Description
The Story of the Thirteen Colonies
I. OUR COUNTRY LONG AGO.
Learned men, who read the story of the earth in the mountains,
valleys, rivers, lakes, and seas which cover its surface, tell us
that America, although known as the New World, is really older than
Europe. The sun has shone upon this continent and the rain has
watered it for more centuries than we can count. If you study your
maps carefully, you will notice lofty mountains, great lakes, and
long rivers in many parts of the country; and you will see that it
is beautiful and fertile almost everywhere, except in the far north,
where snow covers the ground most of the year.
The same wise men who found out that the country is so old, dug down
into the soil, examined the things they found there, questioned the
Indians, and, little by little, discovered that our continent has
been inhabited by many different kinds of animals and men. They
found huge bones of animals which died thousands of years ago, and
placed these in museums, where you can now see them. They also found
the bones of some of the ancient men and women, with some of their
weapons, tools, kitchen pots, and bits of their garments.
By studying these things very carefully, and by listening to the
stories of the natives, they learned a great deal about the country
which, from Greenland and A-las´ka in the north, to Cape Horn in the
south, was once inhabited by tribes of Indians. None of these had
white skins like the inhabitants of Europe, black skins like the
negroes in Africa, or yellow skins like the Chinamen in Asia. But as
they were more like the people in Asia than like those in Africa or
Europe, some men now think they may once have belonged to the same
family.