The American Race. Brinton Daniel Garrison
in the words. He was the beneficent sage who taught them laws and arts, who gave them the maize and tobacco, and who on his departure promised to return and inaugurate the Golden Age. In other myths he is spoken of as the creator of the visible world and the first father of the race. Along with the rites in his worship were others directed to the Spirits of the Winds, who bring about the change of seasons, and to local divinities.
The dead as a rule were buried, each gens having its own cemetery. Some tribes preserved the bones with scrupulous care, while in Virginia the bodies of persons of importance were dried and deposited in houses set apart for the purpose.
The tribe that wandered the furthest from the primitive home of the stock were the Blackfeet, or Sisika, which word has this signification. It is derived from their earlier habitat in the valley of the Red river of the north, where the soil was dark and blackened their moccasins. Their bands include the Blood or Kenai and the Piegan Indians. Half a century ago they were at the head of a confederacy which embraced these and also the Sarcee (Tinné) and the Atsina (Caddo) nations, and numbered about thirty thousand souls. They have an interesting mythology and an unusual knowledge of the constellations.93
The Lenâpés were an interesting tribe who occupied the valley of the Delaware river and the area of the present State of New Jersey. For some not very clear reason they were looked upon by the other members of the stock as of the most direct lineage, and were referred to as “grandfather.” Their dialect, which has been preserved by the Moravian Missionaries, is harmonious in sound, but has varied markedly from the purity of the Cree.94 It has lost, for instance, the peculiar vowel change which throws the verb from the definite to the indefinite form. The mythology of the Lenâpés, which has been preserved in fragments, presents the outlines common to the stock.
ALGONKIN LINGUISTIC STOCK
Abnakis, Nova Scotia and S. bank of St. Lawrence.
Arapahoes, head waters of Kansas river.
Blackfeet, head waters of Missouri river.
Cheyennes, upper waters of Arkansas river.
Chipeways, shores of Lake Superior.
Crees, southern shores of Hudson Bay.
Delawares, see Lenâpés.
Illinois, on the Illinois river.
Kaskaskias, on Mississippi, below Illinois river.
Kikapoos, on upper Illinois river.
Lenâpés, on the Delaware river.
Meliseets, in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
Miamis, between Miami and Wabash rivers.
Micmacs, in Nova Scotia.
Menomonees, near Green Bay.
Mohegans, on lower Hudson river.
Manhattans, about New York Bay.
Nanticokes, on Chesapeake Bay.
Ottawas, on the Ottawa river and S. of L. Huron.
Pampticokes, near Cape Hatteras.
Passamaquoddies, on Schoodic river.
Piankishaws, on middle Ohio river.
Piegans, see Blackfeet.
Pottawattomies, S. of Lake Michigan.
Sauteux, see Crees.
Sacs and Foxes, on Sac river.
Secoffies, in Labrador. S
hawnees, on Tennessee river.
Weas, near the Piankishaws.
5. THE IROQUOIS
When the French first explored the St. Lawrence River, they found both its banks, in the vicinity where the cities of Montreal and Quebec now stand, peopled by the Iroquois. This tribe also occupied all the area of New York state (except the valley of the lower Hudson), where it was known as the Five Nations. West of these were the Hurons and Neutral Nation in Canada, and the Eries south of Lake Erie, while to the south of the Five Nations, in the valley of the Susquehanna and pushing their outposts along the western shore of Chesapeake Bay to the Potomac, were the Andastes and Conestogas, called also Susquehannocks. Still further south, about the head-waters of the Roanoke River, dwelt the Tuscaroras, who afterwards returned north and formed the sixth nation in the league. West of the Apalachians, on the upper waters of the Tennessee River, lived the Cherokees who, by their tradition, had moved down from the upper Ohio, and who, if they were not a branch of the same family, were affiliated to it by many ancient ties of blood and language. The latest investigations of the Bureau of Ethnology result in favor of considering them a branch, though a distant one, of the Iroquois line.
The stock was wholly an inland one, at no point reaching the ocean. According to its most ancient traditions we are justified in locating its priscan home in the district between the lower St. Lawrence and Hudson Bay. If we may judge from its cranial forms, its purest representatives were toward the east. The skulls of the Five Nations, as well as those of the Tuscaroras and Cherokees, are distinctly dolichocephalic, and much alike in other respects, while those of the Hurons are brachycephalic.95 Physically the stock is most superior, unsurpassed by any other on the continent, and I may even say by any other people in the world; for it stands on record that the five companies (500 men) recruited from the Iroquois of New York and Canada during our civil war stood first on the list among all the recruits of our army for height, vigor and corporeal symmetry.
In intelligence also their position must be placed among the highest. It was manifested less in their culture than in their system of government. About the middle of the fifteenth century the Onondaga chief, Hiawatha, succeeded in completing the famous league which bound together his nation with the Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas, and Cayugas into one federation of offence and defence. “The system he devised was to be not a loose and transitory league, but a permanent government. While each nation was to retain its own council and management of local affairs, the general control was to be lodged in a federal senate, composed of representatives to be elected by each nation, holding office during good behavior and acknowledged as ruling chiefs throughout the whole confederacy. Still further, and more remarkably, the federation was not to be a limited one. It was to be indefinitely expansible. The avowed design of its proposer was to abolish war altogether.”96
Certainly this scheme was one of the most far-sighted, and in its aim beneficent, which any statesman has ever designed for man. With the Iroquois it worked well. They included in the league portions of the Neutral Nation and the Tuscaroras, and for centuries it gave them the supremacy among all their neighbors. The league was primarily based upon or at least drew much of its strength from the system of gentes; this prevailed both among the Iroquois and Cherokees, descent being traced in the female line. Indeed, it was from a study of the Iroquois system that the late Mr. Morgan formed his theory that ancient society everywhere passed through a similar stage in attaining civilization.
It is consonant with their advanced sentiments that among the Iroquois women had more than ordinary respect. They were represented by a special speaker in the councils of the tribe, and were authorized to conduct negotiations looking towards making peace with an enemy. Among the Conestogas we have the instance of a woman being the recognized “Queen” of the tribe. With the Wyandots, the council of each gens was composed exclusively of women. They alone elected the chief of the gens, who represented its interests in the council of the tribe.97
In sundry other respects they displayed an intelligent activity. In many localities they were agricultural, cultivating maize, beans and tobacco, building large communal houses of logs, fortifying their villages with palisades, and making excellent large canoes of birch bark. According to traditions, which are supported by recent archæological researches,
See Horatio Hale, “
See
J. Aitken Meigs, “Cranial Forms of the American Aborigines,” in
Horatio Hale,
J. W. Powell,