Of the second confederation the leading members were the Wyandots, or Hurons, of the parts between Lakes Simcoe, Huron, and Erie.
The first was that of the famous and formidable Mohawks. To these add the Senekas, the Onondagos, the Cayugas, and the Oneidas, and you have the Five Nations. Then add, as a later accession, from the southern Iroquois, the Tuskaroras, and the Six Nations are formed.
Between these two there was war even to the knife; the greater portion of the Wyandot league belonging to the Algonkin class.
Nevertheless, a few representatives of the whole seven tribes[74] still remain extant, their present locality—a reserve—being the triangular peninsula which was the original Huron area.
Again, in the present site of Montreal, the earlier occupants were the Hochelaga; an Iroquois tribe also.[231]
The Sioux.—In tracing the Nelson River from its embouchure in Hudson's Bay, towards its source in the Rocky Mountains, we reach Lake Winnepeg, and the Red River Settlement—the Red River rising within the boundary of the United States, flowing from south to north, and receiving, as a feeder, the Assineboin. Now the Valley of the Assineboin is an interesting ethnological locality.
Either the river takes its name from the population, or the population from the river; the division to which it belongs being a new one. Different from the Algonkins on the east, different from the Athabaskans on the north, and (in the present state of our knowledge) different from the Arrapahoes on the west, the Assineboins have all their affinities southwards. In that direction the family to which they belong extends as far as Louisiana. These Indians it is to whom nine-tenths of the Valley of Missouri originally belonged—the Indians of the great Sioux class; Indians whose original hunting-grounds included the vast prairie-country from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi, and who again appear as an isolated detachment on Lake Michigan. These isolated Sioux are the Winebagoes; the others being the Dahcota, the Yankton, the Teton, the Upsaroka, the Mandan, the Minetari, the Missouri, the Osage, the Konzas, the Ottos, the[232] Omahaws, the Puncas, the Ioways, and the Quappas,—all American, i.e., belonging to the United States.
None of the Sioux tribe come in contact with the sea. None of them belong to the great forest districts of America. Most of them hunt over the country of the buffalo. This makes them warlike, migratory hunters; with fewer approaches to agricultural or industrial civilization than any Indians equally favoured by soil and climate.
Of this class the Assineboins are the British representatives. They are the chief Red River aborigines.
It is the Iroquois, the Sioux, and certain members of the Algonkin stock, upon which the current and popular notions of the American Indian, the Red Man, as he is called—