Geographical Background of America
During the glacial epochs the interior of Asia was well watered and full
of game which supplied the primitive human hunters. With the advent of
each
interglacial epoch the rains diminished, grass and trees
disappeared, and the desert spread over enormous tracts. Both men and
animals must have been driven to sore straits for lack of food. Migration
to better regions was the only recourse. Thus for hundreds of thousands of
years there appears to have been a constantly recurring outward push from
the center of the world's greatest land mass. That push, with the
consequent overcrowding of other regions, seems to have been one of the
chief forces impelling people to migrate and cover the earth.
Among the primitive men who were pushed outward from the Asian
deserts during a period of aridity, one group migrated northeastward
toward the Kamchatkan corner of Asia. Whether they reached Bering Sea and
the Kamchatkan shore before the next epoch of glaciation we do not know.
Doubtless they moved slowly, perhaps averaging only a few score or a
hundred miles per generation, for that is generally the way with
migrations of primitive people advancing into unoccupied territory. Yet
sometimes they may have moved with comparative rapidity. I know about a
tribe of herdsmen in central Asia which abandoned its ancestral home and
started on a zigzag march of a thousand miles because of a great drought.
The grass was so scanty that there was not enough to support the animals.
The tribe left a trail of blood, for wherever it moved it infringed upon
the rights of others and so with conflict was driven onward. In some such
way the primitive wanderers were kept in movement until at last they
reached the bleak shores of the North Pacific. Even there
something--perhaps sheer curiosity--still urged them on. The green island
across the bay may have been so enticing that at last a raft of logs was
knotted together with stout withes. Perhaps at first the men paddled
themselves across alone, but the hunting and fishing proved so good that
at length they took the women and children with them, and so advanced
another step along the route toward America. At other times distress,
strife, or the search for game may have led the primitive nomads on and on
along the coast until a day came when the Asian home was left and the New
World was entered. The route by which primitive man entered America is
important because it determined the surroundings among which the first
Americans lived for many generations. It has sometimes been thought that
the red men came to America by way of the Kurile Islands, Kamchatka, and
the Aleutian Islands. If this was their route, they avoided a migration of
two or three thousand miles through one of the coldest and most
inhospitable of regions. This, however, is far from probable. The distance
from Kamchatka to the first of the Aleutian Islands is over one hundred
miles. As the island is not in sight from the mainland, there is little
chance that a band of savages, including women, would deliberately sail
thither. There is equally little probability that they walked to the
island on the ice, for the sea is never frozen across the whole width.
Nevertheless the climate may at that time have been colder than now. There
is also a chance that a party of savages may have been blown across to the
island in a storm. Suppose that they succeeded in reaching Bering Island,
as the most Asiatic of the Aleutians is called, the next step to Copper
Island would be easy. Then, however, there comes a stretch of more than
two hundred miles. The chances that a family would ever cross this waste
of ocean are much smaller than in the first case. Still another
possibility remains. Was there once a bridge of land from Asia to America
in this region? There is no evidence of such a link between the two
continents, for a few raised beaches indicate that during recent
geological times the Aleutian Islands have been uplifted rather than
depressed.
The passage from Asia to America at Bering Strait, on the other
hand, is comparatively easy. The Strait itself is fifty-six miles wide,
but in the middle there are two small islands so that the longest stretch
of water is only about thirty-five miles. Moreover the Strait is usually
full of ice, which frequently becomes a solid mass from shore to shore.
Therefore it would be no strange thing if some primitive savages, in
hunting for seals or polar bears, crossed the Strait, even though they had
no boats. Today the people on both sides of the Strait belong to the
American race. They still retain traditions of a time when their ancestors
crossed this narrow strip of water. The
Thilanottines have a legend that two giants once fought fiercely
on the Arctic Ocean. One would have been defeated had not a man whom he
had befriended cut the tendon of his adversary's leg. The wounded giant
fell into Bering Strait and formed a bridge across which the reindeer
entered America. Later came a strange woman bringing iron and copper. She
repeated her visits until the natives insulted her, whereupon she went
underground with her fire-made treasures and came back no more. Whatever
may have been the circumstances that led the earliest families to cross
from Asia to America, they little reckoned that they had found a new
continent and that they were the first of the Native Americans.
Unless the first Americans came to the new continent by way of the
Kurile and Aleutian Islands, it was probably their misfortune to spend
many generations in the cold regions of northeastern Asia and northwestern
America. Even if they reached Alaska by the Aleutian route but came to the
islands by way of the northern end of the Kamchatkan Peninsula, they must
have dwelt in a place where the January temperature averages - 10º F. and
where there are frosts every month in the year. If they came across Bering
Strait, they encountered a still more severe climate. The winters there
are scarcely worse than in northern Kamchatka, but the summers are as cold
as the month of March in New York or Chicago.
Perhaps a prolonged sojourn in such a climate is one reason for the
stolid character of the Indians. Of course we cannot speak with certainty,
but we must, in our search for an explanation, consider the conditions of
life in the far north. Food is scanty at all times, and starvation is a
frequent visitor, especially in winter when game is hard to get. The long
periods of cold and darkness are terribly enervating. The nervous white
man goes crazy if he stays too long in Alaska. Every spring the first
boats returning to civilization carry an unduly large proportion of men
who have lost their minds because they have endured too many dark, cold
winters. His companions say of such a man, "The North has got him." Almost
every Alaskan recognizes the danger. As one man said to a friend, "It is
time I got out of here."
"Why?" said the friend, "you seem all right. What's the matter?"
"Well," said the other, "you see I begin to like the smell of skunk
cabbage, and, when a man gets that way, it's time he went somewhere else."
The skunk cabbage, by the way, grows in Alaska in great thickets ten
feet high. The man was perfectly serious, for he meant that his mind was
beginning to act in ways that were not normal. Nowhere is the strain of
life in the far north better described than in the poems of
Robert W. Service:
| Oh, the awful hush that seemed to crush me
down on every hand, As I blundered blind with a trail to find
through that blank and bitter land; Half dazed, half crazed in
the winter wild, with its grim heartbreaking woes, And the
ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough
knows! North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak
and plain Passed like a dream I slept to lose and waked to
dream again. River and plain and mighty peak--and who could
stand unawed? As their summits blazed, he could stand undazed
at the foot of the throne of God. North, aye, North, through a
land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes, And all I heard
was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes, Till at
last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill, And
I burst in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death,
lay Bill. From "Ballads of a Cheechako. |
The human organism inherits so delicate an adjustment to climate that, in spite of man's boasted ability to live anywhere, the strain of the frozen North eliminates the more nervous and active types of mind. Only those can endure whose nerves lack sensitiveness and who are able to bear long privation and the strain of hunger and cold and darkness.
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