Tales and traditions occupy the place of books, with the Red Race.—They make up a kind of oral literature, which is resorted to, on long winter evenings, for the amusement of the lodge.
The love of independence is so great with these tribes, that they have never been willing to load their political system with the forms of a regular government, for fear it might prove oppressive.
To be governed and to be enslaved, are ideas which have been confounded by the Indians.
GEOGRAPHICAL TERMINOLOGY OF THE U. STATES,
DERIVED FROM THE INDIAN LANGUAGE.
These Extracts are made from “Cyclopædia Indiænsis” a MS. work in preparation.
No. I.
Hudson River.—By the tribes who inhabited the area of the present County of Dutchess, and other portions of its eastern banks, as low down as Tappan, this river was called Shatemuc—which is believed to be a derivative from Shata, a pelican. The Minisi, who inhabited the west banks, below the point denoted, extending indeed over all the east half of New Jersey, to the falls of the Raritan, where they joined their kindred the Lenni Lenape, or Delawares proper, called it Mohicanittuck—that is to say, River of the Mohicans. The Mohawks, and probably the other branches of the Iroquois, called it Cahohatatea—a term of which the interpreters who have furnished the word, do not give an explanation. The prefixed term Caho, it may be observed, is their name for the lower and principal falls of the Mohawk. Sometimes this prefix was doubled, with the particle ha, thrown in between. Hatatea is clearly one of those descriptive and affirmative phrases representing objects in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, which admitted as we see, in other instances of their compounds, a very wide range. By some of the more westerly Iroquois, the river was called Sanataty.