See America First, By Orville O. Hiestand










































































































 -  There runs not
a drop of my blood in the veins of any human creature. This
called upon me for - Page 11
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There Runs Not A Drop Of My Blood In The Veins Of Any Human Creature.

This called upon me for revenge.

I have sought it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace, yet do not harbor the thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is thereto mourn for Logan? Not one."

CHAPTER II

THE MOUND BUILDERS

Thou unrelenting Past! Strong are the barriers round thy dark domain, And fetters sure and fast Hold all that enter thy unbreathing reign.

Far in thy realm, withdrawn Old empires sit in sullenness and gloom; And glorious ages gone, Lie deep within the shadows of thy womb.

Full many a mighty name Lurks in thy depths, unuttered, unrevered. With thee are silent fame, Forgotten arts, and wisdom.

- W. C. Bryant.

"Who can read the history of the past? Who is there who can tell the story of creation's morn? It is not written in history, neither does it live in tradition. There is mystery here, but it is hid by the darkness of bygone ages."

"There is a true history here, but we have not learned well the alphabet used. Here are doubtless wondrous scenes, but our standpoint is removed by time so vast that only the rude outlines can be determined. The delicate tracery, the body of the picture, are hidden from our eye. The question as to the antiquity and primitive history of man is full of interest in proportion as the solution is set with difficulties. We question the past, but only here and there a response is heard. Surely bold is he who would attempt, from the few data at hand, to reconstruct the history of times and people so far removed. We quickly become convinced that many centuries and tens of centuries have rolled away since man's first appearance on the earth. We become impressed with the fact that multitudes of people have moved over the surface of the earth and sunk into the night of oblivion without leaving a trace of their existence, without a memorial through which we might have at least learned their names."

"In Egypt we find the seat of an ancient civilization which was in its power many centuries before Christ. The changes that have passed over the earth are far more wonderful than any ascribed to the wand of the magician. Nations have come and gone, and the land of the Pharaohs has become an inheritance for strangers; new sciences have enriched human life, and the fair structure has arisen on the ruins of the past. Many centuries, with their burden of human hopes and fears, have sped away into the past, since 'Hundred-gated Thebes' sheltered her teeming population, where now are but a mournful group of ruins. Yet today, far below the remorseless sands of her desert, we find the rude flint-flakes that require us to carry back the time of man's first appearance in Egypt to a past so remote that her stately ruins become a thing of yesterday in comparison to them." (footnote Von Hellwald: Smithsonian Report, 1836.)

Europe, in the minds of some travelers, seems to have a monopoly on all fair landscapes and ancient civilization, to hear their overdrawn descriptions gleaned from many books of travel. But, in the socalled New World we find mysterious mounds and gigantic earthworks, also deserted mines, where we can trace the sites of ancient camps and fortifications, showing that the Indians of America's unbounded primeval forests and vast flowery prairies were intruders on an earlier, fairer civilization. Here we find evidence of a teeming population. No one viewing the imposing ruins scattered about the Mississippi valley and especially the wonderful work of Fort Ancient can help but marvel at these crumbling walls of an ancient, forgotten race.

One writer has stated that America has no hoary legends or traditions that lend an ever-increasing interest to the scenes of other lands. It will never have any ancient history, nor any old institutions. This writer surely never stood on those ancient mounds of Ohio and elsewhere which tell us that there were people here ten thousand years ago, when the glaciers began to melt and the land became inhabitable once more. "Even before the ice came creeping southwestwardly from the region of Niagara and passed over two-thirds of our state, from Lake Erie to the Ohio River there were people here of an older race than the hills, as the hills now are; for the glaciers ground away the hills as they once were and made new ones, with new valleys between them, and new channels for the streams to run where there had never been water courses before. The earliest Ohioans must have been the same as the Ohioans of the Ice Age, and when they fled southward before the glaciers they mast have followed the retreat of the melting ice, back into Ohio again. No one knows how long they dwelt here along its edges in a climate like that of Greenland, where the glaciers are now to be seen as they once were in the region of Cincinnati. But it is believed that these Ice Folk, as we may call them, were of the race which still roams the Arctic snows.

"All they have left to prove that they were able to cope with the fierce brute life and terrible climate of their day are axes of chipped stone and similar tools and weapons dropped on the gravelly banks of new rivers which the glaciers upheaved. Such an ax was dug up out of the glacier terrace, as the bank of this drift is called, in the valley of the Tuscarawas in Mississippi.

"For the next four or five thousand years the early Ohio men kept very quiet; but we need not suppose for that reason that there were none.

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