ge in which the ground is merely
scratched with stone spades and hoes. It is incipient agriculture, but
should be carefully distinguished from the _field agriculture_ in which
extensive pieces of land are subdued by the plough. The assistance of
domestic animals is needed before such work can be carried far, and it
does not appear that there was an approach to field agriculture in any
part of pre-Columbian America except Peru, where men were harnessed to
the plough, and perhaps occasionally llamas were used in the same
way.[52] Where subsistence depended upon rude horticulture eked out by
game and fish, it required a large territory to support a sparse
population. The great diversity of languages contributed to maintain the
isolation of tribes and prevent extensive confederation. Intertribal
warfare was perpetual, save now and then for truces of brief duration.
Warfare was attended by wholesale massacre. As many prisoners as could
be managed were taken home by their captors; in some cases they were
adopted into the tribe of the latter as a means of increasing its
fighting strength, otherwise they were put to death with lingering
torments.[53] There was nothing which afforded the red men such
exquisite delight as the spectacle of live human flesh lacerated with
stone knives or hissing under the touch of firebrands, and for elaborate
ingenuity in devising tortures they have never been equalled.[54]
Cannibalism was quite commonly practised.[55] The scalps of slain
enemies were always taken, and until they had attained such trophies the
young men were not likely to find favour in the eyes of women. The
Indian's notions of morality were those that belong to that state of
society in which the tribe is the largest well-established political
aggregate. Murder without the tribe was meritorious unless it entailed
risk of war at an obvious disadvantage; murder within the tribe was
either revenged by blood-feud or compounded by a present given to the
victim's kinsmen. Such rudimentary _wergild_ was often reckoned in
wampum, or strings of beads made of a kind of mussel shell, and put to
divers uses, as personal ornament, mnemonic record, and finally money.
Religious thought was in the fetishistic or animistic stage,[56] while
many tribes had risen to a vague conception of tutelar deities embodied
in human or animal forms. Myth-tales abounded, and the folk-lore of the
red men is found to be extremely interesting and instructive.[57] Th