vilization of America before a sort of Christian barbarism,
the sword in one hand, the cross in the other, and behind the mounted
troops the big iron chest for the gold--iron chests that you can see to
this day among the Spanish families of the Southwest, rusted from burial
in time of war, but strong yet as in the centuries when guarded by
secret springs such iron treasure boxes hid all the gold and the silver
of some noble family in New Spain. When you go back beyond the days of
New Spain, you are amid a civilization as ancient as Egypt's--an era
that can be compared only to the myth age of the Norse Gods, when Loki,
Spirit of Evil, smiled with contempt at man's poor efforts to invade
the Realm of Death. It was the age when puny men of the Stone Era were
alternately chasing south before the glacial drift and returning north
as the waters receded, when huge leviathans wallowed amid sequoia
groves; and if man had domesticated creatures, they were three-toed
horses, and wolf dogs, and wild turkeys and quail. Curiously enough,
remnants of some sort of domesticated creatures are found in the cave
men's houses, centuries before the coming of horses and cattle and sheep
with the Spanish. The trouble is, up to the present when men like Curtis
and dear old Bandelier and Burbank, and the whole staff of the
Smithsonian and the School of Santa Fe have gone to work, we have not
taken the trouble in America to gather up the prehistoric legends and
ferret out their race meaning. We have fallen too completely in the last
century under the blight of evolution, which presupposes that these cave
races were a sort of simian-jawed, long-clawed, gibbering apes spending
half their time up trees throwing stones on the heads of the other apes
below, and the other half of their time either licking their chops in
gore or dragging wives back to caves by the hair of their heads. You
remember Kipling's poem on the neolithic man, and Jack London's fiction.
Now as a matter of fact--which is a bit disturbing to all these
accretions of pseudo-science--the remains of these cave people don't
show them to have been simian-jawed apes at all. They had woven clothing
when our ancestors were a bit liable to Anthony Comstock's activities
as to clothes. They had decorated pottery ware of which we have lost the
pigments, and a knowledge of irrigation which would be unique in apes,
and a technique in basketry that I never knew a monkey to possess. Some
day, when th