Page 140 - La Société canadienne d'histoire de l'Église catholique - Rapport 1961

136 WISCONSIN HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS.
The result of this inquiry, to say the least, corroborates t
testimony of the first class of facts in favor of an Asiatic par
entage. In addition to all these facts, we have the testimony oi
able anatomists, that the American crania, with few exceptions,
are decidedly of the Mongolian type. It will be recollected \

that a few years since, a Chinese Junk visited New York, 4
manned by native Chinese. It was my good fortune to board
k
this unseemly craft and to observe its crew; and although I had
k
been familiar with our north-western Indians for more than
twenty years, had I been ignorant of the nationality of that
crew, I should have supposed them to be the genuine sons of 4f
the forest, a little disguised by their dress. They had the same +
high cheek bones, retreating fore-heads and straight,coarse, @!
black hair, and a complexion that needed only the smoke of the w
wigwam, for a season, to make it pure Indian. As it was, it
inclined rather to the color of brass than of copper; but no
greater discrepancy than may be observed between the com-
plexions of a newly arrived Englishman and one who has been
in the United States five years. All the facts of Indian history,
as well as the physical peculiarities of the race, point, unmis-
takably, to an Asiatic origin, with, perhaps, a few exceptions,
which will be noticed soon.
But when we attempt to trace that origin to any one nation
of the Old World, we are at once involved in a labyrinth of
difficulties; and at this very point the most intelligent writers
have abandoned the subject as hopelessly involved in mystery.
In respect to the more cultivated tribes, who had preserved
something like an authentic history of themselves and their more
immediate prcdecessors, they find no difficulty in tracing them,
at least, to an Asiatic origin; but the stone upon which they
stumble is this; that the first glimmerings of the history of the
more civilized tribes, commence with a rude, savage people
inhabiting the country before them; and to account for the
existence of these, they regard as the grand dificulty, and
abandon the investigation at the very point in the inquiry,
which, in my judgment, furnishes the key to the general solution