North American Indians of the plains / by Clark Wissler.

  • Clark Wissler
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: North American Indians of the plains / by Clark Wissler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Plains of the Siouan, Caddoan, and Shoshonean speak¬ ing tribes. It is true that many tribes have migration legends some of which are consistent with a few details of culture; but as these nearly always take the forms of other myths, they cannot be given much historical weight. The plain fact is that the moment we get beyond the period of exploration in the Plains, historical data fail us. We know where the tribes were when discovered and most of their movements since that date, but beyond that we must proceed by inference and the interpretation of anthropological data. Not being able to discover how the various tribes came to be in the Plains, we can scarcely expect to tell how long they have been there. The archaeological method may be brought into play here; but as yet we lack data. Mounds and earthworks have been dis¬ covered in the Dakotas and southward along the Mis¬ souri, apparently the fringe of the great mound area in the Woodlands to the east. In the open Plains, we have so far neither evidence of long occupation nor of states of culture differing from those we have just described. This is, however, by no means a final statement of the case for future archaeological research will doubtless clear up this point. Turning back to culture, we find that so many of the traits enumerated in these pages are almost entirely peculiar to the area that we are constrained to conclude that they developed within it. This is strengthened by the peculiar adaptation of many of these traits to the geographical conditions, suggesting that they were invented or discovered by a Plains people. It seems,
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