The later history of the Hurons and Iroquois is not without its special interest. One little band, the Hurons of Lorette, the representatives of the refugees from the massacre of 1648, has lingered till our own day in too close proximity to the French habitants of Quebec to preserve in purity the blood of the old race. But great as are the alterations which time and intermixture with the white race have effected, they still retain many intellectual as well as physical traits of their original stock after an interval of two hundred and thirty-six years, during which intimate intercourse, and latterly frequent intermarriage with those of European blood, have wrought inevitable change on the race.[[139]] Other more vigorous representatives of the old Huron stock occupy a small reservation in the Township of Anderdon, in Western Ontario, from whom the vocabulary was derived which furnished a test of the language of the Hochelagans in the sixteenth century. But the Hurons of Lorette have also preserved their native tongue; and an ample vocabulary[[140]] of the older form of their language survives. A third modification of the ancient tongue no doubt exists; for the larger remnant of the survivors of the Hurons, after repeated wanderings, is now settled, far from the native home of the race, on reserves conceded to them by the American Government in Kansas.
The Hurons have thus, for the most part, disappeared from Canada; but it is not without interest to note that the revolution which, upwards of a century ago, severed the connection of the old colonies to the south of the St. Lawrence with the region to the north, restored to Canada its ancient Iroquois. This race of savage warriors acquired the mastery of a region equal in extent to Central Europe; and by a system of warfare, not, after all, more inherently barbarous or recklessly bloody than that of Europe’s Grand Monarch, reconstructed the social and political map of the continent east of the Mississippi. Their influence acquired a novel importance when, in the seemingly insignificant rivalries of French and English fur-traders, they practically determined the balance of power between the two foremost nations of Europe on this continent. Their indomitable pertinacity proved more than a match alike for European diplomacy and military skill; and, as they maintained an uncompromising hostility to the French at a time when the rival colonists were nearly equally balanced, the failure of the magnificent schemes of Louis XIV. and his successors to establish in North America such a supremacy as Charles V. and Philip II. had held in Mexico and Peru, is largely traceable to them. It is natural that the Anglo-American student of history should estimate highly the polity of savage warriors who thus foiled the schemes of one of the most powerful monarchies of Europe for the mastery of this continent. The late Hon. L. H. Morgan thus writes of them: “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.”[[141]] But in this their historian applies to the Iroquois a European standard, similar to that by which Prescott unconsciously magnified Mexican barbarism into a rivalry with the contemporary civilisation of Spain. The romance attached to the Hodenosauneega, or Kononsionni, the famous league of the Long House or United Households, more truly derives its chief interest and value from the fact that its originators remained to the last savages. It is, at any rate, important to keep this fact in view, and to interpret the significance of the league in that light. When the treaty which initiated it was entered into by the Caniengas and the Oneidas, they were both in that primitive stage of unsophisticated barbarism to which the term “Stone Period” has been applied. In the absence of all knowledge of metallurgy, their implements and weapons were alike simple and rude. Agriculture, under such conditions, must have been equally primitive; and as for their wars, when they were not defensive, they appear to have had no higher aim than revenge. Gallatin, no unappreciative witness, says of them: “The history of the Five Nations is calculated to give a favourable opinion of the intelligence of the Red Man. But they may be ranked among the worst of conquerors. They conquered only in order to destroy, and, it would seem, solely for the purpose of gratifying their thirst for blood. Towards the south and the west they made a perfect desert of the whole country within 500 miles of their seats. A much greater number of those Indians, who since the commencement of the seventeenth century have perished by the sword in Canada and the United States, have been destroyed by that single nation than in all their wars with the Europeans.”[[142]]
To characterise the combination effected among such tribes as one presenting elements of wise civil institutions; or indeed to introduce such terms as league and federal system, in the sense in which they have been repeatedly employed, as though they referred to a confederation akin to those of the ancient Achæans or Ætolians, is to suggest associations altogether misleading. Though an interesting phase of American savage life, to which its long duration gives a marked significance, the Iroquois league was by no means unique; though it was the oldest, and may have been the model on which others were framed. The Creek confederacy embraced numerous tribes between the Mobile, Alabama, and Savannah rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico. At the head of it were the Muskhogees, a numerous and powerful, but wholly savage race of hunters. Like the Oneidas, Onandagas, and the still older Wyandots, they and the Choctaws claimed to be autochthones. The Muskhogees appealed to a tradition of their ancestors that they issued from a cave near the Alabama river; while the Choctaws pointed to the frontier region between them and the Chickasaws, where, as they affirmed, they suddenly emerged from a hole in the earth, a numerous and mighty people. The system of government amongst the members of this southern confederacy seems to have borne considerable resemblance to that of the Iroquois; if it was not borrowed from it. Every village was the centre of an independent tribe or nation, with its own chief; and the restraints imposed on the individual members, except when co-operating in some special enterprise or religious ceremonial, appear to have been slight.
