When closely analyzed, the difference between the highest and the average culture of the race is much less than has been usually taught. The Aztecs of Mexico and the Algonkins of the eastern United States were not far apart, if we overlook the objective art of architecture and one or two inventions. To contrast the one as a wild or savage with the other as a civilized people, is to assume a false point of view and to overlook their substantial psychical equality.

For these reasons American culture, wherever examined, presents a family likeness which the more careful observers of late years have taken pains to put in a strong light. This was accomplished for governmental institutions and domestic architecture by Lewis H. Morgan, for property rights and the laws of war by A. F. Bandelier, for the social condition of Mexico and Peru by Dr. Gustav Brühl, and I may add for the myths and other expressions of the religious sentiment by myself.⁴⁷

In certain directions doubtless the tendency has been to push this uniformity too far, especially with reference to governmental institutions. Mr. Morgan’s assertions upon this subject were too sweeping. Nevertheless he was the first to point out clearly that ancient American society was founded, not upon the family, but upon the gens, totem or clan, as the social unit.⁴⁸ The gens is “an organized body of consanguineal kindred” (Powell), either such in reality, or, when strangers have been adopted, so considered by the tribal conscience. Its members dwell together in one house or quarter, and are obliged to assist each other. An indeterminate number of these gentes, make up the tribe, and smaller groups of several of them may form “phratries,” or brotherhoods, usually for some religious purpose. Each gens is to a large extent autonomic, electing its own chieftain, and deciding on all questions of property and especially of blood-revenge, within its own limits. The tribe is governed by a council, the members of which belong to and represent the various gentes. The tribal chief is elected by this council, and can be deposed at its will. His power is strictly limited by the vote of the council, and is confined to affairs of peace. For war, a “war chief” is elected also by the council, who takes sole command. Marriage within the gens is strictly prohibited, and descent is traced and property descends in the female line only.

This is the ideal theory of the American tribal organization, and we may recognize its outlines almost anywhere on the continent; but scarcely anywhere shall we find it perfectly carried out. The gentile system is by no means universal, as I shall have occasion to point out; where it exists, it is often traced in the male line; both property and dignities may be inherited directly from the father; consanguine marriage, even that of brother and sister or father and daughter, though rare, is far from unexampled.⁴⁹ In fact, no one element of the system was uniformly respected, and it is an error of theorists to try to make it appear so. It varied widely in the same stock and in all its expressions.⁵⁰ This is markedly true, for instance, in domestic architecture. The Lenâpé, who were next neighbors to the Five Nations, had nothing resembling their “long house,” on which Morgan founded his scheme of communal tenements; and the efforts which some later writers have made to identify the large architectural works of Mexico and Yucatan with the communal pueblos of the Gila valley will not bear the test of criticism.

The foundation of the gentile, as of any other family life, is, as I have shown elsewhere,⁵¹ the mutual affection between kindred. In the primitive period this is especially between the children of the same mother, not so much because of the doubt of paternity as because physiologically and obviously it is the mother in whom is formed and from whom alone proceeds the living being. Why this affection does not lead to the marriage of uterine brothers and sisters—why, on the contrary, there is almost everywhere a horror of such unions—it is not easy to explain. Darwin suggests that the chief stimulus to the sexual feelings is novelty, and that the familiarity of the same household breeds indifference; and we may accept this in default of a completer explanation. Certainly, as Moritz Wagner has forcibly shown,⁵² this repugnance to incest is widespread in the species, and has exerted a powerful influence on its physical history.

In America marriage was usually by purchase, and was polygamous. In a number of tribes the purchase of the eldest daughter gave the man a right to buy all the younger daughters, as they reached nubile age. The selection of a wife was often regarded as the concern of the gens rather than of the individual. Among the Hurons, for instance, the old women of the gens selected the wives for the young men, “and united them with painful uniformity to women several years their senior.”⁵³ Some control in this direction was very usual, and was necessary to prevent consanguine unions.

The position of women in the social scheme of the American tribes has often been portrayed in darker colors than the truth admits. As in one sense a chattel, she had few rights against her husband; but some she had, and as they were those of her gens, these he was forced to respect. Where maternal descent prevailed, it was she who owned the property of the pair, and could control it as she listed. It passed at her death to her blood relatives and not to his. Her children looked upon her as their parent, but esteemed their father as no relation whatever. An unusually kind and intelligent Kolosch Indian was chided by a missionary for allowing his father to suffer for food. “Let him go to his own people,” replied the Kolosch, “they should look after him.” He did not regard a man as in any way related or bound to his paternal parent.

The women thus made good for themselves the power of property, and this could not but compel respect. Their lives were rated at equal or greater value than a man’s;⁵⁴ instances are frequent where their voice was important in the council of the tribe; nor was it very rare to see them attaining the dignity of head chief. That their life was toilsome is true; but its dangers were less, and its fatigues scarce greater, than that of their husbands. Nor was it more onerous than that of the peasant women of Europe to-day.

