Scanty as was the population compared with the vast area teeming with natural products capable of supporting human life, it may be safely said that at the time of the discovery, and long prior thereto, practically the whole of the area included in the present map was claimed and to some extent occupied by Indian tribes; but the possession of land by the Indian by no means implies occupancy in the modern or civilized sense of the term. In the latter sense occupation means to a great extent individual control and ownership. Very different was it with the Indians. Individual ownership of land was, as a rule, a thing entirely foreign to the Indian mind, and quite unknown in the culture stage to which he belonged. All land, of whatever character or however utilized, was held in common by the tribe, or in a few instances by the clan. Apparently an exception to this broad statement is to be made in the case of the Haida of the northwest coast, who have been studied by Dawson. According to him[3] the land is divided among the different families and is held as strictly personal property, with hereditary rights or possessions descending from one generation to another. “The lands may be bartered or given away. The larger salmon streams are, however, often the property jointly of a number of families.” The tendency in this case is toward personal right in land.
[TRIBAL LAND.]
For convenience of discussion, Indian tribal land may be divided into three classes: First, the land occupied by the villages; second, the land actually employed in agriculture; third, the land claimed by the tribe but not occupied, except as a hunting ground.
[Village sites.—]The amount of land taken up as village sites varied considerably in different parts of the country. It varied also in the same tribe at different times. As a rule, the North American Indians lived in communal houses of sufficient size to accommodate several families. In such cases the village consisted of a few large structures closely grouped together, so that it covered very little ground. When territory was occupied by warlike tribes, the construction of rude palisades around the villages and the necessities of defense generally tended to compel the grouping of houses, and the permanent village sites of even the more populous tribes covered only a very small area. In the case of confederated tribes and in the time of peace the tendency was for one or more families to establish more or less permanent settlements away from the main village, where a livelihood was more readily obtainable. Hence, in territory which had enjoyed a considerable interval of peace the settlements were in the nature of small agricultural communities, established at short distances from each other and extending in the aggregate over a considerable extent of country. In the case of populous tribes the villages were probably of the character of the Choctaw towns described by Adair.[4] “The barrier towns, which are next to the Muskohge and Chikkasah countries, are compactly settled for social defense, according to the general method of other savage nations; but the rest, both in the center and toward the Mississippi, are only scattered plantations, as best suits a separate easy way of living. A stranger might be in the middle of one of their populous, extensive towns without seeing half a dozen houses in the direct course of his path.” More closely grouped settlements are described by Wayne in American State Papers, 1793, in his account of an expedition down the Maumee Valley, where he states that “The margins of the Miamis of the Lake and the Au Glaize appear like one continuous village for a number of miles, nor have I ever beheld such immense fields of corn in any part of America from Canada to Florida.” Such a chain of villages as this was probably highly exceptional; but even under such circumstances the village sites proper formed but a very small part of the total area occupied.
From the foregoing considerations it will be seen that the amount of land occupied as village sites under any circumstances was inconsiderable.
[Agricultural land.—]It is practically impossible to make an accurate estimate of the relative amount of land devoted to agricultural purposes by any one tribe or by any family of tribes. None of the factors which enter into the problem are known to us with sufficient accuracy to enable reliable estimates to be made of the amount of land tilled or of the products derived from the tillage; and only in few cases have we trustworthy estimates of the population of the tribe or tribes practicing agriculture. Only a rough approximation of the truth can be reached from the scanty data available and from a general knowledge of Indian methods of subsistence.
The practice of agriculture was chiefly limited to the region south of the St. Lawrence and east of the Mississippi. In this region it was far more general and its results were far more important than is commonly supposed. To the west of the Mississippi only comparatively small areas were occupied by agricultural tribes and these lay chiefly in New Mexico and Arizona and along the Arkansas, Platte, and Missouri Rivers. The rest of that region was tenanted by non-agricultural tribes—unless indeed the slight attention paid to the cultivation of tobacco by a few of the west coast tribes, notably the Haida, may be considered agriculture. Within the first mentioned area most of the tribes, perhaps all, practiced agriculture to a greater or less extent, though unquestionably the degree of reliance placed upon it as a means of support differed much with different tribes and localities.
Among many tribes agriculture was relied upon to supply an important—and perhaps in the case of a few tribes, the most important—part of the food supply. The accounts of some of the early explorers in the southern United States, where probably agriculture was more systematized than elsewhere, mention corn fields of great extent, and later knowledge of some northern tribes, as the Iroquois and some of the Ohio Valley tribes, shows that they also raised corn in great quantities. The practice of agriculture to a point where it shall prove the main and constant supply of a people, however, implies a degree of sedentariness to which our Indians as a rule had not attained and an amount of steady labor without immediate return which was peculiarly irksome to them. Moreover, the imperfect methods pursued in clearing, planting, and cultivating sufficiently prove that the Indians, though agriculturists, were in the early stages of development as such—a fact also attested by the imperfect and one-sided division of labor between the sexes, the men as a rule taking but small share of the burdensome tasks of clearing land, planting, and harvesting.
It is certain that by no tribe of the United States was agriculture pursued to such an extent as to free its members from the practice of the hunter’s or fisher’s art. Admitting the most that can be claimed for the Indian as an agriculturist, it may be stated that, whether because of the small population or because of the crude manner in which his operations were carried on, the amount of land devoted to agriculture within the area in question was infinitesimally small as compared with the total. Upon a map colored to show only the village sites and agricultural land, the colors would appear in small spots, while by far the greater part of the map would remain uncolored.
[Hunting claims.—]The great body of the land within the area mapped which was occupied by agricultural tribes, and all the land outside it, was held as a common hunting ground, and the tribal claim to territory, independent of village sites and corn fields, amounted practically to little else than hunting claims. The community of possession in the tribe to the hunting ground was established and practically enforced by hunting laws, which dealt with the divisions of game among the village, or among the families of the hunters actually taking part in any particular hunt. As a rule, such natural landmarks as rivers, lakes, hills, and mountain chains served to mark with sufficient accuracy the territorial tribal limits. In California, and among the Haida and perhaps other tribes of the northwest coast, the value of certain hunting and fishing claims led to their definition by artificial boundaries, as by sticks or stones.[5]