In older centuries, while the Huron-Iroquois still constituted one united people in their ancestral home to the north of the St. Lawrence, they must have been liable to contact with the Eskimo, both on the north and the east; and greatly as the two races differ, the dolichocephalic type of head common to both is not only suggestive of possible intermixture, but also of encroachments on the Eskimo in early centuries by this aggressive race. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as probably at a much earlier date, when the Iroquois had parted from the Hurons, they became unquestionably the aggressive race of the northern continent; and were an object of dread to widely severed nations. Their earliest foes were probably the Algonkins, whose original home appears to have been between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay. Nevertheless, there was a time, according to the traditions of both, apparently in some old pre-Columbian century, when Iroquois and Algonkins combined their forces against the long-extinct stock whose name survives in that of the Alleghany Mountains and river. But if so, their numbers must have then vastly exceeded that of their whole combined nations at any period subsequent to their first intercourse with Europeans. For if the growing opinion is correct that the Alligéwi were the so-called “Mound-Builders” of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, they must have been a numerous people, occupying a territory of great extent, and carrying on agriculture on a large scale. So far as metallurgy—that crucial test of civilisation,—is concerned, they had not advanced beyond the stage of Iroquois progress. Their pottery and ingenious carvings in stone have already been noted, along with their singular geometrical earthworks which still puzzle the American archæologist, from the evidence they show of skill in a people still practically in their Stone period. The only conceivable solution of the mystery, as already suggested, seems to me the assumption of some “Druidic” or Brahminical caste, distinct from the native Alligéwi stock, who ruled in those great northern river-valleys, as in Peru; and, like the mythic Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs, taught them agriculture, and directed the construction of the marvellous works to which they owe their later distinctive name. But for some unknown reason they provoked the united fury of Iroquois and Algonkins; and after long-protracted strife were driven out, if not wholly exterminated. A curious phase of incipient native civilisation thus perished; and, notwithstanding all the romance attached to the league of the Iroquois, it is impossible to credit them at any stage of their own history with the achievement of such a progress in agriculture or primitive arts as we must ascribe to this ancient people of the Ohio valley. To the triumph of the Iroquois in this long-protracted warfare may have been due the haughty spirit which thenceforth demanded a recognition of their supremacy from all surrounding nations. Their partial historians ascribe to them a spirit of magnanimity in the use of their power, and a mediatorial interposition among the weaker nations that acknowledged their supremacy. They appear, indeed, to have again entered into alliance with an Algonkin nation. Their annalists have transmitted the memory of a treaty effected with the Ojibways, when the latter dwelt on the shores of Lake Superior; and the meeting-place of the two powerful races was at the great fishing-ground of the Sault Ste. Marie rapids, within reach of the copper-bearing rocks of the Keweenaw peninsula. The league then established is believed to have been faithfully maintained on both sides for upwards of two hundred years. But if so, it had been displaced by bitter feud in the interval between the visits of Cartier and Champlain to the St. Lawrence.
The historical significance given to the legend of Hiawatha by the coherent narrative so ingeniously deduced by Mr. Horatio Hales from The Iroquois Book of Rites, points to a long-past era of beneficent rule and social progress among the Huron-Iroquois. But the era is pre-Columbian, if not mythic. The pipe of peace had been long extinguished, and the buried tomahawk recovered, when the early French explorers were brought into contact with the Iroquois and Hurons. The history of their deeds, as recorded by the Jesuit Fathers from personal observation, is replete with the relentless ferocity of the savage. War was their pastime; and they were ever ready to welcome the call to arms. La Salle came in contact with them on the discovery of the Illinois; and Captain John Smith, the founder of Virginia, encountered their canoes on the Chesapeake Bay bearing a band of Iroquois warriors to the territories of the Powhattan confederacy. They were then, as ever, the same fierce marauders, intolerant of equality with any neighbouring tribe. The Susquehannocks experienced at their hands the same fate as the Alligéwi. The Lenapes, Shawnees, Nanticokes, Unamis, Delawares, Munsees, and Manhattans, were successively reduced to the condition of dependent tribes. Even the Canarse Indians of Long Island were not safe from their vengeance; and their power seems to have been dreaded throughout the whole region from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.
