The whole region to the east of the Mississippi, from the fifty-second to the thirty-sixth degree of north latitude, appears to have been occupied by the two great Indian stocks, the Algonquin-Lenape and the Iroquois. But Gallatin, who directed special attention to the determination of the elements of philological affinity between them, recognised to the south of their region the existence of at least three essentially distinct languages of extensive use: the Catawba, the Cherokee, and that which he assumed to include in a common origin, both the Muskhogee and the Choctaw.[[64]] But besides those, six well-ascertained languages of smaller tribes, including those of the Uchees and the Natchez, appear to demand separate recognition. Their region differs essentially from those over which the Algonquin and Iroquois war-parties ranged at will. It is broken up by broad river channels, and intersected by impenetrable swamps; and has thus afforded refuge for the remnants of conquered tribes, and for the preservation of distinct languages among small bands of refugees. The Timucuas were the ancient occupants of Florida; but they appear to have been displaced by the Chatta-Muskogee nations; driven forth, as is surmised, from their homes in the Ohio valley; and the older race is only known now by the preservation of its language in works of the Spanish missionaries.[[65]]
When the Ohio valley was first explored it was uninhabited; and in the latter part of the seventeenth century the whole region extending from Lake Erie to the Tennessee river was an unpeopled desert. But the Cherokees were in the occupation of their territory when first visited by De Soto in 1540; and they are described by Bertram in 1773, with their great council-house, capable of accommodating several hundreds, erected on the summit of one of the large mounds, in their town of Cowe, on the Tanase river, in Florida. But Bertram adds: “This mound on which the rotunda stands, is of a much ancienter date than the building, and perhaps was raised for another purpose. The Cherokees themselves are as ignorant as we are by what people, or for what purpose, these artificial hills were raised.”[[66]] It would, indeed, no more occur to those wanderers into the deserted regions of the Mound-Builders to inquire into the origin of their mounds, than into that of the Alleghany Mountains.
If then it is probable that we thus recover some clue to the identity of the vanished race of the Ohio valley, the very designation of the river is a memorial of their supplanters. The Ohio is an Iroquois name given to the river of the Alleghans by that indomitable race of savage warriors who effectually counteracted the plans of France, under her greatest monarchs, for the settlement of the New World. Their historian, the late Hon. L. H. Morgan, remarks of the Iroquois: “They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other race of Indian lineage except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European colonisation, they stood, for nearly two centuries, with an unshaken front, against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border population. Under their federal system, the Iroquois flourished in independence, and capable of self-protection, long after the New England and Virginia races had surrendered their jurisdictions, and fallen into the condition of dependent nations; and they now stand forth upon the canvas of Indian history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil institutions, their sagacity in the administration of the league, and their courage in its defence.”[[67]] But to characterise the elements of combined action among the Six Nation Indians as wise civil institutions; or to use such terms as league and federal system in the sense in which they are employed by the historian of the Iroquois; is to suggest associations that are illusory. With all the romance attached to the League of the Hodenosauneega, they were to the last mere savages. When the treaty which initiated the great league was entered into by its two oldest members, the Mohawks and the Oneidas, the former claimed the name of Kanienga, or “People of the Flint.” Whatever may have been the precise idea they attached to the designation, they were, as they remained to the last, but in their Stone period. Their arts were of the rudest character, and their wars had no higher aim than the gratification of an inextinguishable hatred. All that we know of them only serves to illustrate a condition of life such as may have sufficed through countless generations to perpetuate the barbarism which everywhere reveals itself in the traces of man throughout the northern continent of America. One nation after another perished by the fury of this race, powerful only to destroy. The Susquehannocks, whose name still clings to the beautiful river on the banks of which they once dwelt, are believed to have been of the same lineage as the Alleghans; but they incurred the wrath of the Iroquois, and perished. At a later date the Delawares provoked a like vengeance; and the remnant of that nation quitted for ever the shores of the river which perpetuates their name. Such in like manner was the fate of the Shawnees, Nanticokes, Unamis, Minsi, and Illinois. All alike were vanquished, reduced to the condition of serfs, or driven out and exterminated.
The tribes that lived to the west of the Mississippi appear to have been for the most part more strictly nomad. The open character of the country, with its vast tracts of prairie, and its herds of buffalo and other game, no doubt helped to encourage a wandering life. The Crees, the Blackfeet, the Sioux, Cheyennes, Comanches, and Apaches were all of this class, and with their interminable feuds and perpetual migrations rendered all settled life impossible. The Mandans, the most civilised among the tribes of the North-West, abandoned village after village under the continual attacks of the Sioux, until they disappeared as a nation; and the little handful of survivors found shelter with another tribe.
