USA > New York > History of the state of New-York : including its aboriginal and colonial annals, vol. pt 1 > Part 5
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Those signs of freemasonry which modern travellers have found, are also thought to be of Welsh origin. Travel- lers describef certain private societics among the Indians, which apparently resemble our lodges of freemasons. Their rules of government and admission of members are said to be nearly the same. No one can be received as a member of the fraternity except by ballot, and a concurrence of the whole is necessary to a choice. They have different degrees in the order. The ceremonies of initiation, and the mode of passing from one degree to another, would create astonishment in the mind of an enlightened spectator. Is not this practice of European origin ? In the early periods of English his-
* Or Guatemalians,-Sce Dr. Cabrera's hypothesis hereafter. Accord- tag to him, Votan was the first populator in Mexico, and the object of an idolatrous veneration.
: Says Major Stoddard in Hist. Sketch of Louisiana.
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Origin of the Aborigines and ancient Ruins. [FARTI.
tory the knowledge of freemasonry was mostly confined to the Druids ; and Wales was more fruitful of this description of men than any other part of Europe. They were almost the only men of learning in those days : they executed the functions of priests, historians, and legislators. Those in Wales, in particular, animated their countrymen to a noble defence of their liberties, and afforded so much trouble to the First Edward, that he ordered them to be barbarously massa- cred. This ferocious tyranny was carried into effect about the year 1282. Few only of the bards survived to weep over the miseries of their country.
But a similar institution, it is said, prevails among our Iro- quois Indians. These have never been suspected to be of Welsh extraction. Still they may have derived the signs from those who were. We receive the information from Go- vernor Clinton, to whom it was communicated by a respecta- ble Indian preacher, who received the signs of the mystery from a Menonic chief. The institution, therefore, must be prevalent among the Menoninies as well as other Indians. In this secret institution among the Indians, the members are very select. Among the Iroquois, the society consists of five Oneidas, two Cayugas, two St. Regis, six Senecas. They are said to have secret signs, and pretend that the institution has existed from eternity. The period of their meetings is unknown ; but they assemble once in three years, as deputies under pretence of other business.
If the Welsh Indians could be identified as descendants of Madoc's colony, or if the Alligewi could be ascertained to. have been Welsh, the discovered traces of civilization, Chris- tianity, and the arts, might partly be referred to their instru- mentality. But the pre-existence of inhabitants when Madoc is supposed to have arrived, the crowded population (for in- stance in Ohio 700,000, as Mr. Atwater has conjectured,*) which formerly swarmed over this continent, preclude the
* Vol. I. Arch. Amer.
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Prince Madoc.
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presumption that Madoc's colony (322 years only before Co- Jumbus) were the first settlers, or that they and their descen- donts were the sole constructors of all the mounds, temples, and fortifications that appear to have been erected. They may have contributed to swell the tide of population from the north of Europe : this is the opinion of De Laet, Hornius, and Mitchill, and may have aided in constructing the fortifica- tions and works which bear so strong a resemblance to those of their own country. But limited must be the views that would circumscribe the origin of myriads who have swarmed over this continent, to the narrow confines of Wales.
$ 10.
It is certain that our ancient forts in New-York resemble the old British and Danish .* Pennant, in his Tour through Wales, describes a strong British post on the summit of a bill in Wales, of a circular form, with a great foss and dike, and a small artificial mound within the precinct. A similar entrench- ment he describes in his Tour in Scotland .* Beyond our State, particularly in Ohio, places of former worship, burial, and defence, have also, by comparison with the descriptions and drawings in Pennant's Tour, been assimilated to those of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales .; The Danes de- scended from the Scythians, and made settlements and con- quests on the British isles even since the days of Julius Caesar.
According to Pliny, the name of Seytliian was common to all nations living in the north of Asia and Europe. (41) The Scythians, therefore, from whom the Tartars were descended, in all probability first peopled the British isles. The fact that our works are in all respects like those of Britain, and that similar works may be found all the way from this part of
* Gov. Clinton, in Memoirs on West. Antig. of N. Y. Lee Pennant's Tour in Scotland, in Pinkerton's Collections.
+ Sce Atwater, Vol. I. Arche, Amer.
Vor, I S
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Origin of the Aborigines and ancient Ruins. [PART I.
