ld gather the most treasures from it. We have given
little attention to keeping up the garden.

If you have been in some part of the country that is still wild and
unsettled, 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 a thousand years
ago. They learned more about Nature than the wandering Indians, but we
do not believe they would ever become civilized if left to themselves.

The only animal that the Indians had tamed was the wolf. They made
little use of the wolf-dog except in the far North, where i