Such information as can thus be gleaned from a variety of independent sources, as from the somewhat confused yet trustworthy narrative of David Cusick, the Tuscarora historian, and from Peter Dooyentate, the Wyandot historian, all leads to the same conclusion. From remote and altogether pre-Columbian centuries, the Hurons and other allied tribes—the occupants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of various detached portions of the country north of the St. Lawrence and eastward of the Georgian Bay,—appear to have been in possession of the whole region to which their oldest traditions pointed as the cradle of the race; while nations of the Algonkin stock lay beyond them to the north-west. The great river and the lakes from whence it flows into the lower valley formed a well-defined southern boundary for affiliated tribes; but the first Dutch and English explorers of the Hudson, and of the tract of country which now constitutes the western part of the State of New York, found the river-valleys and lake shores in occupation of the Iroquois confederacy, then consisting of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas. These constituted the five nations of the famous Iroquois league. But the Hurons of Canada, with whom they were latterly at deadly feud, appear to have been the oldest representatives of the common race, and were still in occupation of their ancestral home when Cartier first explored the St. Lawrence. The same race had spread far to the south; and its representatives, in detached groups, long continued to perpetuate its influence. These included the Conestogas or Andastes, the Andastogues, the Carantouans, the Cherohakahs or Nottoways, the Tuscaroras, and others, under various names. It is not always easy to recognise the same tribe under its widely dissimilar designations. The Susquehannocks of the English and the Minquas of the Dutch, appear to be the Andastes under other designations, and Champlain’s Carantouans may have been the Eries. Under those and other names the Huron-Iroquois stock extended to the country of the Tuscaroras in North Carolina. Still farther south Gallatin surmised, from linguistic evidence, a connection between the Cherokees and the Iroquois.[[115]] This fact Mr. Hale has placed beyond doubt; and having detected in the language of the former a grammatical structure mainly Huron-Iroquois, while the vocabulary is to a great extent foreign, he is inclined to think that we thus recover traces of a people, far south in Alabama and Georgia, the descendants of refugees of the conquered Alligéwi, adopted into one of the nations of their Iroquois conquerors.[[116]]

From one after another of the outlying southern offshoots of the common stock, additions were made from time to time, to restore the numbers of the decimated Iroquois. Westward of the confederacy was the country of the Eries, an offshoot of the Seneca nation, occupying the southern shore of the great lake which perpetuates their name. Immediately to the north of the Eries, within the Canadian frontier, the Attiwendaronks, or Neuters, occupied the peninsula of Niagara, while the Tiontates or Petuns, and other tribes of the same stock, were settled in the fertile region between Lakes Erie and Huron. In 1714, the Tuscaroras, when driven by the English out of North Carolina, were welcomed by their Iroquois kinsmen, and received into the league which thenceforth bore the name of the Six Nations. Towards the middle of the same century the waste of war made them ready to welcome any additions to their numbers; and the Tuteloes and Nanticokes, both apparently Algonkin, furnished fresh accessions to the diminished numbers of the confederacy, but without taking their place as distinct nations.

But of all the nations of the stock thus widely spread westward and southward, the Hurons are the native historical race of Canada, intimately identified with incidents of its early settlement and of friendly intercourse with La Nouvelle France. Their language is now recognised as the oldest form of the common speech of the Huron-Iroquois, and it is not creditable to Canadian philologists that its grammar still remains unrepresented in any accurate printed form. The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec did, indeed, publish in its Transactions, in 1831, the translation of a Latin MS., compiled with much industry by a missionary who had laboured among the Hurons of Lorette, and whose anonymous work was found amongst the papers of the mission. But it is the production of one ignorant of the science of language, and gives no adequate idea either of the grammatical structure or of the variety and richness of the Huron tongue.

The languages or dialects spoken by many native Indian tribes have undoubtedly perished with the races to which they pertained; but the numerous Huron-Iroquois dialects still existing, not only in written form, but as living tongues, afford valuable materials for ethnical study. The history of other Indian tribes abundantly accounts for the multiplication of a minute diversity of languages so specially characteristic of the American continent, with the endless subdivisions of its indigenous population into petty tribes, kept apart by internecine feuds. The number of native American languages is estimated by Vater, in his Linguarum Totius Orbis Index, at about five hundred. But the question forthwith arises: What shall be regarded as constituting a language? For, in the wanderings of little bands of Indian nomads, and the adoption of refugees from disbanded tribes, dialects multiply indefinitely. Nearly six hundred of such are catalogued by Mr. Bancroft, in his Native Races of the Pacific States, as spoken between Alaska and the Isthmus of Panama.

