North American Indians

The crossing at that time could have been made on the ice, but it might also have been accomplished in skin boats or canoes, a feat not infrequently performed by Eskimos of today.

The first comers to North America trekked southward and their descendants penetrated into more hospitable climes and more productive lands. To roving hunters in quest of food, this vast, virgin territory must have seemed a paradise. With no human enemies to bar their way, the first thin ripple of this series of human waves probably spread with incredible rapidity.

Game was abundant. The early hunters found most of the familiar animals we now know in America, and they also encountered creatures long since extinct.

The giant ground sloth with its sluggish habits must have proved an easy victim to his human enemies. The mighty mammoth and the American camel were hunted and used for food.

In Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada, ingeniously flaked stone knives and projectile points have been found with the bones of these animals, and with those of a large, now extinct variety of bison.

The Americas were not populated entirely by descendants of these first discoverers. It is likely that through many centuries Asiatic people, responding to population pressure from the south and west, found this natural route into the American continent, just as successive streams of European immigration later penetrated inland from the Atlantic seaboard.

Archeological evidence indicates that most of these migrants did not linger long in the far north but pushed southward along the coast in their canoes, or followed the interior valleys.

So completely did they establish themselves that, when the Europeans arrived, the two continents, and practically all of the adjacent islands as well, were occupied from the Arctic coast to the extremity of Tierra del Fuego.

During the thousands of years that elapsed before the invasion of Europeans in the 16th century, the descendants of these early Asiatic hunters had succeeded in developing high civilizations. Without the aid of ideas from established culture centers, their attainments compared favor- ably with the best achieved in the Old World.

From the fur-clad Eskimo of the frozen Arctic coast, living in his ingenious snow house, to the naked savage of the steaming tropical jungles of the Amazon Basin, with his equally suitable palm-thatched home, the descendants of these first American immigrants demonstrated their adaptability in countless ways. Whatever his environment, the Indian learned the secrets of Nature…”