American Genesis: The American Indian and the Origins of Modern Man

LOST TRIBES AND SUNKEN CONTINENTS 25
been natives of this new continent? If not, when did they come
and how? And did they all come from the same place?
The question of origins was an open one until 1702, when
Cotton Mather, the influential preacher from Boston, the spiritual
father of the Salem witch trials of 1692, made his own proclamation
on the question. He asserted that the lndians had not migrated
by any normal route, but that the Devil in person had
brought these Red Men to America I Mather's dictum reBected
the low regard most colonists had for the Indians.
After Mather, the focus of inquiry into Indian origins was directed
at how these people fit into God's creation as it was outlined
in the Bible, the sole true authority. Many of the earliest
explorers and historians accounted for the Indians as descendants
of the "ten lost tribes of Israel."· In those days, ancient Hebrew
tribal practice as described in the Old Testament was about the
only well-documented primitive way of life. Parallels between the
Indians and the Hebrews included marriage within the tribe,
marriage by purchase, animal sacrifice, lunar and ritual calendars,
first-fruit ceremonies, purification rites, fasting, food taboos, Bood
myths, and circumcision. Links of all kinds were cited. One
savant saw a connection between Mexico's mighty Aztecs and the
early Hebrews. The Aztecs, it was pOinted out, started as a small
tribe of nomads who had only one cherished possession-the
• WUliam Penn, Quaker religious leader and founder of the Quaker colony
of Pennsylvania, said of the Indians of Pennsylvania: "The natives are gen·
erally tall, well built, and of singular proportion; they tread strong and clever,
and mostly walk with a lofty chin. . . . Their eye is little and black, not
unlike a straight looked Jew ... and the noses of several of them have as
much of the Roman . . .. For their original, I am ready to believe them to be
of the Jewish rare-I meao of the stock of the ten tribes-and that for the
follOwing reasons: first . . . ; in the n .. t place, I find them to be of the like
co~tenance. and their children of so lively a resemblance that a man would
think himself in Duke's Place or BerrY Street in London when he seeth them.
But this is not all: they agree in rites, they reckon by moons, they offer their
first-fruits, they have a kind of feast of tabernacles, they are said to lay their
altars upon twelve stones, their mourning a year, customs of women, with
many other things that do not now occur," (William Penn, Letter of August
1683. )