America to Tartary, furnishes some proof that the Tartars were the authors of ours also. (12)
Edward Brerewood (43) claims the Tartars as the only parent people of the aborigines. John De Laet (44) a Flemish writer, Gregorio Garcia, (45) a Dominican, and father Jo- sephi De Acosta, (46) a Spanish Jesuit, concur in ascribing the American aboriginal population to the north of Asia and of Europe. The first makes the Scythians, Tartars, and Sa- moiedes, the principal hive ; but traces portions of the Ameri- can family from the northwest of Europe, the islands near the western coasts of Africa, particularly the Canaries, and partly from Wales, under Prince Madoc. The two other authors suppose that these emigrants may have also come from those regions lying south of the straits of Magellan. Grotius (47) and Hornius (18) trace them from Norway, by way of Green- land ; but the latter refers also to the Swedes, the Welsh, and others.
Dr. Mitchill" says, that the suggestion of Mr. Clinton, of the Danish origin of some of the old forts in Onondaga and adjacent, was to him a new window of light. It led him to follow, with the reverend pastor Van Troil, the European emi- grants, during the horrible commotions of the ninth and tenth centuries, to Iceland ; trace them, with the reverend Mr. Crantz, to Greenland ; and at last find the Scandinavians on the banks of the St. Lawrence. Madoc, Prince of Wales, and his Cambrian followers, appeared among these bands of adventurers. And thus the north-eastern lands of North America were visited by the hyperborean tribes from the north-westernmost climates of Europe ; and the north-western climes of North America had received inhabitants of the same race from the north-eastern regions of Asia.
The hypothesis of this learned philosopher is, that America, as well as Asia, had its Tartars in the north and its Malays in the south. Hle aim's to prove, from a comparison of the fea- tures, manners, and dress, distinguishable in the North Ameri-
* Vol. I. Archo. Amer. p. 341.
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Tartars, Scadinavians, Malays, &.c.
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can nations of the higher latitudes, with those of the Sa- moiedes and Tartars of Asia, that they are of the same race ; ind, from the physiognomy, manufactures, and customs of the North American tribes of the middle and lower latitudes, and of the South Americans, that they are nearly akin to the Ma- lay* race of Austral Asia and Polynesia ; and that the north- western climes of Europe contributed, as the north-eastern re- gions of Asia had, to the original population of this continent.
This derivation of the Northern Americans from Asiatic and Norwegian ancestry, and the Southern from that of South- ern Asia, is also ably maintained by Doctor Williamson ; | and the theory has attracted the concurrence of some modern philosophers in Europe.j.
In conformity to this interesting hypothesis, the antiquary is instructed to trace the swarms from the great hive of na- tions existing to the eastward and westward of the Caspian Sea, in a manner very different from that which some writers of Europe have pursued, as the barbarians descended upon the more warm and productive countries of the south. " He will follow the hordes journeying by land eastward, and he will trace the fearless boatman venturing over sea westward, until the Tartar and the Samoied meet each other at the anti- podes. He will find this autipodal region to lie south of lakes Ontario and Erie ; and thereon pursue the vestiges of their combats, their conflicts, and their untold story, to Onondaga,
See Blumenbach's Division of the Human Species, Malays, &c. in Vol. X. (bew ser.) N. Am. Rev. p. 405, 7. Sce Dr. Mitchill's Private Museum.
j Observations on the Climate and Aborigines of America, on Complex . ion, &c. by Hugh Williamson, LL. D. N. Y. 1811. p. 102, &c. 128, &c. See also his Hist. of North Caro. Vol. I, p. 6, 7, 8, 213, 216. See Abbé Molina, Hist. Chili, Vol. II. B. 1. Ch. 1. See Atwater, in Vol. I. Archa. Amer. See also Humboldt, who supports the southern similarity with Ma- lory. Humboldt is said to have written in German, an essay on the origin of the native tribes of America.
! Compte De Lacepede, President of the Academy of Arts at Paris. " Histoire naturelle de l'Homme, " &c. Sce Dr. Mitchill's Dissertation. translated at Geneve, and appended by a learned commentary, 1817, Biblio- bonne Universelle.
