The Red Man's Continent Part 4

Other good descriptions of the North American continent are found in the following books: I. C. Russell's "North America" (1904), Stanford's "Compendium of Modern Geography and Travel," including the volumes on Canada, the United States, and Central America, and the great volumes on America in "The Earth and its Inhabitants" by Elise Reclus, 19 vols. (1876-1894). Russell's book is largely physiographic but contains some good chapters on the Indians. In Stanford's "Compendium" the purpose is to treat man and nature in their relation to one another, but the relationships are not clearly brought out, and there is too much emphasis on purely descriptive and encyclopedic matter. So far as interest is concerned, the famous work by Elise Reclus holds high rank. It is an encyclopedia of geographical facts arranged and edited in such a way that it has all the interest of a fine book of travel. Like most of the other books, however, it fails to bring out relationships.

As sources of information on the Indians, two books stand out with special prominence. "The American Race," by D. G. Brinton (1891), is a most scholarly volume devoted largely to a study of the Indians on a linguistic basis. It contains some general chapters, however, on the Indians and their environment, and these are most illuminating. The other book is the "Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico," edited by F. W. Hodge, and published by the United States Bureau of Ethnology (Washington, 1897, 1910, 1911). Its two large volumes are arranged in encyclopedic form. The various articles are written by a large number of scholars, including practically all the students who were at work on Indian ethnology at the time of publication. Many of the articles are the best that have been written and will not only interest the general reader but will contribute to an understanding of what America was when the Indians came here and what it still is today.