Until recently the tendency has been to assume an underlying unity of speech for the whole American languages, based on the polysynthetic or holophrastic characteristic ascribed to the whole; just as by an exaggerated estimate of the prevalence of a predominant head-form, one physical type was long assumed to characterise the American race from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego. Perhaps, so far as language is concerned, the present tendency is towards the opposite extreme. Major Powell, the chief of the Ethnographical Bureau at Washington, recognises eighty groups of languages in North America, between which no affinity is thus far apparent. Fifty-five of those he believes to be satisfactorily determined as distinct stocks. On the other hand, Professor Whitney, after noticing the complexity of the inquiry when directed to the native American languages, thus proceeds: “Yet it is the confident opinion of linguistic scholars that a fundamental unity lies at the base of all these infinitely varying forms of speech; that they may be, and probably are, all descended from a single parent language.”[[117]]

Here then is a field for much useful research, with the promise of valuable results. The subject is rendered more important owing to the fact that, of nearly all the nations of the North American continent, their languages are the only surviving memorials of the race. Already, under the efficient supervision of the Ethnographic Bureau of the United States, systematic contributions are being secured for this important branch of knowledge, so far as their own geographical area is concerned. A no less important area is embraced in the Dominion of Canada, and the attention of the Government is now directed to the necessity for timely action in this matter. In the North-West, and in British Columbia, languages are disappearing and races becoming extinct. Mr. Hale has contributed to the American Philosophical Society’s Transactions a valuable monogram on the Tutelo tribe and language, derived mainly from Nikonha, the last full-blood Tutelo, who survived till upwards of a hundred years of age. He was married to a Cayuga woman, and lived among her people on their Grand river reserve. “My only knowledge of the Tuteloes,” says Mr. Hale, “had been derived from the few notices comprised in Gallatin’s Synopsis of the Indian Tribes, where they are classed with the nations of the Huron-Iroquois stock. At the same time the distinguished author, with the scientific caution which marked all his writings, is careful to mention that no vocabulary of the language was known. That which was now obtained showed, beyond question, that the language was totally distinct from the Huron-Iroquois tongues, and that it was closely allied to the language of the Dakota family.”[[118]] But for the timely exertion of a philological student, this interesting link in the history of the Huron-Iroquois relations with affiliated tribes would have been lost beyond recall.

The history of the Huron-Iroquois race, and especially of the Six Nation Indians, since the settlement of the main body for the past century on their reserves on the Grand river, in the Province of Ontario, curiously illustrates the pertinacity with which they have cherished the dialectic varieties of a common tongue. But while the essential differences of language everywhere constitute one of the most obvious distinctions of race, it is interesting to note the recognition by the Indians of affinities of dialects, and even remote kinship based on such evidence; as in the readmission of the Tuscaroras to the Iroquois family of nations. According to Brebeuf, the kinship of the Attiwendaronks of the Niagara peninsula was recognised by the Hurons in that designation which classed them as a “people of a language a little different.”[[119]] Peter Jones Kahkewaquonaby, a civilised Ojibway, adopted into the Mohawk nation, in speaking of the traditions of the Indians as to their own origin, says: “All the information I have been able to gain in relation to the question amounts to the following. Many, many winters ago the Great Spirit, Keche-Manedoo, created the Indians. Every nation speaking a different language is a second creation, but all were made by the same Supreme Being.”[[120]]