It thus appears probable that in remote centuries, before the discovery of America by European voyagers, the region extending westward from the Labrador coast to Lake Ontario, if not, indeed, to Lake Huron, had been in occupation by those who claimed to be autochthones, and who were known and feared far beyond their own frontiers. But though thus maintaining a haughty predominancy; so far as their arts afford any evidence, they were in their infancy. The country occupied by them, except in so far as it was overgrown with the forest, was well adapted for agriculture; and the Iroquois and Hurons alike compared favourably with the Algonkins in their agricultural industry. A confirmatory evidence of exceptional superiority among this remarkable race is that their women were held in unwonted respect. They had their own representatives in the council of the tribe; and exercised considerable influence in the choice of a chief. But on them devolved all domestic labour, including the cultivation of their fields. This work was entirely carried on by the women, while the share of the men in the joint provision of food was the product of the chase. The beautiful region was still so largely under forest that it must have afforded abundant resources for the hunter; but it furnished no facilities for the inauguration of a copper or bronze age, such as the shores of Lake Superior in vain offered to its Algonkin nomads. Of metallic ores they had no knowledge; and while they doubtless prized the copper brought occasionally from Lake Superior, copper implements are rare in the region which they occupied. Their old alliance with the Algonkins of the great copper region had long come to an end; and when brought under the notice of the French and English colonists, the Algonkins had joined with the Hurons as the implacable foes of the Iroquois confederacy.
In the ancient warfare in which Algonkins and Huron-Iroquois are found united against the nation of the great river valleys, we see evidences of a conflict between widely distinct stocks of northern and southern origin. It is an antagonism between well-defined dolichocephalic and brachycephalic races. In the dolichocephalic Iroquois or Huron, we have the highest type of the forest savage; maintaining as his own the territory of his fathers, and building palisaded towns for the secure shelter of his people. The brachycephalic Mound-Builder, on the other hand, may still survive in one or other of the members of the semi-civilised village communities of New Mexico or Arizona. But if the interpretation of native traditions have any value, they carry us back to pre-Columbian centuries, and tell of long-protracted strife, until what may at first have been no more than the aggressions of wild northern races, tempted by the resources of an industrious agricultural community, became a war of extermination. The elaborately constructed forts of the Mound-Builders, no less abundant throughout the Ohio valley than their curious geometrical earthworks, prove the dangers to which they were exposed, no less than the skill and determination with which the aggressors were withstood, it may be through successive generations, before their final overthrow.
The palisaded Indian town of Hochelaga, one of the chief urban centres of the Huron-Iroquois tribes in the older home of the race, and a sample of the later Huron defences on the Georgian Bay, stood, in the sixteenth century, at the foot of Mount Royal, whence the city of Montreal takes its name; and some of the typical skulls of its old occupants, as well as flint implements and pottery from its site, are now preserved in the Museum of M’Gill University. The latter relics reveal no more than had long been familiar in the remains which abound within the area of the Iroquois confederacy, and elsewhere throughout the eastern states of North America. Their earthenware vessels were decorated with herring-bone and other incised patterns; and their tobacco pipes and the handles of their clay bowls were, at times, rudely modelled into human and animal forms. Their implements of flint and stone were equally rude. They had inherited little more than the most infantile savage arts; and when those were at length superseded, in some degree, by implements and weapons of European manufacture, they prized the more effective weapons, but manifested no desire for mastering the arts to which they were due. To all appearance, through unnumbered centuries, the tide of human life has ebbed and flowed in the valley of the St. Lawrence as unprogressively as on the great steppes of Asia. Such footprints as the wanderers have left on the sands of time tell only of the unchanging recurrence of generations of men as years and centuries came and passed away. Illustrations of native art are now very familiar to us. The ancient flint pits have been explored; and the flint cores and rough-hewn nodules recovered. The implements of war and the chase were the work of the Indian brave. His spears and arrow heads, his knives, chisels, celts, and hammers, in flint and stone, abound. Fish-hooks, lances or spears, awls, bodkins, and other implements of bone and deer’s horn, are little less common. The highest efforts of artistic skill were expended on the carving of his stone pipe, and fashioning the pipe-stem. The pottery, the work of female hands, is usually in the simplest stage of coarse, handmade, fictile ware. The patterns, incised on the soft clay, are the conventional reproductions of the grass or straw-plaiting; or, at times, the actual impressions of the cordage