Indians of North America -- Colorado; Mesa Verde National Park (Colo.)
The early part of the story of the Americas is still hazy. In spite of
many years of search by dozens of top-flight archeologists there are
many unanswered questions. Each year expeditions sift through the dust
of the ages on the trail of those early Americans. More often than not
the trail leads to a blank wall. The ancient past of the Indian is
clouded with uncertainty but the lure of the unknown still beckons to
those who are endeavoring to trail him back to his Asiatic birthplace.
The great trouble is that for thousands of years the Indians lived a
hunting life. They wandered from day to day, living on the natural foods
they found in each day’s journey. There was no permanent home, no
settled life. The hunter was ever on the trail of his next meal.
Consider the life of the primitive hunter. Each morning he is awakened
by the pangs of hunger in his empty, flapping paunch and he views with
dismay his breakfast which is disappearing over the horizon on four
strong, swift legs. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes he starts out in
pursuit of his breakfast. Failing to catch up with it, he starts after
his lunch. If it eludes him, he begins to work on the next meal—and the
next and the next. Always he is one jump behind his food supply. When he
makes a kill he gorges and smoothes the wrinkles out of his belly. When
he fails, he goes hungry.
Being forced to follow the game he is ever on the move. He can have no
permanent home, no pottery, nothing that cannot easily be transported on
the trail. One night he sleeps under a tree and leaves behind a broken
stone knife. The next night he sleeps in a cave ten miles away and
discards a worn-out sandal. The third night he builds his campfire
beside a lake across the mountain. On and on through the days he moves
and finally, when the end comes, the animals of the wild clean and
scatter his bones and they return to the dust from whence they came.
The archeologist may find the stone knife and the discarded sandal. He
may even find the long-cold ashes of the campfire. But there is nothing
to indicate that all three belonged to the same man. There is not a
single bit of evidence that ties them together.
Thus it is with the hunter. His trail is cold: the clews are few. He is
the will-o-the-wisp of the human race. He has put many gray hairs in the
head of the archeologist.
All of the early inhabitants of North and South America lived a
wandering, hunting life. For thousands of years they lived on the chance
products, animal and plant, that nature offered. They seldom stayed long
in one place: they never built a permanent thing. To date the story of
the first ten or fifteen thousand years is far from complete. It can be
summed up in a few words.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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