Mr. Hale has shown that the language of the Cherokees has a grammar mainly Huron-Iroquois, and a vocabulary largely recruited from some foreign source. From this he infers that one portion of the conquered Alligéwi, while the conflict still lasted, may have cast in their lot with the conquering race, just as the Tlascalans did with the Spaniards in their war against the Aztecs, and hence the origin of the great Cherokee nation. The fugitive Alligéwi, he surmises, may have fled down the Mississippi till they reached the country of the Choctaws, themselves a mound-building people; and to the alliance of the two he would thus trace the difference in the language of the latter from that of their eastern kindred, the Creeks or Muskhogees.[[143]] On the assumption of such a combination of ethnical elements, the origin of the Creek confederacy is easily accounted for. It is to this same element of language that we have to revert for guidance in the interpretation of the history of this remarkable race. It would be an evasion of the most essential evidence on which any reliable conclusions must be based, if the fact were overlooked that the Iroquois never emerged beyond the primitive stage of the Stone period. Nevertheless in one element of intellectual development their progress had been great. Each nation of the Iroquois league had its chief, to whom pertained the right of kindling the symbolic council-fire, and of taking the lead in all public assemblies. When the representative chiefs of the nations gathered in the Long House around the common council-fire of the league, it was no less necessary that they should be able and persuasive speakers than brave warriors. Rhetoric was cultivated in the council-house of the Iroquois no less earnestly than in the Athenian ekklesia or the Roman forum. Acute reasoning and persuasive eloquence demanded all the discriminating refinements of grammar, and the choice of terms which an ample vocabulary supplies. The holophrastic element has been noted as a peculiar characteristic of American languages. The word-sentences thus constructed not only admitted of, but encouraged, an elaborate nicety of discrimination; while the marked tendency of the process, so far as the language itself is concerned, was to absorb all other parts in the verb. Time, place, manner, aim, purpose, degree, and all the other modifications of language are combined polysynthetically with the root. Nouns are to a large extent verbal forms; and not only nouns and adjectives, but adverbs and prepositions, are regularly conjugated. Elaborated polysyllables, flexibly modified by systematic internal changes, give expression, in one compounded word-sentence, to every varying phase of intricate reasoning or emotion; and the complex structure shows the growth of a language in habitual use for higher purposes than the mere daily wants of life. The vocabulary in use in some rural districts in England has been found to include less than three hundred words; and in provincial dialects, thus restricted, the refinements of grammatical expression disappear. Among such rustic communities speech plays a very subordinate part in the business of life. But upon the deliberations of the Indian council-house depended the whole action of the confederacy. Hence, while in all else the Iroquois remained an untutored savage, his language is a marvellously systematised and beautiful structure, well adapted to the requirements of intricate reasoning and persuasive subtlety.
Professor Whitney says, in reference to American languages generally, what may more especially be applied to the Huron-Iroquois: “There are infinite possibilities of expressiveness in such a structure; and it would only need that some native American Greek race should arise, to fill it full of thought and fancy, and put it to the uses of a noble literature, and it would be rightly admired as rich and flexible, perhaps beyond anything else that the world knew.”[[144]] Yet, on the other hand, the Iroquois dispense with the whole labials, never articulate with their lips, and throw entirely aside from their alphabetical series of phonetics six of those most constantly in use by us.
In this direction, then, lies an ethnological problem which cannot fail to awaken ever-increasing interest. To the native languages of the New World we must look for a true key to the solution of some of the most curious and difficult questions involved in the peopling of the continent. “There lies before us,” says Professor Whitney, “a vast and complicated problem in the American races; and it is their language that must do by far the greatest part of the work in solving it.”
Of the languages of the Huron-Iroquois, the Huron appears to be the oldest, if not the parent stock. When this aggressive race had spread, as conquerors, far to the south of the St. Lawrence, the mother nation appears to have held on to the cradleland of the race, where its representatives were found still in possession when the first European explorers entered the St. Lawrence. Colonists, of French or English origin, have been in more or less intimate intercourse with them ever since, yet the materials for any satisfactory study of the Huron language, or of a comparison between it and the various Iroquois dialects, are still scanty and very inadequate. The languages of the Five Nations that originally constituted the members of the Iroquois league, are, in the strictest sense of the term, dialects. In their council-house on the Grand river, the chiefs of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onandagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, speak each in their own language and need no interpreter. Nevertheless, the differences are considerable; and a Seneca would scarcely find the language of a Mohawk intelligible to him in ordinary conversation. But the separation of the Tuscaroras from the Iroquois on the Mohawk river had been of long duration, and their language differs much more widely from the others.