Such domestic arrangements seem strange to us, but they did not exclude either conjugal or parental affection. On the contrary, the presence of such sentiments has impressed travelers among even the rudest tribes, as the Eskimos, the Yumas and the hordes of the Chaco;⁵⁵ and Miss Alice Fletcher tells me she has constantly noted such traits in her studies of life in the wigwam. The husband and father will often undergo severe privations for his wife and children.

The error to which I have referred of classifying the natives into wild and civilized tribes has led to regarding the one as agricultural, and the other as depending exclusively on hunting and fishing. Such was not the case. The Americans were inclined to agriculture in nearly all regions where it was profitable. Maize was cultivated both north and south to the geographical extent of its productive culture; beans, squashes, pumpkins, and potatoes were assiduously planted in suitable latitudes; the banana was rapidly accepted after its introduction, even by tribes who had never seen a white man; cotton for clothing and tobacco as a luxury were staple crops among very diverse stocks. The Iroquois, Algonkins and Muskokis of the Atlantic coast tilled large fields, and depended upon their harvests for the winter supplies. The difference between them and the sedentary Mexicans or Mayas in this respect was not so wide as has been represented.

It was a serious misfortune for the Americans that the fauna of the continent did not offer any animal which could be domesticated for a beast of draft or burden. There is no doubt but that the horse existed on the continent contemporaneously with post-glacial man; and some palæontologists are of opinion that the European and Asian horses were descendants of the American species;⁵⁶ but for some mysterious reason the genus became extinct in the New World many generations before its discovery. The dog, domesticated from various species of the wolf, was a poor substitute. He aided somewhat in hunting, and in the north as an animal of draft; but was of little general utility. The lama in the Cordilleras in South America was prized principally for his hair, and was also utilized for burdens, but not for draft.⁵⁷ Nor were there any animals which could be domesticated for food or milk. The buffalo is hopelessly wild, and the peccary, or American hog, is irreclaimable in its love of freedom.

We may say that America everywhere at the time of the discovery was in the polished stone age. It had progressed beyond the rough stone stage, but had not reached that of metals. True that copper, bronze and the precious ores were widely employed for a variety of purposes; but flaked and polished stone remained in all parts the principal material selected to produce a cutting edge. Probably three-fourths of the tribes were acquainted with the art of tempering and moulding clay into utensils or figures; but the potter’s wheel and the process of glazing had not been invented. Towns and buildings were laid out with a correct eye, and stone structures of symmetry were erected; but the square, the compass, the plumb line, and the scales and weight had not been devised.⁵⁸ Commodious boats of hollowed logs or of bark, or of skins stretched on frames, were in use on most of the waters; but the inventive faculties of their makers had not reached to either oars or sails to propel them,⁵⁹ the paddle alone being relied upon, and the rudder to guide them was unknown. The love of music is strong in the race, and wind instruments and those sounded by percussion had been devised in considerable variety; but the highest type, the string instruments, were beyond their capacity of invention.

The religious sentiment was awake in all the tribes of the continent, and even the lowest had myths and propitiatory rites by which to explain to themselves and cajole to their own interests the unknown powers which order the destiny of human life. There is a singular similarity in these myths. The leading cycle of them usually describes the exploits of a divine man, the national hero-god, who was the first instructor, often the ancestor of the tribe, and the creator of the visible universe. His later history is related with singular parallelism by tribes in Canada and Mexico, in Yucatan and Uruguay. After teaching his people the arts of life and the sacred rites, the forms of their social organizations and the medicinal powers of plants, he left in some mysterious way, not by the event of death, but for a journey, or by rising to the sky; leaving with them, however, his promise to return at some future day, when they should need him, and he should again become their guide and protector.

The interpretation of this fundamental American myth, which I have shown to be the typical religious legend of the race,⁶⁰ offers an interesting problem. Comparing it with others of similar form in Egyptian and Aryac antiquity, I have explained it as based on the natural phenomenon of the returning and departing day, as, if not a solar, at least a light myth, developed through personification and etymologic processes. Often the hero-god is identified with some animal, as the raven, the rabbit, the wolf or coyote, the jaguar, the toucan, etc. Possibly in these we may recognize the “totemic animal” after which the gens was named; but in most cases the identification cannot be made.

The hero-god is usually connected with tales of a creation and a flood, or other destruction of the world. These cosmogonical and cataclysmal myths belong together, and arise from the same impulse to explain cosmic phenomena by the analogy with ordinary changes of the seasons and the day. In constant connection with them, and also with the rites of religion and medicine, with the social institutions and the calendar, with the plans of edifices and the arrangement of gens and phratries, in fact, with all the apparatus of life, was a respect for the sacred number. It is strange how constantly this presents itself throughout American life, and is, in fact, the key to many of its forms. The sacred number is Four, and its origin is from the four cardinal points. These were the guides to the native in his wanderings, and, as identified with the winds, were the deities who brought about the change of the seasons and the phenomena of the weather. They were represented by the symbols of the cross, whose four arms we see portrayed on the altar tablet of Palenque, on the robes of the Mexican priests, in the hieroglyphs of the Algonkins, and in countless other connections.