or wicker-work by which the larger clay vessels were held in shape, to be dried in the sun before they were imperfectly burned in the primitive kiln. But the potter also indulged her fancy at times in modelling artistic devices of men and animals, as the handles of the smaller ware, or the forms in which the clay tobacco pipe was wrought. Nevertheless the northern continent lingered to the last in its primitive stage of neolithic art; and its most northern were its rudest tribes, until we pass within the Arctic circle and come in contact with the ingenious handiwork of the Eskimo. Southward beyond the great lakes, and especially within the area of the Mound-Builders, a manifest improvement is noticeable. Alike in their stone carvings and their modelling in clay, the more artistic design and better finish of industrious settled communities are apparent. Still further to the south, the diversified ingenuity of fancy, especially in the pottery, is suggestive of an influence derived from Mexican and Peruvian art. The carved work of some western tribes was also of a higher character. But taking such work at its best, it cannot compare in skill or practical utility with the industrial arts of Europe’s Neolithic age. This region has now been visited and explored by Europeans for four centuries, during a large portion of which time they have been permanent settlers. Its soil has been turned up over areas of such wide extent that the results may be accepted, with little hesitation, as illustrations of the arts and social life subsequent to the occupation of the continent by its aboriginal races. But we look in vain for evidence of an extinct native civilisation. However far back the presence of man in the New World may be traced, throughout the northern continent, at least, he seems never to have attained to any higher stage than what is indicated by such evidences of settled occupation as were shown in the palisaded Indian town of Hochelaga; or at most, in the ancient settlements of the Ohio valley. Everywhere the agriculturist only disturbs the graves of the savage hunter. The earthworks of the Mound-Builders, and still more their configuration, are indeed suggestive of a people in a condition analogous to that of the ancient populace of Egypt or Assyria, toiling under the direction of an overruling caste, and working out intellectual conceptions of which they themselves were incapable. Yet, even in their case, this inference finds no confirmation from the contents of their mounds or earthworks. They disclose only implements of bone, flint, and stone, with some rare examples of equally rude copper tools, hammered into shape without the use of fire. Working in the metals appears to have been confined to the southern continent; or, at least, never to have found its way northward of the Mexican plateau. Nothing but the ingeniously sculptured tobacco pipe, or the better-fashioned pottery, gives the slightest hint of progress beyond the first infantile stage of the tool-maker.
Whatever may have been the source of special skill among the old agricultural occupants of the Ohio valley, their Iroquois supplanters borrowed from them no artistic aptitude. No remains of its primitive occupants give the slightest hint that the aborigines of Canada, or of the country immediately to the south of the St. Lawrence, derived any knowledge from the old race so curiously skilled in the construction of geometrical earthworks. Any native burial mounds or embankments are on a small scale, betraying no more than the simplest operations of a people whose tools were flint hoes, and horn or wooden picks and shovels. Wherever evidence is found of true working in metals, as distinct from the cold-hammered native copper, as in the iron tomahawk, the copper kettles, and silver crosses, recovered from time to time from Indian graves, their European origin is indisputable. Small silver buckles, or brooches, of native workmanship are indeed common in their graves; for a metallic currency was so unintelligible to them that this was the use to which they most frequently turned French or English silver coinage.
But notwithstanding the general correspondence in arts, habits, and conditions of life, among the forest and prairie tribes of North America, their distinctive classification into various dolichocephalic and brachycephalic types points to diversity of origin and a mingling of several races. So far as the native races of Canada are considered, it has been shown that they belong to the dolichocephalic type. The Alligéwi, or Mound-Builders, on the contrary, appear to have been a strongly marked brachycephalic race; and the bitter antagonism between the two, which ended in the utter ruin of the latter, may have been originally due to race distinctions such as have frequently been the source of implacable strife.
The short globular head-form, which, in the famous Scioto-mound skull, is shown in a strongly marked typical example with the longitudinal and parietal diameters nearly equal, appears to have been common among the southern tribes, such as the Osages, Ottoes, Missouries, Shawnees, Cherokees, Seminoles, Uchees, Savannahs, Catawbas, Yamasees, Creeks, and many others. This seems to point to such a convergence, of two distinct ethnical lines of migration from opposite centres, as is borne out by much other evidence. In noting this aspect of the question anew, the further significant fact may also be once more repeated, that the Eskimo cranium, along with certain specialties of its own, is pre-eminently distinctive as the northern type.