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Origin of the Aborigines and ancient Ruins. [PART I.
the great head-quarters of the victorious Iroquois. The Danes, or Finus, and Welshimen, performing their migrations gra- dually to the southwest, will appear to have penetrated to the country situate south of lake Ontario, and to have fortified themselves there. The Tartars or Samoieds, travelling, by degrees, from Alaska to the southeast, probably found them there. In their course, these Asian colonists probably exter- minated the Malays (49) who had penetrated along the Ohio and its streams, or drove them to the caverns abounding in saltpetre and copperas in Kentucky and Tennessee, where their "bodies," accompanied with the clothes and ornaments of their peculiar manufacture, have been repeatedly disinterred and examined. Having achieved this conquest, the Tartars and their descendants had probably a much more difficult task to perform : this was, to subdue the more ferocious and warlike European colonists, who had already been intrenched and for- tified in the country before them. There is evidence enough, that long and bloody wars were waged among the tribes .; In these, the Scandinavians and Esquimaux seem to have been overpowered in New-York. The survivors of the defeat and ruin retreated to Labrador, where they have continued secure and protected by barrenness and cold. How memorable a spot has been Onondaga !- where men of the Malay race from the southwest, and of the Tartar blood from the northwest,. and of the Gothic stock from the northeast, have successively contended for supremacy and rule, and which may be consi- dered as having been possessed by each before the French, Dutch, or English, had ever visited or known the country !"(50)
Father Charlevoix (51) allows that America might have re- ceived its first inhabitants from Tartary and Hyrcania ; and that more than one nation had a Scythian or Tartarian origin. After enumerating a great number of writers, (52) and ex-
* Sec account of Indian Mummies, found in the Mammoth Cave of Ken- . tucky, Vol. 1. Archs. Ainer. and specimens of their peculiar manufacture, &c. in Dr. Mitchill's Collection.
i Sce Mr. Clinton's Memoir, Mr. Atvater's Antiquities, and others be-
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European and Asiatic Tartars.
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amining particularly Acosta, L'Escarbet, Brerewood, and Grotius, he concludes in his opinion, that the ancient Celtæ and Gauls, who sent colonies to the uttermost bounds of Asia and Europe, and whose origin may be undeniably carried back to the sons of Japhet, made their way into America by the Azores ; and in reply to the objection, if raised, that the Azores were not inhabited in the fifteenth century, he replies, that the first discoverers of those islands abandoned them to make settlements in others of greater extent and fertility, and on an immense continent, whence they are not far distant. The Esquimaux, and other nations of North America, re- semble so much those of the north of Asia and Europe, and so little the other natives of the new world, that it may be presumed they descended from the former.
That there are genuine descendants from the ancient. Seythians, or from their offspring the Tartars, of the north of Asia or Europe, might be placed beyond any reasonable doubt, if similitude in feature, manners, and customs, were to decide the question. One western nation in particular, among whom has been discovered a language of signs supposed to savour of Asiatic origin," possess all the migratory habits and customs of the roving Tartars. These are the Hietans or Comanches.{ Having no fixed residence, they alternately occupy the immense space of country from the Trinity and Braces, crossing the Red river to the heads of Arkansas and Missouri to river Grand ; beyond it about Santa Fe, and over the dividing ridge on the waters of the Western Ocean. They have a native language by speech, which no others can under- stand ; but they have a language by signs that all Indians un- derstand. These roving Tartars occasionally display a rapidity
* Jeph's Antiquarian Address, p. 24. Wm. Dunbar's communication in pt. 1. vol. VI. Transac. of Amer. Philo. Soc. Philadelphia. See Long's Expedition up the Missouri, for particulars of their language of signs.
i See Reports accompanying the President's Message to Congress, 1806. Communicating the Discoveries of Lewis and Clark, Sibley and Dunbar. This account is in John Sibley's communication to Gen. Dearborn, ther. Secretary of War.
62 Origin of the Aborigines and ancient Ruins. [PARTI. in hostile incursions and retreat, and a romance in achieve- ment, which would do credit to the barbarous gallantry of their Asiatic brethren. (53)
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The question recurs, were the five nations and Delawares, (the native Indians of this state, who, according to their tradition, migrated from the west,) of a Tartar stock, and were the Alligewi, whom they expelled, the north-western Europeans, who had preceded them in their migration to this state? Pennant, (in his Arctic Zoology,) says, that the five nations and others in the interior of America, who are tall of body, robust in make, and of oblong faces, are derived from a variety among the Tartars, viz. from the fine stock of T'schutski, and these again from that fine race of Tartars, the Kabardenski, or inhabitants of Kabarda. Mr. Du Ponceau observes,* that it has been ascertained, that one nation at least, on the eastern continent of Asia, the Sedentary Tschuts- cki, speak an American language, a dialect of that (viz. the Karalit) which begins in Greenland, crosses the American continent, (on both coasts of which it is found among the people called Esquimaux,) is spoken at Norton Sound, and the mouth of the Anadir, and thence northward along the coast, to the peninsula called Tschutschkoi Noss, or the promontory of the Tschutecki. The inquiry may be more satisfactorily elucidated, when, (in our history of these In- dians,) we shall contrast some of their prominem manners and customs with those of their supposed parent stock. From what has been said, there is strong ground for conjecturing, that their ancestors were Tartars originally, from the north of Asia, who by intermitted stages, were for years emigrating to the northern lakes and banks of the Mississippi ; and after a long and destructive conflict, succeeded in conquering those
* See Notes on Eliot's Indian Grammar. vo !. IN. Mass. Hist. Coll. Ca Series, p. 233n. 318-IV.