The Mohawk language was adopted at an early date for communicating with the Indians of the Six Nations. The New England Company, established in 1649, under favour of the Lord Protector, Cromwell, “for the propagation of the Gospel in New England,” was revived on the restoration of Charles II. under a royal charter; and with the eminent philosopher, Robert Boyle, as its first governor, vigorous steps were taken for the religious instruction of the Indians. The correspondence of Eliot, “the Apostle of the Indians,” with the first governor of the Company, is marked by their anxiety for the completion of the Massachusetts Bible, which, along with other books, he had translated for the benefit of the Indians of New England. The silver Communion Service, still preserved at the reserve on the Grand river, presented to the ancestors of the Mohawk nation by Queen Anne, is an interesting memorial of the early efforts for their Christianisation. It bears the inscription: “A. R., 1711. The Gift of Her Majesty, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, and of her Plantations in North America, Queen: to her Indian Chappel of the Mohawks.” The date has a special interest in evidence of the transforming influences already at work; for it was not till three years later that the Tuscaroras were received into the confederation, and the Iroquois became known by their later appellation as the Six Nation Indians. In accordance with the efforts indicated by the royal gift, repeated steps were taken for translating the Scriptures and the Prayer-Book into their language. In a letter of the Rev. Dr. Stuart, missionary to the Six Nations, dated 1771, he describes his introduction to Captain Brant at the Mohawk village of Canajoharie, and the aid received from him in revising the Indian Prayer-Book, and in translating the Gospel of St. Mark and the Acts of the Apostles into the Mohawk language. The breaking out of the revolutionary war arrested the printing of these translations. The manuscripts were brought to Canada in 1781, and placed in the hands of Colonel Clause, the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs. This gentleman subsequently carried them to England, where they were at length printed. A more recent edition of the Mohawk Prayer-Book, prepared under the direction of the Rev. Abraham Nelles, a missionary of the New England Company, with the aid of a native catechist, issued from the Canadian press in 1842. The Indian text is accompanied with its English equivalent on the opposite page, and this Kaghyadouhsera ne Yoedereanayeadagwha, or Book of Common Prayer, is still in use in the religious services of the Six Nation Indians at their settlement on the Grand river.
Some characteristics of the language, such as the absence of labials, constitute not only a distinctive difference from the old Huron speech, but afford proof of the latter being the older form. “It is a fact,” says Professor Max Müller, in referring to his intercourse with an intelligent native Mohawk, then a student at Oxford, “that the Mohawks never, either as infants or as grown-up people, articulate with their lips. They have no p, b, m, f, v, w—no labials of any kind.”[[145]] The statement, so far as the Mohawk infants are concerned, is open to further inquiry; but Dr. Oronhyatekha, the Mohawk referred to, who pursued his studies for a time in the University of Toronto, and to whom I have been largely indebted in this and other researches in Indian philology, not only rejects the six letters already named, but also c, g, l, z. The alphabet is thus reduced to seventeen letters. Professor Max Müller notes in passing, that the name “Mohawk” would seem to prove the use of the labial. But it is of foreign origin, though possibly derived from their own term: oegwehokough, “people.” The name employed by themselves is “Canienga.” The practice of speaking without ever closing the lips is an acquired habit of later origin than the forms of the parent tongue. A comparison of any of the Iroquois dialects with the Huron as still spoken by the Wyandots of Ontario, shows the m in use by the latter in what is no doubt a surviving example of the oldest form of the Huron-Iroquois language. This Huron m frequently becomes w in the Iroquois dialects, e.g. skatamendjaweh, “one hundred,” becomes in Mohawk unskadewennyaweh; rume, “man,” Mohawk, ronkwe, etc. These and other examples of this interchangeable characteristic of Indian phonology, and the process of substitution in the absence of labials, are illustrated in the table of Huron-Iroquois numerals on the following page. The habit of invariably speaking with the lips open is the source of very curious modifications in the Iroquois vocabularies when compared with that of the Wyandots. The m gives place to w, nw, nh, or nhu; also to ku and nkw, and so frequently changes the whole character of the word by the modifications it gives rise to.
A comparison of the numerals of cognate languages and dialects is always instructive; and with the growing disposition of American philologists to turn to the Basques, as the only prehistoric race of Europe that has perpetuated the language of an Allophylian stock with possible analogies to the native languages of America, their numerals may be placed alongside of those of the Huron-Iroquois. The permanency of the names for numerals, and their freedom from displacement by synonyms,