All that we know or can surmise of the nations of North America, presents a total contrast to this. In so far as the mystery of its prehistoric Mound-Builders has been solved, we see there a people who had attained to a grade of civilisation not greatly dissimilar to that of the village communities of New Mexico and Arizona; and who had settled down in the Ohio valley, perhaps while feudal Europe was still only emerging from mediæval rudeness, if not at an earlier date. The great river-valley was occupied by populous urban centres of an industrious community. Agriculture, though prosecuted only with the simplest implements, chiefly of wood and stone, must have been practised on an extensive scale. The primitive arts of the potter were improved; the copper abounding in the remote region on the shores of Lake Superior was prized as a rarity; though metallurgy in its practical applications had scarcely entered on its first stage. The nation was in its infancy; but it had passed beyond the rude hunter state, and was entering on a settled life, with all possibilities of progress in the future, when the fierce nomads of the north swept down on the populous valley, and left it a desolate waste. If so, it was but a type of the whole native history of the continent. From all that can be gleaned, alike from archæological chroniclings, Indian tradition, and the actual facts of history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the condition of the whole population of the northern continent has ever been the same. It might not inaptly be compared to an ever-recurring springtide, followed by frosts that nipped the young germ, and rendered the promised fruitage abortive. Throughout the whole period of French and English colonial history, the influence of one or two savage but warlike tribes is traceable from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico; and the rival nations were exposed to such constant warfare that it is more than doubtful if the natural increase of population was latterly equal to the waste of war. Almost the sole memorials of vanished nations are the names of some of their mountain ranges and rivers. It is surmised, as already noted, that the Allighewi, or Tallegwi, to whom the name common to the Alleghany Mountains and river is traced, were the actual Mound-Builders.[61] If so, the history of their overthrow is not wholly a matter of surmise. The traditions of the Delawares told that the Alleghans were a powerful nation reaching to the eastern shores of the Mississippi, where their palisaded towns occupied all the choicest sites in the Ohio valley; but the Wyandots, or Iroquois, including perhaps the Eries, who had established themselves on the headwaters of the chief rivers that rise immediately to the south of the great lakes, combined with the Delawares, or Lenape nation, to crush that ancient people; and the decimated Alleghans were driven down the Mississippi, and dispersed.