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European and Asiatic Tartars ..
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European emigrants, who had fortified themselves throughout the country, from the Mississippi into New-York. But whether the ancestors of these victors or vanquished were the first people of America, or what country was the original cradle of the American family, are problems of much more difficult solution, than the Asiatic and European identity of these races of aborigines.
In addition to authors named, who support a European or Asiatic origin, or one from both regions, we might add to the list of those who think that the north-eastern Asia might have been the route of the first people, the names of Robertson, Pennant, Barton, and others .*
The vicinity of the two continents of Asia and America, says Dr. Robertson, renders it highly probable that the human race first passed that way from Asia. In latitude 668 north, the two coasts are thirteen leagues only asunder ; about midway between which are two islands, less than twenty miles distant from cither shore. Here the Asiatics could find no dif- ficulty in passing to the opposite coast, which was in sight of their own. They might have crossed on sledges, or on foot in the winter, when the strait is entirely frozen over, according to the accounts of Captain Cook and several of his inferior officers. It isremarkable thatin every peculiarity in person and disposition which characterize the Americans, they have some resemblance to the rude tribes scattered over the north-east of Asia, but almost none to the nations settled in the northern extremities of Europe.
Mr. Pennant observes that the inhabitants of the New World do not consist of the offspring of a single nation : dif- ferent people at several different periods arrived there, and it is impossible to say that any one is now to be found on the spot of its colonization. It is impossible, with the lights which we have so recently received, to admit that America could receive the bulk of its inhabitants from any other
* Robertson's Ilist. Amer. Pennant's Arc. Zool. Barton's New Views. See Quarterly and Edinburgh Reviews.
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Origin of the Aborigines and ancient Ruins. [PART I.
place than Eastern Asia. Mr. Pennant describes striking similarities between the ancient Scythians, or Tartars of Asia, and the American tribes. These and other peculiarities will be noticed in our account of the Iroquois and Delawares, the ancient proprietors of the territory of New-York. Mr. Pennant mentions, for instances, the practice of scalping among the Scythia .. ; their lingering ferocity towards their captives ; the Tartarian mode of barial ; the practice f prick- ing their faces and marking the punctures with charcoal, as observed by the Tungusi, the most numerous nation in Si- beria ; the Asiatic canoes and paddles ; and the features and bodily form of the Tartar nations, as striking similitudes to those of the American nations."
In the reserved dispositions, as well as persons and colour of the North American Indians, a strong resemblance has been observed to those of the Malays of the Oriental Archipelago, that is, the Tartar tribes of Upper Asia; like these they also shave their head, leaving only a lock of hair. The practice of those refined Tartars, the Chinese, of binding the feet in infancy, also prevails among the Indians, but for the purpose only, as is said, of turning the toes inward. "We might adduce," says the Quarterly Review, ; " the picture language of the Mexicans, as corresponding with the ancient picture-language of China, and the Quipos of Peru with the knotted and partly coloured cords, which the Chinese history informs us were in use in the early period of the empire; we might compare the high cheek bones, and the elongated eye of the two people, and produce other resemblances as so many corroborating proofs of a common origin."
In fact, it has been supposed that M. de Humboldtf has de- monstrated the identities of the Mexicans and Tartarian na-
* Pennant's Arc. Zool.
¡ No. LVII. p. 13. See specimens of this picture language in Dr. Mitchill's private museum.