A rich symbolism rapidly developed in all the sedentary tribes, and very much along the same lines. The bird, the serpent, the sacred stone, the tree of life, water as a purifier, the perpetual fire, all these are members of a religious symbolism, clear signs of which recur in all segments of the continent. The chants and dances, the ritual of the medicine men, the functions of esoteric orders and secret societies, present a resemblance greater than that which can be explained by a mere similarity in the stage of culture. I explain it by the ethnic and psychical unity of the race, and its perpetual freedom from any foreign influence.

The mortuary rites indicated a belief in the continued existence of the individual after apparent death. These were by incineration, by inhumation, by exposure, or by mummification. Articles were placed with the deceased for use in his future state, and the ceremonies of mourning were frequently severe and protracted. A sacredness was generally attached to the bones and therefore these were carefully preserved. In accordance with a superstition widely felt in the Old World, they were supposed to harbor some share of the departed spirit. The conception of the after life is wholly material. The Zapotec, for instance, believes that he will return to his familiar haunts after a few hundred years, and buries all the money he makes that he may then live at his ease. Von Gagern estimates the amount of silver thus secreted and lost within the last century at a hundred million dollars.⁶¹

The ceremonies of religion, which included that of the treatment of disease, inasmuch as a demonic cause was always assigned to illness, were in the hands of a particular class, known to the whites as “medicine men,” or shamans, or sorcerers. Sometimes the right of belonging to this order was hereditary in a gens, but generally peculiar aptitude for the business was the only requirement. Many of them were skilled in legerdemain, and even to-day some of their tricks puzzle the acutest white observers. As doctors, augurs, rain-makers, spell-binders, leaders of secret societies, and depositaries of the tribal traditions and wisdom, their influence was generally powerful. Of course it was adverse to the Europeans, especially the missionaries, and also of course it was generally directed to their own interest or that of their class; but this is equally true of priestly power wherever it gains the ascendency, and the injurious effect of the Indian shamans on their nations was not greater than has been in many instances that of the Christian priesthood on European communities.

The psychic identity of the Americans is well illustrated in their languages. There are indeed indefinite discrepancies in their lexicography and in their surface morphology; but in their logical substructure, in what Wilhelm von Humboldt called the “inner form,” they are strikingly alike. The points in which this is especially apparent are in the development of pronominal forms, in the abundance of generic particles, in the overweening preference for concepts of action (verbs), rather than concepts of existence (nouns), and in the consequent subordination of the latter to the former in the proposition. This last mentioned trait is the source of that characteristic which is called incorporation. The American languages as a rule are essentially incorporative languages, that is, they formally include both subject and object in the transitive concept, and its oral expression. It has been denied by some able linguists that this is a characteristic trait of American languages; but I have yet to find one, of which we possess ample means of analysis, in which it does not appear in one or another of its forms, thus revealing the same linguistic impulse. Those who reject it as a feature have been led astray either by insufficient means of information about certain languages, or by not clearly comprehending the characteristics of the incorporative process itself.⁶²

As intimated, however, in spite of this underlying sameness, there is wide diversity in the tongues themselves. Where we cannot find sufficient coincidences of words and grammar in two languages to admit of supposing that under the laws of linguistic science they are related, they are classed as independent stocks or families. Of such there are about eighty in North and as many in South America. These stocks offer us, without doubt, our best basis for the ethnic classification of the American tribes; the only basis, indeed, which is of any value. The efforts which have been heretofore made to erect a geographic classification, with reference to certain areas, political or physical; or a craniological one, with reference to skull forms; or a cultural one, with reference to stages of savagery and civilization, have all proved worthless. The linguistic is the only basis on which the subdivision of the race should proceed. Similarity of idioms proves to some extent similarity of descent and similarity of psychic endowments. Of course, there has been large imposition of one language on another in the world’s history; but never without a corresponding infiltration of blood; so that the changes in language remain as evidence of national and race comminglings. I select, therefore, the linguistic classification of the American race as the only one of any scientific value, and, therefore, that which alone merits consideration.

The precise number of linguistic stocks in use in America at the discovery has not been made out. In that portion of the continent north of Mexico the researches of the Bureau of Ethnology of the United States have defined fifty-nine stocks, no less than forty of which were confined to the narrow strip of land between the Rocky mountains and the Pacific ocean.

For convenience of study I shall classify all the stocks into five groups, as follows:—

I. The North Atlantic Group.

II. The North Pacific Group.

III. The Central Group.

IV. The South Pacific Group.

V. The South Atlantic Group.

This arrangement is not one of convenience only; I attach a certain ethnographic importance to this classification. There is a distinct resemblance between the two Atlantic groups, and an equally distinct contrast between them and the Pacific groups, extending to temperament, culture and physical traits. Each of the groups has mingled extensively within its own limits, and but slightly outside of them. Each is subject to conditions of temperature, altitude and humidity, which are peculiar to itself, and which have exerted definite influences on the constitution and the history of its inhabitants. Such a subdivision of the race is therefore justified by anthropologic considerations.