Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography

by Daniel G. Brinton

In physical features they are of average stature and superior muscular development. The color varies considerably, even in the same village, but tends toward a brown. The skull is long, the face broad, and the cheek-bones prominent.[181]

In point of culture the Tinnéh stand low. The early missionaries who undertook the difficult task of bringing them into accord with Christian morals have left painful portraitures of the brutality of the lives of their flocks. The Apaches have for centuries been notorious for their savage dispositions and untamable ferocity. They are, however, skilful hunters, bold warriors, and of singular physical endurance.

Immediately south of the Athabascans, throughout their whole extent, were the Algonkins. They extended uninterruptedly from Cape Race, in Newfoundland, to the Rocky Mountains, on both banks of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. The Blackfeet were their westernmost tribe, and in Canada they embraced the Crees, Montagnais, Micmacs, Ottawas, etc. In the area of the United States they were known in New England as the Abnakis, Passamaquoddies, Pequots, etc.; on the Hudson, as Mohegans; on the Delaware, as Lenape; in Maryland, as Nanticokes; in Virginia, as Powhatans; while in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, the Miamis, Sacs and Foxes, Kickapoos and Chippeways, were of this stock. Its most southern representatives were the Shawnees, who once lived on the Tennessee, and, perhaps, the Savannah river, and were closely related to the Mohegans of New York.

Most of these tribes were agricultural, raising maize, beans, squash and tobacco; they occupied fixed residences in towns most of the year; they were skilled in chipping and polishing stone, and they had a definite, even rigid, social organization. Their mythology was extensive, and its legends, as well as the history of their ancestors, were retained in memory by a system of ideographic writing, of which a number of specimens have been preserved. Their intellectual capacities were strong, and the distinguished characters that arose among them—King Philip, Tecumseh, Black Hawk, Pontiac, Tammany, Powhatan—displayed, in their dealings of war or peace with the Europeans, an ability, a bravery and a sense of right, on a par with the famed heroes of antiquity.

The earliest traceable seat of this widely extended group was somewhere between the St. Lawrence River and Hudson Bay. To this region their traditions point, and there the language is found in its purest and most archaic form. They apparently divided early into two branches, the one following the Atlantic coast southward, the other the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes westward. Of those that remained, some occupied Newfoundland, others spread over Labrador, where they were thrown into frequent contact with the Eskimos.

Surrounded on all sides by the Algonkins, the Iroquois first appear in history as occupying a portion of the area of New York State. To the west, in the adjoining part of Canada, were their kinsmen, the Eries and Hurons; on the Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania, the Conestogas; and in Virginia, the Tuscaroras. All were closely related, but in constant feud. Those in New York were united as the Five Nations, and as such, are prominent figures in the early annals of the English colony. The date of the formation of their celebrated league is reasonably placed in the fifteenth century.

Another extensively dispersed stock is that of the Dakotas. Their area reached from Lake Michigan to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Saskatchewan to the Arkansas rivers, covering most of the valley of the Missouri. A fragment of them, the Tuteloes, resided in Virginia, where they were associated with the Monacans, now extinct, but who were probably of the same stock.

They are also called the Sioux. Their principal tribes are the Assiniboins, to the north; the Hidatsa or Crows, at the west; the Winnebagoes to the east; the Omahas, Mandans, Otoes, and Poncas, on the Missouri; the Osages and Kansas to the south.

The Chahta-Muskoki stock occupied the area of what we call the Gulf States, from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River. They comprised the Creeks or Muskokis, the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and later the Seminoles. The latter took possession of Florida early in the last century. Previously that peninsula had been inhabited by the Timucuas, a nation now wholly extinct, though its language is still preserved in the works of the Spanish missionaries.

The Creeks and their neighbors were first visited by Fernando de Soto in 1540, on that famous expedition when he discovered the Mississippi. The narratives of his campaign represent them as cultivating extensive fields of corn, living in well fortified towns, their houses erected on artificial mounds, and the villages having defences of embankments of earth. These statements are verified by the existing remains, which compare favorably in size and construction with those left by the mysterious “Mound Builders” of the Ohio valley. In fact, the opinion is steadily gaining ground that probably the builders of the Ohio earthworks were the ancestors of the Creeks, Cherokees, and other southern tribes.[182]