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From: Elmo <non...@ip...> - 2009-08-30 15:22:21
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Settled, it will help you to form a picture of how the entire land once looked. If you have been in one of our great natural parks, this will be a better help. In these parks everything remains just as Nature made it. There the animals, birds, and plants are free to live their lives unmolested. Is it not a good thing that our government has been wise enough to have large tracts of land left in just the condition in which the whole country was when our ancestors first came? We will think of our whole land, then, as a great wild park, rich in all kinds of animal and plant life. It was not an altogether happy family that lived in this park, for all were struggling for food, drink, and sunshine. But as none were possessed of such deadly weapons as those of civilized man, no one kind of animal was able to kill off all of any other kind. Neither the Indians in their wigwams, nor the wild animals in their lairs, nor the birds singing in the trees, nor the ducks quacking in the marshes dreamed of the change that was coming to their homes. They did not dream of civilized man with his terrible weapons and his many needs, who was to change the whole appearance of the country and nearly or quite exterminate many of them. The life of the Indians was almost as simple as that of the lower animals. Their clothing required little care. Their homes were easily made. Some of them had learned to cultivate the soil, but they depended mainly upon food obtained by hunting, and such roots, berries, and nuts as the women could collect. If we could have looked down on our land as the bird does, we should have seen little sign of human inhabitants. There were no roads or bridges, and only indistinct trails led from one village to another. In the far Southwest there were people quite different from those of whom we have been speaking. They were called the Pueblo Indians. In Mexico there were similar people called the Aztecs. All these Indians still live in permanent stone villages, as they did |