All this was the work of Indians. The Spaniards, indeed, wasted and destroyed with no less merciless indiscrimination. Not only nations perished, but a singularly interesting phase of native civilisation was abruptly arrested in Mexico, Central America, and Peru. The intrusion of French, Dutch, and English colonists was, no doubt, fatal to the aborigines whom they supplanted. Nevertheless their record is not one of indiscriminate massacre. The relations of the French, especially with the tribes with whom they were brought into immediate contact, were on the whole kindly and protective. But as we recover the history of the native tribes whose lands are now occupied by the representatives of those old colonists, we find the Indians everywhere engaged in the same exterminating warfare; and whether we look at the earlier maps, or attempt to reconstruct the traditionary history of older tribes, we learn only the same tale of aimless strife and extinction. When Cartier first explored the St. Lawrence in 1535 he found large Indian settlements at Quebec and on the island of Montreal; but on the return of the French under Champlain, little more than half a century later, there were none left to dispute their settlement. At the later date, and throughout the entire period of French occupation, the country to the south of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario was occupied by the Iroquois, or Six Nation Indians, as they were latterly called. Westward of the river Ottawa the whole region was deserted until near the shores of the Georgian Bay; though its early explorers found everywhere the traces of recent occupation by the Wyandot or other tribes, who had withdrawn to the shores of Lake Huron to escape the fury of their implacable foes.
At the period when the Hurons were first brought under the notice of the French Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century they were established along the Georgian Bay and around Lake Simcoe; and in so far as the wild virtues of the savage warrior are concerned, they fully equalled the Iroquois by whom they were at length driven out and nearly exterminated. When Locke visited Paris in 1679 the narratives of the Jesuit fathers had rendered familiar the unflinching endurance of this race under the frightful tortures to which they were subjected by their Iroquois captors; and which they, in turn, not only inflicted on their captive foes, but on one after another of the missionaries whose devoted zeal exposed them to their fury. We now read with interest this reflection noted in Locke’s Journal, in which he recognises in these savages the common motives of humanity; the same desire to win credit and reputation, and to avoid shame and disgrace, which animates all men: “This makes the Hurons and other people of Canada with such constancy endure inexpressible torments; this makes merchants in one country and soldiers in another; this puts men upon school divinity in one country and physics and mathematics in another; this cuts out the dresses for the women, and makes the fashions for the men, and makes them endure the inconveniences of all.” The great English philosopher manifestly entertained no doubt that the latent elements on which all civilisation depends were equally shared by Indian and European. But the Hurons perished—all but a little remnant of Christianised half-breeds now settled on the St. Charles river below Quebec—in their very hour of contact with European civilisation.
Father Sagard estimated the Huron tribes at the close of their national history, when they had been greatly reduced in numbers, as still between thirty and forty thousand. But besides these there lay between them and the shores of Lake Erie and the Niagara river the Tiontonones and the Attiwendaronks, and to the south of the Great Lake the Eries, all of the same stock, and all sharers in the same fate. Tradition points to the kindling of the council-fire of peace among the Attiwendaronks before the organisation of the Iroquois confederacy. Father Joseph de la Roche d’Allyon, who passed through their country when seeking to discover the source of the Niagara river, speaks of twenty-eight towns and villages under the rule of its chief Sachem, and of their extensive cultivation of maize, beans, and tobacco. They had won, moreover, the strange character of being lovers of peace, and were styled by the French the Neuters, from the desire they manifested to maintain a friendly neutrality alike with the Hurons and the Iroquois. Of the Eries we know less. In the French maps of the seventeenth century the very existence of the great lake which perpetuates their name was unknown; but the French fur-traders were aware of a tribe existing to the west of the Iroquois, whose country abounded with the lynx or wild cat, the fur of which was specially prized, and they designated it “La Nation du Chat.” To their artistic skill are ascribed several remains of aboriginal art, among which a pictorial inscription on Cunningham’s Island is described as by far the most elaborate work of its class hitherto found on the continent.[[68]] From the partial glimpses thus recovered of both nations we are tempted to ascribe to them an aptitude for civilisation fully equal to that of which the boasted federal league of the Iroquois gave evidence. But they perished by the violence of kindred nations before either the French or English could establish intercourse with them; and their fate doubtless reveals to us glimpses of history such as must have found frequent repetition in older centuries throughout the whole North American continent.
The legend of the peace-pipe, Longfellow’s poetic version of the Red Indian Edda, founded on traditions of the Iroquois narrated by an Onondaga chief, represents Gitche Manito, the Master of Life, descending on the crag of the red pipestone quarry at the Côteau des Prairies, and calling all the tribes together:—
And they stood there on the meadow
With their weapons and their war gear,