No Difficulty in the Seeming Racial Differences

(22) Nor need we be stopped from finding racial affinities by the strongly Mongolised appearance of the natives of the page 60North-west American coast. That region, with the coast to the south, has been a cul-de-sac into which the American Indians of the plains have driven the defeated tribes of their race. Here wave after wave of Indians must have swept over the aboriginal coast tribes who had coasted from Asia, and must have obliterated not only their face-form, but their head-form; for these weaker tribes, finding plenty of sea-food, never re-crossed the Rockies. And hence there is a perfect tangle of not merely dialects but stock languages on the Pacific Coast. Of Powell's fifty-eight linguistic families in North America forty belong to this strip between the mountains and the Pacific. Hence, too, a great mixture of long and short and intermediate heads in every tribe and almost every village, although the short or round Mongol head predominates; whilst many of the natives, especially amongst the women, show, when washed, skins fairly white and ruddy cheeks, with hair soft and often brown; amongst the Haidahs especially, the men when they do not, according to custom, pluck out the hair, have a fine beard and moustache. Holmes says of them: "Amongst the Haidahs or Queen Charlotte Island tribes exists a family of coarse red-haired, light-brown-eyed people of fair complexion"; and Sproat says: "Their young women's skins are as clear and white as those of Englishwomen." These seem to be traces of the megalithic Caucasian sea-going race that had lived on the north-east coast of Asia and had been already, perhaps, liberally Mongolised in the process of being driven north and east the same race that, un-Mongolised, went south-east into Polynesia.