The North-Americans of yesterday: a comparative study of North-American Indian life, customs, and products, on the theory of the ethnic unity of the race

About this book

Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh’s work is a scholarly comparative study that treats the Indigenous peoples of North America as a single, though varied, “race” of the past. The opening pages reveal a narrator steeped in the ethnographic tradition of the late‑19th and early‑20th centuries, drawing on the reports of John Wesley Powell, the United States Bureau of Ethnology, the Smithsonian, and a host of eminent historians and archaeologists. Dellenbaugh frames his analysis as a corrective to romantic misconceptions, arguing that cultural differences among tribes are matters of degree rather than kind, and that the conventional “Paleolithic/Neolithic” chronology is misleading when applied to American stone tools. He outlines a broad theory of migration, glaciation, and environmental pressure that shaped the distribution of linguistic stocks from the Yucatán to the Arctic, positioning the book as a synthesis of contemporary scientific literature and field observations.

The prose is dense, formal, and reflective of its turn‑of‑the‑century academic milieu, with frequent citations and a tone of earnest authority. Readers who enjoy exhaustive ethnographic surveys, historic‑geographic speculation, and the meticulous style of early American anthropology will find Dellenbaugh’s volume rewarding, while those seeking narrative storytelling or modern interpretive frameworks may prefer more recent treatments.

Opening lines

The “Indian” has never seemed to me an abnormal factor, but rather a natural part of our society, for it is now nearly thirty years since I first associated with him in the Far West, and before that the Iroquois were familiar to me as a small boy. When I first went among the Western tribes, it was with the second Colorado River expedition of that gallant explorer and foremost student of Amerindian affairs, John Wesley Powell. His own works and the reports of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, of which he has so long been the head, and where he has gathered together so many eminent ethnologists and archæologists, have furnished me with much material. These reports form a fine library on Amerindian matters, and reflect great honour on Professor Powell who conceived the idea, and on Congress which has ungrudgingly supported it. …

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