they or another race now extinct drove out the Mound-builders, none can
tell.

Of arts the red man had but the rudest. He made wigwams, canoes, bone
fish-hooks with lines of hide or twisted bark, stone tomahawks,
arrow-heads and spears, clothing of skins, wooden bows, arrows, and
clubs. He loved fighting, finery, gambling, and the chase. He
domesticated no animals but the dog and possibly the hog. Sometimes
brave, he was oftener treacherous, cruel, revengeful. His power of
endurance on the trail or the warpath was incredible, and if captured,
he let himself be tortured to death without a quiver or a cry. Though
superstitious, he believed in a Great Spirit to be worshipped without
idols, and in a future life of happy hunting and feasting.

Whether, at the time of which we now speak, the Indians were an old
race, already beginning to decline, or a fresh race, which contact with
the whites balked of its development, it is difficult to say. Their
career since best accords with the former supposition. In either case we
may assume that their national groupings and habitats were nearly the
same in 1500 as later, when these became accurately known. In the
eighteenth century the Algonquins occupied all the East from Nova Scotia
to North Carolina, and stretched west to the Mississippi. At one time
they numbered ninety thousand. The Iroquois or Five Nations had their
seat in Central and Western New York. North and west of them lived the
Hurons or Wyandots. The Appalachians, embracing Cherokees, Creeks,
Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles and a number of lesser tribes, occupied
all the southeastern portion of what is now the United States. West of
the Mississippi were the Dakotas or Sioux.

Since the white man's arrival upon these shores, very few changes have
occurred among the brute inhabitants of North America. A few species, as
the Labrador duck and the great auk, have perished. America then
possessed but four animals which had appreciable economic value; the
dog, the reindeer at the north, which the Mound-builders used as a
draft animal but the Indians did not, and the llama and the paco south
of the equator. Every one of our present domestic animals originated
beyond the Atlantic, being imported hither by our ancestors. The Indians
of the lower Mississippi Valley, when De Soto came, had dogs, and also
what the Spaniards called hogs, perhaps peccaries, but neither brute was
of any breed now bred in the country. A certain kind