# Whose essay, in German, on the origin of the native tribes of America. is hardly yet known here.
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Europe and Asiatic Tartars.
y 11.]
tions, by a comparison of the zodiac of those people respec- tively. " "The very learned and sagacious comparison," says Professor Vater, " " which he has made between the divisions of time of the Mexicans, and the tribes of eastern Asia re- spectively, shows a visible analogy throughout their modes of computing time, which can by no means be ascribed to coin- cidence, especially where so many other circumstances lead us to assume a connexion between the nations. The Mexi- cans, Japanese, Thebetians, and various other nations of in- ner Asia, have undeniably the same system in the division of their great cycle, and in the names which they give to the years of which it is composed. This argument is also con- firmed by the still farther discovery, that a great number of the names whereby the Mexicans designate the twenty days of their month, are precisely the signs of the zodiac, as it has been re- ceived from time immemorial by the tribes of eastern Asia."f
Doctor Barton, and other respectable writers who have examined the subject, arrange themselves on the same side of the question. After a brief description of several North American and Asiatic tribes, Dr. Barton subjoins comparative vocabularies of their languages, and from the similarity be- tween some of them; the superior population of the more western regions of North America, which abound with a greater number of mounds, &c. than the eastern parts ; and from the general tradition of the aborigines, he concludes that the march of population was originally from Asia to America.
Accordingly, the first inhabitants passed from Asia across the islands that lie between the extremities of Asia and Ame- rica, but at different times and from various parts : Tartary, China, Japan, or Kamschatka : the inhabitants of these coun- tries resembling each other in colour, feature, shape, ; and in many other particulars.
* In vol. IV. Mithridates, cited vol. VII. N. Am. Rev. (new series. } p. 15.
i See ibid:
# New Travels among the Indians, by William Fisher, Esq. Philadelphia. 1312.
VOL. I.
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Origin of the Aborigines und ancient Ruins. [PART I.
§ 12.
In what manner the populators of this continent might have passed from Asia, or from Europe, may be conceived as easi- ly as the transit of people after the deluge, to the extremities of those continents, and to that of Africa. *
Asia and America are supposed to have been united at the north, f and afterwards separated by one of those catastro- phes which at times convulse the surface of the globe. Charlevoix thought the two continents still united far to the north. But they are separated, as we formerly observed, by islands at so short a distance, į that the strait when not frozen over, may be passed by canoes with far less hazard than the fearless Esquimaux sometimes dares in venturing upon the mountain wave.§
So between the north-east of America, and north-west of Europe, the difficulties, though greater than those above- mentioned, were by no means appalling to northern navigators. They must have been far less so anciently than in modern days, if we credit, with Hakluyt and others, || the former existence of an island (larger than Ireland, but now sunk,) situated between Greenland and Iceland, in the days of Zeno. Even from the British Isles, or Coast of France to
* As to the migration of the human race after the deluge, see preface to D'Anville's ancient geography.
i And according to Acosta and Feijoo, as cited by Clavigero, the first emigrants came across at that point. Buffon also thought the two con- tinents united by oriental Tartary.
Į See account of Kamschatka, published by order of the Empress of Rus- sia, Robertson's Amer. Life of Catherine, Empress of Russia.
Sce the modern northern voyages. Indians not only of the north, but of the South Sea Islands, and West-Indies are daring navigators. They seem to pursue their course from one place to another, with nearly the same unerring precision, which marks their straight forward way through a vast wilderness, wherein civilized people would become bewildered and lost.
fj See Il's Collections. Forster's Northern Voyage ..
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Tartars and other nations.
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Newfoundland, the passage is not very long or difficult. A passage may with case be effected from the coast of Africa to Brazil-Canaries to the Western Islands-thence to the Antilles. Neither is it very long or difficult from China to Japan-Japan or the Philippines to the Mariannes-thence to Mexico.
America has been peopled as the other parts of the world have been : independently of pre-design-unforeseen accident, tempests, and shipwreck have certainly contributed to people every habitable part of the world .*
§ 13.
This is also the opinion of Governor Clinton. " The probability; is, that America was peopled from various quar- ters of the old world, and that its predominant race is the Scythian or Tartarian. Malte Brun, the great French geographer, in his Précis de la Géographie Universelle, &c., speaks of the vast colonial system of the Carthaginians ; of Phoenician navigation, of that of the Arabians and the Ma- lays, to the Moluccas and to America ; and it is almost certain, that the squadrons of the Japanese and the Malays traversed the great Southern Ocean, now filled with their colonies. Diodorus Siculus says, that the Phoenicians sailed far into the Atlantic Ocean. Herodotus states, that Africa was circumnavigated by vessels despatched by Necho, king of Egypt, under the conduct of Phoenicians. Hanno, according to Pliny, during the most flourishing times of Carthage, sailed round from Gades to the utmost extent of Arabia, and wrote an account of this voyage, called the Periplus. That vessels from the old world, have been driven by tempests on the coast of America, is certain, and that they have gone there at early periods for various purposes, is highly probable. A communication can be had between America and the old world, without any considerable navigation. They are in
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