In foot-note of p. 107 of vol. iii. of “U.  S. Explorations for a Railroad Route to the Pacific Ocean,” we are told,

“Many of the Indians of Zuni (New Mexico) are white.  They have a fair skin, blue eyes, chestnut or auburn hair, and are quite good-looking.  They claim to be full-blooded Zunians, and have no tradition of intermarriage with any foreign race.  The circumstance creates no surprise among this people, for from time immemorial a similar class of people has existed among the tribe.”

Winchell says: 

“The ancient Indians of California, in the latitude of forty-two degrees, were as black as the negroes of Guinea, while in Mexico were tribes of an olive or reddish complexion, relatively light.  Among the black races of tropical regions we find, generally, some light-colored tribes interspersed.  These sometimes have light hair and blue eyes.  This is the case with the Tuareg of the Sahara, the Afghans of India, and the aborigines of the banks of the Oronoco and the Amazon.” (Winchell’s “Preadamites,” p. 185.)

William Penn said of the Indians of Pennsylvania, in his letter of August, 1683: 

“The natives . . . are generally tall, straight, well-built, and of singular proportion; they tread strong and clever, and mostly walk with a lofty chin. . . .  Their eye is little and black, not unlike a straight-looked Jew. . . .  I have seen among them as comely European-like faces of both sexes as on your side of the sea; and truly an Italian complexion hath not much more of the white, and the noses of several of them have as much of the Roman. . . .  For their original, I am ready to believe them to be of the Jewish race—­I mean of the stock of the ten tribes—­and that for the following reasons:  first, in the next place, I find them to be of the like countenance, and their children of so lively a resemblance that a man would think himself in Duke’s Place or Berry Street in London when he seeth them.  But this is not all:  they agree in rites, they reckon by moons, they offer their first-fruits, they have a kind of feast of tabernacles, they are said to lay their altars upon twelve stones, their mourning a year, customs of women, with many other things that do not now occur.”

Upon this question of complexion Catlin, in his “Indians of North America,” vol. i., p. 95, etc., gives us some curious information.  We have already seen that the Mandans preserved an image of the ark, and possessed legends of a clearly Atlantean character.  Catlin says: 

“A stranger in the Mandan village is first struck with the different shades of complexion and various colors of hair which he sees in a crowd about him, and is at once disposed to exclaim, ‘These are not Indians.’  There are a great many of these people whose complexions appear as light as half-breeds; and among the women particularly there are many whose skins are almost white, with the most pleasing symmetry and proportion of feature; with