Among what may be accepted as typical Canadian skulls, those recovered from the old site of Hochelaga, and from the Huron ossuaries around Lake Simcoe, have a special value. They represent the native race which, under various names, extended from the Lower St. Lawrence westward to Lake St. Clair. The people encountered by Cartier and the first French explorers of 1535, and those whom Champlain found settled around the Georgian Bay sixty-eight years later, appear to have been of the same stock. Such primitive local names, as Stadaconé and Hochelaga, are not Algonkin, but Huron-Iroquois. Native traditions, as well as the allusions of the earliest French writers, confirm this idea of the occupation by a Huron-Iroquois or Wyandot population of the “region north-eastward from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, at or somewhere along the Gulf coast, before they ever met with the French, or any European adventurers,” as reaffirmed in the narrative of their own native historian, Peter Dooyentate.[[133]] But whatever confirmation may be found for this native tradition, it is certain that the European adventurers bore no part in their expulsion from their ancient home. The aborigines, whom Jacques Cartier found a prosperous people, safe in the shelter of their palisaded towns, had all vanished before the return of the French under Champlain; and they were found by him in new settlements, which they had formed far to the westward on Lake Simcoe and the Georgian Bay.
Questions of considerable interest are involved in the consideration of this migration of the Hurons; and the circumstances under which they deserted their earlier home. They were visited by Champlain in 1615, and subsequently by the missionary Fathers, who, in 1639, found them occupying thirty-two palisaded villages, fortified in the same fashion as those described by the first French explorers at Stadaconé and Hochelaga. Their numbers are variously estimated. Brebeuf reckoned them at 30,000; and described them as living together in towns sometimes of fifty, sixty, or a hundred dwellings,—that is, of three or four hundred householders,—and diligently cultivating their fields, from which they derived food for the whole year. Whatever higher qualities distinguished the Iroquois from Algonkin or other native races, were fully shared in by the Hurons; and they are even spoken of with a natural partiality by their French allies, like Sagard, as a patrician order of savages, in comparison with those of the Five Nations. When first visited by French explorers, after their protracted journey through the desolate forests between the Ottawa and Lake Huron, their palisaded towns and cultivated fields must have seemed like an oasis in the desert. “To the eye of Champlain,” says Mr. Parkman, “accustomed to the desolation he had left behind, it seemed a land of beauty and abundance. There was a broad opening in the forest, fields of maize with pumpkins ripening in the sun, patches of sun-flowers, from the seeds of which the Indians made hair-oil, and in the midst the Huron town of Otouacha. In all essential points it resembled that which Cartier, eighty years before, had seen at Montreal; the same triple palisade of crossed and intersecting trunks, and the same long lodges of bark, each containing many households. Here, within an area of sixty or seventy miles, was the seat of one of the most remarkable savage communities of the continent.”[[134]] The Hurons, thus settled in their latter home, consisted of several “nations,” including their kinsmen to the south, as far as Lake Erie and the Niagara river. They had their own tribal divisions, still perpetuated among their descendants. The Rev. Prosper Vincent Sa∫∫atannen, a native Huron, and the first of his race admitted to the priesthood, informs me that the Hurons of Lorette still perpetuate their ancient classification into four grandes compagnies, each of which has its five tribal divisions or clans, by which of old all intermarriage was regulated. The members of the same clan regarded themselves as brothers and sisters, and so were precluded from marriage with one another. The small number of the whole band at La Jeune Lorette renders the literal enforcement of this rule impossible; but the children are still regarded as belonging to the mother’s clan. The five clans into which each of the four companies is divided are:—1. The Deer, Oskanonton; 2. The Bear, Anniolen; 3. The Wolf, Annenarisk∫∫a; 4. The Tortoise, Andia∫∫ik; 5. The Beaver, Tsotai. There were two, if not more dialects spoken by the old Hurons, or Wyandots; and that of Hochelaga probably varied from any form of the language now surviving. This has to be kept in view in estimating the value of the lists of words furnished by Jacques Cartier of “le langage des pays et Royaulmes de Hochelaga et Canada, aultrement appellée par nous la nouvelle France.”