The Oldest Inhabitants—More Testimony as to Whence they Came.
The latest intelligence, says Appleton’s Journal from our Pacific coast, reports that a Japanese junk had come ashore on one of the islands of Alaska, with three living Japanese on board. The vessel had been disabled in a storm off Japan, and had drifted two thousand five hundred miles in nine months, twenty-three of the crew perishing from hunger and exposure. This striking occurrence is by no means unparalleled. Just forty years ago, a Japanese vessel, with living men on board, came ashore near the mouth of the Columbia river, in Oregon. It had a cargo of rice, and the crew consequently had enough to eat, though their only drink was water from occasional rains. Such occurrences assist greatly in explaining how America was peopled—a question very perplexing to our ancestors, though late geographical and ethnological researches show clearly that there is really very little mystery about it. The Japanese are evidently of the same race with our Indians, their language being, to some extent, similar to those of our Western tribes; and it is not at all unlikely that, during the thousands of years to which Japanese history goes back, many vessels may have floated from their shores to ours, bearing living persons of both sexes. But, even if it were impossible for them to cross the ocean, it is certain that Asiatics could easily make their way to America across Behring straits, or by the Aleutian Islands, the distances between which would be an easy voyage for a canoe. Ten or twelve years ago the Appletons published an account of a voyage down the Amoor, by Peter McDonough Collins, the first American who ever descended that river. In his journal he constantly spoke of the wild tribes on its banks as “Indians.” We remember asking him at that time why he called them such, and he replied, “Because they are Indians.” He was familiar, by long personal observation, with the tribes in Oregon and California, and he declared that he could see no material difference between them and the tribes on the Amoor. He is a man of plain common sense, with a mind not obfuscated by ethnological or antiquarian studies; and the idea had apparently never entered his head that the Amoor tribes were not Indians. Their appearance, their mode of life, and the lodges in which they dwelt, he said, were all similar to those of the natives of Oregon. Their language, also, seemed to him very much the same, though, of course, he had no critical knowledge of their dialects. Taking this resemblance for granted, therefore, and there being no great difficulty in crossing the ocean by the way of the Aleutian Islands, even in canoes, there is no longer any mystery about the peopling of America.—Nashua (N. H.) Gazette.