Lone Star (2 page)

The heads, discovered among the bones of the Columbian elephant and the giant mastodon, were tooled from rock. One weighed 135 pounds, one 60, and the third an even 100. The first two massive heads are recognizably human: one frowns, one smiles. The third, and largest—weird, inhuman—can only represent some unknown force or beast.

The Old Americans wandered across the high plateaus for many thousands of years. But nature is never constant, and the world is never made. The land changed. The vast ice sheets retreated north; the rivers dug deeper into the earth, and the lakes dried. The lush land that had been Texas grew hotter, harsher. The woolly mammoth disappeared. Something happened to the elephant. Perhaps, like the ground sloth and the mastodon and small native horse, it was pushed on its way to extinction by Paleo-American spears. The Pleistocene ended, and the Pleistocene animals died. The Old Americans vanished with them.

Whether the race died out, or merely changed so much over the millennia as to be no longer recognizable, is unknown. But there were already new conquerors, new proprietors, on the land. Before the land bridge sank, other men crossed from Asia and pushed out across the Great Plains. Some went east, and some west, and some did not stop until they had climbed the Andes, thousands of miles to the south.

The new men were definitely Asian. They were Mongoloid in skin shade, hair form and color, and other ways. These were the Amerinds, or American Indians, as Europeans later named them. They called themselves, in hundreds of different tongues, merely the People, or sometimes, the Real Humans.

Like the Old Americans, the Amerinds came as hunters and gatherers. But besides their racial stock, they differed from the Paleo-Americans in many ways. The Old Americans apparently came in a single invasion, over a relatively short period of years. There were never very many of them, and they preserved a certain cultural unity; Old American spear points, for example, never varied much from place to place, or over thousands of years.

The Amerinds came in a long series of invasions, a genuine
Völkerwanderung
that had not completely ceased by historic times. By about 5000 b.c. these invasions were in full swing, and they continued for thousands of years. The ice was gone; instead of a few unglaciated routes, the Amerinds could choose a thousand corridors south. Some remained for long periods in the north before they left, and some never roamed at all. The Amerinds—most of whom in North America showed almost identical racial or physical characteristics, with only minor variations of height or color—became differentiated culturally. They split into linguistic stocks, and then adopted mutually unintelligible languages within each linguistic group. They made their tools and artifacts in different ways: the early Amerinds left twenty-seven different kinds of dart points on the Edwards Plateau of Texas alone.

They carried a great assortment of stone and bone tools: axes, knives, drills, pipes, scrapers, picks, and gravers. Their principal weapon was still the spear, but they had developed the atlatl, or throwing stick, to give them extra range. They came out of Asia with domesticated dogs.

Culturally varied, speaking different languages, nomadic and constantly impinging on each other, the hundreds of bands of Amerinds could only follow the oldest human logic: they made war. Each new folk wandering from the north invaded already appropriated hunting grounds, and the first wars stemmed from the most logical of reasons, the defense of territory. But a constantly roaming, constantly colliding people soon imbedded the idea and act of warfare deep in their cultural heart. All men except the Real Human Beings—kith and kin—were enemies. The fighting was not racial, but internecine, as in modern Europe; the center of society and most important member was the warrior. There was a place for women, because warriors were too occupied to work; there was a place for priests or shamans, and both the young and old, but no place at all for the weak or cowardly.

Civilized men, caught in their modern traps and pressures, have often looked longingly toward the seeming freedom, and barbaric majesty, of the Stone Age, nomadic Amerind male. Females did his bidding; he seldom soiled his hands with labor. But the division of labor, and the culture that grew up around it, was cruelly logical. The warrior had to hunt and fight. He had to kill the elusive deer, the dangerous bear, and the powerful buffalo with a flint spear, or the tribe went hungry; he had to defend his soil, and—the culture soon demanded it—carry war and raids to the enemy, for women and spoils. He had to prove his courage from the day of manhood until he died, and sometimes prove it while dying. The fiendish custom of torturing captured males—captive children were enslaved or adopted, and women were equally useful—probably originated as a courage rite. The tortured captive had to prove his courage at the stake; the tormentors had to gain moral superiority by breaking it. Significantly, whatever sadistic pleasure they got out of it, almost all Amerinds considered it an evil omen if a prisoner defied their tortures and died well.

