long period of time. 1t is certain
that the mound builders here reached
/ the highest stage of civilization they ever
] Oft : ~ 81 10 ,f nd
| trail America. The current upon the
western bank of the great river, while it
had its source in the same fountain head
at the north docs not seem to have been
so well defined in the characteristic
features of civilization, Notwithstanding
| the population in Missouri was at one
time no less great, if not greater, than
in Ohio. Mr.. Conant finds cause of
this relative backwardness in the fact
that the Missouri mound builders never
enjoyed a season of repose and exemp-
ton from war long enough to permit the
concentration of energy upon internal
affairs to the extent which developed
I the more advanced communities of the
! Ohio Valley.
In discussing the migratory move
ments of the prehistoric nations in North
America, Mr.. COnant points out that
/
same ethnic seat, dispatched at times
more or less remote from one another,
are often loosely spoken of as one mi
| grafton. For example, the family group
which bore the generic name of Nahu-
atlacas was composed of seven tribes, or
! perhaps we should better say drifted
southwark in seven successive waves.
All these branches of one trunk spoke sub
stantially the same language, and issued
from the same cradle of civilization
which should probably be identified
with the valleys of the Mississippi and
Ohio; but they appeared on the plateau
of Anahuac at widely different periods.
The Aztecs, whom Cortez found DOM
inant, had been the last to arrive. On
the other hand, it was prior to the COM
mencement of the Christian era-indeed
some psychologists would set the date
not less than a thousand years before
that epoch-when the mysterious Nahuas
emerged in Mexico. Concerning their
origin and history almost nothing is
known, but this much is established,
that the later TOltecs and AZtecS were
only subdivisions of the great Nahua
races, and that all spoke dialects of its
ancestral language. The suggestion has
commended itself to some students that
the primitive Nahuas were themselves
the builders of few, but those the most
ancient, mounds of the Mississippi Val
ley, and were also the authors of some
of the stone structures in northern Mex
leo during halt which possibly arrested
for some centuries their southwark
march. One of the most competent in
terpreters of the Mexican monuments
and hierOglyphic annals, the Able Bras
seur de Bourbourg, regarded $50 B. G..
4 IL
could be established in the Nahuatl Ian
guage. BY this time, at all events, he
Thought, the first migratory wave from
the north had struck the plain of Ana
huac.
Although the Toltee tribes did not
make their appearance in Mexico stimuli
taneously, but at different epOchs and
possibly by different routes, as was the
case, too, with the Aztec group which
| succeeded them, their active occupancy
seems to have begun with the seventh
century of our era. 1t should be borne
in mind that the large territory of Mexi-
co had been occupied conformity by many
pre-TOltec peoples besides the Nahuas,
but whose languages were wholly want
ing in linguistic affinities with the Ma
huatl tongues. 1t was one of these alien
and relatively barbarous tribes, known
| as the ChlchImecS, which, after lapse
of about 400 years, dislodged the Toltecs
from their dominant position, but they
were themselves soon displaced by a
new body of immigrants known as the
AcOlhuas, whose cOnquestS resulted in
the kingdom of Acolhuan. Scarcely
was this power established when the last
series of migratiOns from the north took
place. At Comparatively short intervals
the seven Nahuatlacas tribes arrived on