WHAT WE OWE TO THE INDIAN.—The contact of the two races has greatly influenced our language, literature, and customs. Five and twenty of our states, and hundreds of counties, cities, mountains, rivers, lakes, and bays, bear names derived from Indian languages. Chipmunk and coyote, moose, opossum, raccoon, skunk, woodchuck, tarpon, are all of Indian origin. We still use such expressions as Indian summer, Indian file, Indian corn; bury the hatchet, smoke the pipe of peace. To the Indians we owe the canoe, the snowshoe, the toboggan, lacrosse. Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to plant corn in hills, just as it is planted to-day, and long before the white man came, the Indians ate hominy, mush, and succotash, planted pumpkins and squashes, and made maple sugar.
SUMMARY
1. The Indians were divided into tribes, and the tribes into clans.
2. Each tribe had its own language or dialect, and usually lived by itself.
3. Members of a clan traced descent from some common imaginary ancestor, usually an animal. The civil head of a clan was the sachem; the military heads were the chiefs.
4. As the clans were united into tribes, so the tribes were in some places joined in confederacies.
5. The chief occupations of Indian men were hunting and waging war.
6. Their ways of life varied greatly with the locality in which they lived: as in the wooded regions of the East or on the great plains of the West; in the cold country of the North or in the warmer South.
7. The growth of white settlements, crowding back the Indians, led to
several notable wars in early colonial times, in all of which the Indians
were beaten:—
In Virginia: uprisings in 1622 and in 1644; border war in 1676.
In New England: Pequot War, 1636-37; King Philip's War, 1675-78.
In New Netherland: several wars with Algonquin tribes.
In North Carolina: Algonquin-Tuscarora uprising, 1711-13.
In South Carolina: Yamassee uprising, 1715-16.