Virtually all Amerind peoples took scalps from the bodies of their enemies, living or dead, and every warrior lucky enough to secure them wore or displayed them in various ways. These were, certainly, more positive proof of courage or success in war than the medals or decorations of more civilized man.

Amerinds spread through the forests of the eastern seaboard of North America; they poured down into Mexico and beyond, and some of them scattered across the High Plains and central plateaus of Texas. Now, the land was taking its modern form. The lushness and the great waterholes that had supported mastodon and elephant had long vanished. Across the plains the rain fell less and less, in a marked progression from east to west. The violent, harsh contrasts between timbered country in the east, savannah in the south, and endless prairie to the west appeared. The dense growths of the limestone plateaus became arid, cedar-sprinkled hills. The land lay far south, and there were rivers of palms on its southern fringe—but it was also in the center of the great North American continental landmass, where icy winds could sweep down from the Pole. Such regions are always varied, and subject to violent natural change.

Warm, moist breezes blew out of the Gulf; they moved inland over leagues of endless, bending grass until they turned hot and searing. Arctic winds at times howled off the roof of the world, roared across the High Plains and whistled over the decaying limestone formations of the central plateaus, plunging into the dry savannahs beyond. In spring, warm and cold winds met and warred, with brilliant electricity, ice rains, and dark funnels that dipped and tore the ground. Nature was always hard, and frequently at war with itself.

Over the whole land the sun burned, not the distant, friendly orb that filtered light through European forests, but a violent, brassy engine that browned the earth and made the hillsides shimmer with heat. The moon hung low and silver-cold beyond the ephemeral night clouds against a back-blaze of stars. On each successively higher prairie or plateau the land stretched out, fairly level, further than any living eye could see. There were few boundaries anywhere, and then sharp ones: where the trees ended and the land became an ocean of soughing grass; where the high mesa turned to blue-mountained, dusty desert; where the rolling, grassy, mesquite-studded savannah etched up into the flinty Balcones Scarp. The regions were wider than modern European nations; the subregions larger than Atlantic seaboard states. Over it all the wind blew, now south, now north. Endless land, and eternal wind—it made all animal life restless, long-visioned, volatile, and free.

The Amerinds who entered this harsh, changeable country may have seen no beauty in it, nor learned to love it, until a generation had been born there. The tribes who scattered through it in the Amerind Archaic Age were not notably successful. They were tough and hardy, but they were on foot. They were in open country, armed with flint knives, stone axes, and flint spears; for some thousands of years they did not have the bow and arrow. Bison dotted the plains, but even this modern buffalo, a fraction of the size of the ancient, Pleistocene bison, was a formidable beast to attack on foot, at arm's length. More important, it was impossible for the tribes to follow the buffalo on their great migrations north and south over the arid plains. The hill country, where the ancient limestone formations frayed out above the Balcones Escarpment in spectacular scenery, supported deer and bear and smaller game. But there was not enough of this, nor sufficient easily killed animal flesh upon the grassy savannahs to the south, for Texas tribes to live off the fat of the land. There was, simply, very little fat, and the campsites of the early Amerinds have revealed mortars and pestles, seeds, and the remnants of roots among their small bones, as well as cracked human femurs. Broken and sucked human marrow bones have been discovered preserved in the ancient muck of the coastal prairies in great quantity—proof that where the Old Americans had been able to live well on mastodon and elephant meat, the aborigines who displaced them came to depend on other foods. In modern times all Texas tribes except one—the late-coming Comanches—practiced at least some form of ritual cannibalism, a grisly, ceremonial residue of a harsh past.

