I need only add that the relations among the various members of the Indian family in Florida are, as a rule, so well adjusted and observed that home life goes on without discord. The father is beyond question master in his home. To the mother belongs a peculiar domestic importance from her connection with her gens, but both she and her children seek first to know and to do the will of the actual lord of the household. The father is the master without being a tyrant; the mother is a subject without being a slave; the children have not yet learned self-assertion in opposition to their parents: consequently, there is no constraint in family intercourse. The Seminole household is cheerful, its members are mutually confiding, and, in the Indian’s way, intimate and affectionate.

[ THE SEMINOLE GENS.]

Of this larger body of kindred, existing, as I could see, in very distinct form among the Seminole, I gained but little definite knowledge. What few facts I secured are here placed on record.

After I was enabled to make my inquiry understood, I sought to learn from my respondent the name of the gens to which each Indian whose name I had received belonged. As the result, I found that the two hundred and eight Seminole now in Florida are divided into the following gentes and in the following numbers:

1.Wind gens21
2.Tiger gens58
3.Otter gens39
4.Bird gens41
5.Deer gens18
6.Snake gens15
7.Bear gens4
8.Wolf gens1
9.Alligator gens1
Unknown gentes10
Total208

I endeavored, also, to learn the name the Indians use for gens or clan, and was told that it is “Po-ha-po-hûm-ko-sin;” the best translation I can give of the name is “Those of one camp or house.”

Examining my table to find whether or not the word as translated describes the fact, I notice that, with but one exception, which may not, after all, prove to be an exception, each of the twenty-two camps into which the thirty-seven Seminole families are divided is a camp in which all the persons but the husbands are members of one gens. The camp at Miami is an apparent exception. There Little Tiger, a rather important personage, lives with a number of unmarried relatives. A Wolf has married one of Little Tiger’s sisters and lives in the camp, as properly he should. Lately Tiger himself has married an Otter, but, instead of leaving his relatives and going to the camp of his wife’s kindred, his wife has taken up her home with his people.

At the Big Cypress Swamp I tried to discover the comparative rank or dignity of the various clans. In reply, I was told by one of the Wind clan that they are graded in the following order. At the northernmost camp, however, another order appears to have been established.

Big Cypress camp.Northernmost camp.
1.The Wind.1.The Tiger.
2.The Tiger.2.The Wind.
3.The Otter.3.The Otter.
4.The Bird.4.The Bird.
5.The Deer.5.The Bear.
6.The Snake.6.The Deer.
7.The Bear.7.The Buffalo.
8.The Wolf.8.The Snake.
9.The Alligator.
10.The Horned Owl.