Outings At Odd Times

Comparing then the rude objects of argillite, specialized as they are, with the magnificent flint-work of the historic Indians, I would designate the former as fossil implements, the latter as relics.

To this point I feel that I have been handling facts only, and deducing from them only logical inferences; but now looms up the natural and ever-interesting question, Who were these people? The origin of any race is a difficult problem to solve, but none can compare with these misty vestiges of prehistoric humanity. It seems to me but one inference is permissible: they who fashioned these rude argillite implements were the descendants of palæolithic man, and his superior in so far as a knowledge of the bow and arrow and rude pottery indicates. Beyond this, perhaps, we can not safely venture. Prof. Haynes has recently observed, “The palæolithic man of the river gravels at Trenton and his argillite-using posterity the writer believes to be completely extinct.” While this at present seems to be the generally accepted conclusion, there is a phase of the subject that merits consideration. May not this “argillite-using” man have been a blood-relation of existing Eskimos? To accept the view of Prof. Haynes that “argillite” man became extinct infers an interval of indefinite length, when man did not exist on our central Atlantic seaboard; but if we may judge from the abundant traces of man that have been left and of the relation as to position that these three general forms – palæolithic, later argillite, and Indian – bear to each other, it would appear that, in the valley of the Delaware, at least, man has not for a day ceased to occupy the land since the first of his kind stood upon the shores of that beautiful river.

By referring these intermediate people to the existing Eskimos, I would not be understood as maintaining that these boreal people were directly descended from the argillite-using folk of the Delaware Valley, but that both were derived from palæolithic man; in other words, that with the disappearance of glacial conditions in the Delaware Valley, and the retirement northward of the continental ice-sheet, if such there were, the people of that distant day followed in its tracks, and lived the same life their ancestors had lived when northern New Jersey was as bleak as is Greenland to-day; but that not all of this strange people were so enamored of an arctic life, and that many remained and, with the gradual amelioration of the climate, their descendants changed in their habits so far as to meet the requirements of a temperate climate. This explanation, it seems to me, best accords with known facts.

It is fitting, after a long tramp in search of human relics or remains, still so abundantly scattered over and through the superficial soil, to halt, at the day’s close, upon the river’s bank, and rest upon one of the huge ice-transported bowlders that reach above the sod. From such a point I can mark the boundary of the latest phenomenon of the valley’s geological history, and seem to see what time the walrus and the seal sported in the river’s icy waters; what time the mastodon, the reindeer, and the bison tenanted the pine forests that clad the river’s banks; and what time an almost primitive man, stealing through the primeval forests, surprised and captured these mighty beasts – what time, lingering by the blow-holes of the seal and walrus in the frozen river, surprised and killed these creatures with so simple a weapon as a sharply chipped fragment of flinty rock. And, as the centuries rolled by, and the river itself lessened in bulk, until it but little more than filled its present channel, there still remained along its shores the more cultured descendants of the primitive chipper of pebbles. As a savage, so like the modern Eskimo that he has been held to be the same, this pre-Indian people still wrought the argillite that their ancestors were forced to use for their palæolithic tools; and as these spear-points are being gathered from the alluvial deposits of the more modern river, I can recall to their accustomed haunts this long-gone people, who, ere they gave place to the fierce Algonkin, were the peaceful tenants of this river’s valley. Then as we gather the beautiful arrow-heads of jasper and quartz, and pick from superficial soils grooved axes, celts, chisels, curiously wrought pipes, strange ornaments, ceremonial objects, and fragments of pottery, literally without number, we marvel at the skill of those who wrought them, and faintly realize how long these comparatively recent comers must have dwelt in this same valley, to have accumulated such an endless store of these imperishable relics.

We rightly speak of the antiquity of the Indian, but remote as is his arrival on the Atlantic coast, it is modern indeed, in comparison with the antiquity of man in the same region. We can think of it, and perhaps faintly realize it, as “time relative,” but in no wise determine it as “time absolute.”