The land was too big, too harsh, too restless in climate for man to dominate, or even carve a stable niche for himself, with the tools the archaic Indians possessed.

This era, which paleontologists call Archaic, lasted for some thousands of years across all America. The invention of the bow, about the time of Christ, did not make life much easier, except that now birds, and more small game, were added to the Amerind diet. The great change, which ushered in the Neo-American Age, was the Agricultural Revolution. In America, as everywhere on earth, this was the greatest social and economic revolution mankind ever experienced, beside which the Industrial Revolution was a mere change of phase.

Several thousand years before Christ lived—certainly long before 2500 b.c., for radiocarbon-dated seeds have been discovered in New Mexico as of that date—the Amerinds of Middle or South America discovered how to domesticate maize, or Indian corn. Just as all mammalian life is dependent, in the final analysis, upon water and grass, all human civilization is based on the controlled growth of some cereal grain, whether rice, or wheat, or corn. No civilization could exist without cities—the words are synonymous—and no stable populations could live without a dependable food supply. When the Amerinds of Middle America learned how to grow corn, and along with this development to domesticate a few animals, the basis for a genuine American civilization was firmly laid.

True city-based civilizations began to rise in Middle America, in the same latitudes and in no way inferior to the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Babylon, and Ur of the Chaldees. Their centers were in Middle America and the slopes of the Andes, and in time they sent dim reflections to the ends of both American continents. There was no single Amerind civilization, but a series of connected cultures, which, in the hands of different peoples, rose, flourished, withered, and were restored. The Aztecs of the Valley of Mexico, and the Incas of Peru, were merely the conquerors and stabilizers of what was already a very ancient culture, and both took command within recent pre-Columbian times.

In Mexico, many miles to the south of the Texas plains, a succession of Mayan, Toltec, and other cultures farmed the soil, grew large populations, and erected vast cities, comparable to ancient Memphis, and not much inferior to Imperial Rome. Immensely disciplined, hard-working, and imaginative, these Amerinds evolved a highly sophisticated social and political organization, with complete divisions of labor, classes, and castes. They built immense palaces and pyramids out of carved stone. They developed mathematics, writing, and astronomy—their calendar was superior to Cortés's—and pursued fine arts. They worked gold, silver, and copper with brilliant mastery. The fact that they did all these things without smelting metals only adds luster to the accomplishment—though this lack, when they were taken by unexpected disaster from across the Atlantic, probably more than anything else sealed their doom.

Had Cortés and the conquistadores met metal-armed and armored men, the fate of Mexico might have been startlingly different.

Where the civilization of this Nuclear America might have gone can only be conjectured. The Spaniards, on arrival, did not commit genocide, but something probably worse: culturicide. In almost a single night the Europeans, who sacrificed men and women to their God by burning them alive, justified the extinction of Amerind culture because of the Mexic addiction to ceremonial human sacrifice, the cutting out of living victims' hearts with stone knives. The dominant Amerind aristocracy was exterminated, their temples razed, and their palaces purified. The conquerors even erased the memory of their Mexican slaves. Ironically, the racial descendants of the Aztecs first learned authoritative facts about their vanished heritage from the excavations of North American and European archeologists in recent times, who stumbled upon abandoned Amerind cities the Spaniards never found. Even then, the memory was blighted, because no cultural bridge survived.

Had the discovery of America been delayed a few centuries, the history of Middle America would have been much more like that of modern Asia. Europeans might have conquered, but they could not so easily have destroyed, and essential Amerind culture would have survived. When Columbus sailed, the Mexic civilization was on a par with 14th-century Europe, and certain other tribal groups of North America were culturally contemporary with the Germans of Tacitus' time. As it was, the Amerind contribution to the world was profound: three-fifths of the value of all the earth's agriculture in the
 
20th century came from crops the Americans planted first: maize, "Irish" potatoes, yams, tobacco, beans, squash, pumpkins, peanuts, tomatoes, chocolate, rubber, and long-staple cotton. Amerind discoveries were essential to modern American civilization.