History of Linn County Iowa: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time [1911]Brewer, Luther Albertus
History
History of Linn County Iowa: From Its Earliest Settlement to the Present Time [1911]
Brewer, Luther Albertus
Linn County (Iowa) -- Biography; Linn County (Iowa) -- History; Registers of births, etc. -- Iowa -- Linn County
John Fiske, one of the scholarly writers on American history, has the
following to say on the early races in the United States:
"Whether the Indians are descended from this ancient
population or not, is a question with which we have as yet
no satisfactory method of dealing. It is not unlikely that
these glacial men may have perished from off the face of the
earth, having been crushed and supplanted by stronger races.
There may have been several successive waves of migration of
which the Indians were the latest."--Fiske's _Discovery of
America_, Vol. I, p. 15.
"The aboriginal American, as we know him with his language
and legends, his physical and mental peculiarities, his
social observance and customs, is most emphatically a native
and not an imported article. He belongs to the American
continent as strictly as its opossums and armadillo, its
maize and its golden rods, or any number of its aboriginal
fauna and flora belong to it."--_Ibid._, p. 20.
An Iowa investigator, C. L. Webster, some years ago examined several
mounds on the banks of the Cedar river near Charles City and "found the
skulls small which would show an extremely low grade of mental
intelligence."--_American Naturalist_, Vol. 23, p. 1888.
This may go to show that the early inhabitants were different from the
nomadic Indians that the first whites saw as they landed on the bleak
shores of New England in the eleventh century.
Most writers on this subject are led to believe that we have conclusive
evidence that man existed before the time of the glaciers and that from
primitive conditions he has lived here and developed through the same
stages which may correspond to the development of primitive man in
Europe and Asia. Whether the first settlers in Iowa then, were Mound
Builders, or Indians, or some other race may never be known, for a
certainty. It is enough to say, that man existed and lived on what has
become known as Iowa many, many centuries ago, and he left few if any
remains which can testify to his stage of development or to his mode of
living. This is no doubt true, that man existed in Linn county
countless ages ago, but whether it was a different race, or simply the
Indian race at a different stage of development may never be known and
thus will always remain a mystery.
INDIANS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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