Among the races of the northern continent, none east of the Rocky Mountains more fitly represent their special characteristics than the great Huron-Iroquois family. Their language is remarkable for its compass and elaborate grammatical structure; and the numerous dialects of the common mother tongue furnish evidence of migration and conquest over a wide region eastward of the Mississippi. To such philological evidence many inquirers are now turning for a clue to the origin of the races of the New World, and for the recovery of proofs of their affinity to one or other of the Old World stocks. Professor Whitney, after dwelling on the “exaggeratedly agglutinative type” of the ancient Iberian language, and its isolation among the essentially dissimilar languages of Aryan Europe, thus proceeds: “The Basque forms a suitable stepping-stone from which to enter the peculiar linguistic domain of the New World, since there is no other dialect of the Old World which so much resembles in structure the American languages”[[121]]; not indeed, as he adds, that they are all of accordant form; for he pronounces the grouping of them in a single great family as “a classification of ignorance.” The possibilities of ancient communication between the opposite shores of the Atlantic, and the migration of colonists of the New World from the Mediterranean Sea, have already been discussed in dealing with the legend of the Lost Atlantis. Great indeed as is the interval of time therein implied, it would not suffice to erase all traces of affinity of languages. But it would be vain to hope for any historical guidance recoverable from the oldest of Iroquois legends. If, moreover, Iberian, Hittite, Egyptian, Phœnician, or other of the world’s gray fathers, transplanted to America the germs of its long indigenous stock, we look in vain for any traces of their Old World civilisation north of the Mexican Gulf. Nor is it by any means an established truth that the arts of Central America or Peru are of any very great antiquity. Their metallurgy was at a crude, yet suggestive, stage at which it was not likely to be long arrested. The same may be said of their hieroglyphic records; though they certainly present some highly significant analogies to the Chinese phase of word-writing, calculated, along with other aspects of resemblance to that stage of partial, yet long-enduring, civilisation of which China is the Asiatic exemplar, to modify our estimate of the possible duration of Central and Southern American civilisation. Nevertheless the assumption of an antiquity in any degree approximating to that of Egypt seems wholly irreconcilable with the evidence. Their architecture was barbaric, though imposing from the scale on which their great temples and palaces were built. In Central America especially, the aggregation of numerous ill-lighted little chambers, like honey-comb cells excavated out of the huge pile, is strongly suggestive of affinity to the Casas Grandes, and the Pueblos of the Zuñi; and this is confirmed by the correspondence traceable between many of their architectural details and the ornamentation of the Pueblo pottery.

The astronomy and the calendars, both of Mexico and Peru, with their detailed methods of recording their divisions of time, are all suggestive of an immature phase of civilisation in the very stage of its emergence from barbarism, modified, in some cases, by the recent acquisition of certain arts. As to the peculiar phase of Mexican art, and whatever other evidence of progress Mexico supplies, they appear to me no more than natural products of the first successful intrusion of the barbarians of the northern continent on the seats of tropical civilisation. Certain it seems, at least, that if an earlier civilisation had ever existed in the north, or if the representatives of any Old World type were present there in numbers for any length of time, some traces of their lost arts must long since have come to light.

But the conservative power of language is indisputable; and if the kinship now claimed for the polysynthetic languages of both hemispheres be correct, we are on the threshold of significant disclosures. The Huron-Iroquois tongue, in its numerous ramifications, as well as some of the native languages that have outlived the last of the races to which they belonged, may preserve traces of affinities as yet unrecognised. But in no respect are the Huron-Iroquois more correctly adducible as a typical race of American aborigines than in the absence of all evidence of their ever having acquired any of the arts upon which civilisation depends. We look in vain in their vocabularies for terms of science, or for names adapted to the arts and manufactures on which social progress depends. But they had developed a gift of oratory, for which their language amply sufficed, and from which we may infer the presence in this race of savages of latent powers, capable of wondrous development. “Their languages show, in their elaborate mechanism, as well as in their fulness of expression and grasp of thought, the evidence of the mental capacity of those who speak them. Scholars who admire the inflections of the Greek and Sanscrit verb, with their expressive force and clearness, will not be less impressed with the ingenious structure of the verb in Iroquois. It comprises nine tenses, three moods, the active and passive voices, and at least, twenty of those forms which in the Semitic grammars are styled conjugations. The very names of these forms will suffice to give evidence of the care and minuteness with which the framers of this remarkable language have endeavoured to express every shade of meaning. We have the diminutive and augmentative forms, the cis-locative and trans-locative, the duplicative, reiterative, motional, causative, progressive, attributive, frequentative, and many others.”[[122]] To speak, indeed, of the Iroquois as, in a consciously active sense, the framers of all this would be misleading. But it unquestionably grew up in the deliberations around the council fire, where the conflicting aims of confederate tribes were swayed by the eloquence of some commanding orator, until the fiercest warrior of this forest race learned to value more the successful wielding of the tongue in the Kanonsionni, or figurative Long House of the League, even than the wielding of the tomahawk in the field. At the organisation of the confederacy, the Canyengas or Mohawks were figuratively said to have “built a house,” rodinonsonnih, or rather to have “built the long house” in which the council fire of the Five Nations was kindled. Of this the Senecas, lying on the extreme west, were styled the “door-keepers,” and the Onondagas, whose territory was central, were the custodians. The whole usage is rhetorical and figurative. Under such influences the language of the Huron-Iroquois was framed, and it grew rich in emotional and persuasive forms. It only needed the evolution of a true alphabet out of the pictorial symbolism on their painted robes, or the grave-posts of their chiefs, to inaugurate a literature which should embody the orations of the Iroquois Demosthenes, and the songs of a native Homer, for whom a vehicle of thought was already prepared, rich and flexible as poet could desire.