THE INDIANS
[Illustration: A typical Indian]
%57%. When Europeans first set foot on our shores, they found the country already inhabited, and, adopting the name given to the men of the New World by Columbus, they called these people "Indians."
They were not "Indians," or natives of Asia, but a race by themselves, which ages before the time of Columbus was spread over all North and South America.
Like their descendants in the West to-day, they had red or copper-colored skins, their eyes and long straight hair were jet black, their faces beardless, and their cheek bones high.
%58. The Villages.%—-East of the Rocky Mountains the Indians lived in villages, often covering several acres in area, and surrounded by stockades of two and even three rows of posts. The stockade was pierced with loopholes, and provided with platforms on which were piles of stones for the defenders to hurl on the heads of their enemies. Sometimes the structures which formed the village were wigwams—rude structures made by driving poles into the ground in a circle, drawing their tops near together, and then covering them with bark or skins. Sometimes the dwellings had rudely framed sides and roofs covered with layers of elm bark. Usually these structures were fifteen or twenty feet wide by 100 feet long. At each end was a door. Along each side were ten or twelve stalls, in each of which lived a family, so that one house held twenty or more families. Down the middle at regular intervals were fire pits where the food was cooked, the smoke escaping through holes in the roof.[1]
[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's Conspiracy of Pontiac, Vol. I., pp. 17, 18.]
[Illustration: Buffalo-skin lodge]
%59. Clans and Tribes.%—All the families living in such a house traced descent from a common female ancestor, and formed a clan. Each clan had its own name,—usually that of some animal, as the Wolf, the Bear, or the Turtle,—its own sachem or civil magistrate, and its own war chiefs, and owned all the food and all the property, except weapons and ornaments, in common. A number of such clans made a tribe, which had one language and was governed by a council of the clan sachems.
[Illustration: Seneca long house]