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Nothing has been found in the mounds to indicate great antiquity, and the present tendency among archæologists is to assign to them a comparatively recent origin.
The 'Nations' of North America
In order that the reader may be enabled the better to comprehend the history and customs of the Red Race in North America, it will be well at this juncture to classify the various ethnic stocks of which it is composed. Proceeding to do so on a linguistic basis—the only possible guide in this instance—we find that students of American languages, despite the diversity of tongues exhibited in North America, have referred all of these to ten or a dozen primitive stems.8 Let us first examine the geographical position of the 'nations' of the American aborigines in the sixteenth century, at the period of the advent of the white man, whilst yet they occupied their ancestral territory.
The Athapascan stock extended in a broad band across the continent from the Pacific to Hudson Bay, and almost to the Great Lakes below. Tribes cognate to it wandered far north to the mouth of the Mackenzie River, and, southward, skirted the Rockies and the coast of Oregon south of the estuary of the Columbia River, and spreading over the plains of New Mexico, as Apaches, Navahos, and Lipans, extended almost to the tropics. The Athapascan is the most widely distributed of all the Indian linguistic stocks of North America, and covered a territory of more than forty degrees of latitude and seventy-five degrees of longitude. Its northern division was known as the Tinneh or Déné, and consisted of three groups—eastern, north-western, and south-western, dwelling near the Rockies, in the interior of Alaska, and in the mountain fastnesses of British America respectively.
The Pacific division occupied many villages in a strip of territory about four hundred miles in length from Oregon to Eel River in California. The southern division occupied a large part of Arizona and New Mexico, the southern portion of Utah and Colorado, the western borders of Kansas, and the northern part of Mexico to lat. 25°. The social conditions and customs as well as the various dialects spoken by the several branches and offshoots of this great family differed considerably according to climate and environment. Extremely adaptable, the Athapascan stock appear to have adopted many of the customs and ceremonies of such tribes as they were brought into contact with, and do not seem to have had any impetus to frame a culture of their own. Their tribes had little cohesion, and were subdivided into family groups or loose bands, which recognized a sort of patriarchal government and descent. Their food-supply was for the most part precarious, as it consisted almost entirely of the proceeds of hunting expeditions, and the desperate and never-ending search for provender rendered this people somewhat narrow and material in outlook.
The Iroquois
The Iroquois—Hurons, Tuscaroras, Susquehannocks, Nottoways, and others—occupied much of the country from the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario to the Roanoke. Several of their tribes banded themselves into a confederacy known as the 'Five Nations,' and these comprised the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas. The Cherokees, dwelling in the valleys of East Tennessee, appear to have been one of the early offshoots of the Iroquois. A race of born warriors, they pursued their craft with an excess of cruelty which made them the terror of the white settler. It was with the Iroquois that most of the early colonial wars were waged, and their name, which they borrowed from the Algonquins, and which signifies 'Real Adders,' was probably no misnomer. They possessed chiefs who, strangely enough, were nominated by the matrons of the tribe, whose decision was confirmed by the tribal and federal councils. The 'Five Nations' of the Iroquois made up the Iroquois Confederacy, which was created about the year 1570, as the last of a series of attempts to unite the tribes in question. The Mohawks, so conspicuous in colonial history, are one of their sub-tribes. Many of the Iroquoian tribes "have been settled by the Canadian Government on a reservation on Grand River, Ontario, where they still reside.... All the Iroquois [in the United States] are in reservations in New York, with the exception of the Oneida, who are settled in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The so-called Seneca, of Oklahoma, are composed of the remnants of many tribes ... and of emigrants from all the tribes of the Iroquoian Confederation." In 1689 the Iroquois were estimated to number about twelve thousand, whereas in 1904 they numbered over sixteen thousand.
The Algonquins
The Algonquian9 family surrounded the Iroquois on every side, and extended westward toward the Rocky Mountains, where one of their famous offshoots, the Blackfeet, gained a notoriety which has rendered them the heroes of many a boyish tale. They were milder than the Iroquois, and less Spartan in habits. Their western division comprised the Blackfeet, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, situated near the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains; the northern division, situated for the most part to the north of the St. Lawrence, comprised the Chippeways and Crees; the north-eastern division embraced the tribes inhabiting Quebec, the Maritime Provinces, and Maine, including the Montagnais and Micmacs; the central division, dwelling in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, included the Foxes, Kickapoos, Menominees, and others; and the eastern division embraced all the Algonquian tribes that dwelt along the Atlantic coast, the Abnaki, Narragansets, Nipmucs, Mohicans (or Mohegans), Shawnees, Delawares, and Powhatans.
The Algonquins were the first Indians to come into contact with the white man. As a rule their relations with the French were friendly, but they were frequently at war with the English settlers. The eastern branch of the race were quickly defeated and scattered, their remnants withdrawing to Canada and the Ohio valley. Of the smaller tribes of New England, Virginia, and other eastern states there are no living representatives, and even their languages are extinct, save for a few words and place-names. The Ohio valley tribes, with the Wyandots, formed themselves into a loose confederacy and attempted to preserve the Ohio as an Indian boundary; but in 1794 they were finally defeated and forced to cede their territory. Tecumseh, an Algonquin chief, carried on a fierce war against the United States for a number of years, but by his defeat and death at Tippecanoe in 1811 the spirit of the Indians was broken, and the year 1815 saw the commencement of a series of Indian migrations westward, and a wholesale cession of Indian territory which continued over a period of about thirty years.
A Sedentary People
The Algonquins had been for generations the victims of the Iroquois Confederacy, and only when the French had guaranteed them immunity from the attacks of their hereditary enemies did they set their faces to the east once more, to court repulse a second time at the hands of the English settlers. Tall and finely proportioned, the Algonquins were mainly a sedentary and agricultural people, growing maize and wild rice for their staple foods. Indeed, more than once were the colonists of New England saved from famine by these industrious folk. In 1792 Wayne's army found a continuous plantation along the entire length of the Maumee River from Fort Wayne to Lake Erie, and such evidence entirely shatters the popular fallacy that the Indian race were altogether lacking in the virtues of industry and domesticity. They employed fish-shells and ashes as fertilizers, and made use of spades and hoes. And it was the Algonquins who first instilled in the white settlers the knowledge of how to prepare those succulent dainties for which New England is famous—hominy, succotash, maple-sugar, and johnny-cake. They possessed the art of tanning deerskin to a delicate softness which rendered it a luxurious and delightful raiment, and, like the Aztecs, they manufactured mantles of feather-work. They had also elaborated a system of picture-writing. In short, they were the most intelligent and advanced of the eastern tribes, and had their civilization been permitted to proceed unhindered by white aggression and the recurring inroads of their hereditary enemies, the Iroquois, it would probably have evolved into something resembling that of the Nahua of Mexico, without, perhaps, exhibiting the sanguinary fanaticism of that people. The great weakness of the Algonquian stock was a lack of solidity
