k 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