The early life in the Ohio Valley was particularly conducive to such auxiliary helps in this study, and we owe more of this kind of illustration to Joseph Doddridge[1385] than to any other. He was a physician and a missionary of the Protestant Episcopal Church, and in both his professions a man highly esteemed. He was born in Maryland in 1769, and in his fourth year removed with his family to the western border of the line between Pennsylvania and Virginia. With abundant opportunities in his youth of familiarity with the rudest experiences of frontier life near hostile Indians, he was a keen observer, a skilful narrator, and a diligent gatherer-up of historical and traditional lore from the hardy and well-scarred pioneers. He had received a good academic and medical education, and was a keen student of nature as well as of humanity. His pages give us most vivid pictures of life under the stern and perilous conditions; not, however, without their fascinations, of forest haunts, of rude and scattered cabins, of domestic and social relations, of the resources of the heroic whites, and of the qualities of Indian warfare in the desperate struggle with the invaders.[1386]
Another early writer in this field was Dr. S. P. Hildreth of Ohio, who published his Pioneer History (Cincinnati, 1848) while some of the pioneers of the Northwest were still living, and the papers of some of them, like Col. George Morgan, could be put to service.[1387] Dr. Hildreth, in his Biographical and Historical Memoirs of the early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio (Cincinnati, 1852), included a Memoir of Isaac Williams, who at the age of eighteen began a course of service and adventure in the Indian country, which was continued till its close at the age of eighty-four. When eighteen years of age he was employed by the government of Pennsylvania, being already a trained hunter, as a spy and ranger among the Indians. He served in this capacity in Braddock’s campaign, and was a guard for the first convoy of provisions, on pack-horses, to Fort Duquesne, after its surrender to General Forbes in 1758. He was one of the first settlers on the Muskingum, after the peace made there with the Indians, in 1765, by Bouquet. His subsequent life was one of daring and heroic adventure on the frontiers.[1388]
Passing to the more general works, the earliest treatment of the North American Indians, of more than local scope, was the work of James Adair, first published in 1775, a section of whose map, showing the position of the Indian tribes within the present United States at that time, is given elsewhere.[1389] This History of the American Indians was later included by Kingsborough in Antiquities of Mexico (vol. viii. London, 1848).[1390] At just about the same time (1777), Dr. Robertson, in his America (book iv.), gave a general survey, which probably represents the level of the best European knowledge at that time.
It was not till well into the present century that much effort was made to summarize the scattered knowledge of explorers like Lewis and Clarke and of venturesome travellers. In 1819, we find where we might not expect it about as good an attempt to make a survey of the subject as was then attainable, in Ezekiel Sanford’s History of the United States before the Revolution,—a book, however, which was pretty roundly condemned for its general inaccuracy by Nathan Hale in the North American Review. The next year the Rev. Jedediah Morse made A report to the secretary of war, on Indian affairs, comprising a narrative of a tour in 1820, for ascertaining the actual state of the Indian tribes in our country (New Haven, 1822), which is about the beginning of systematized knowledge, though the subject in its scientific aspects was too new for well-studied proportions. The Report, however, attracted attention and instigated other students. De Tocqueville, in 1835, took the Indian problem within his range.[1391] Albert Gallatin printed, the next year, in the second volume of the Archæologia Americana (Cambridge, 1836), his Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States east of the Rocky Mountains; and though his main purpose was to explain the linguistic differences, his introduction is still a valuable summary of the knowledge then existing.
There were at this time two well-directed efforts in progress to catch the features and life of the Indians as preserving their aboriginal traits. Between 1838 and 1844 Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall published at Philadelphia, in three volumes folio, their History of the Indian tribes of North America, with biographical sketches of the principal chiefs. With 120 portrs. from the Indian gallery of the Department of war, at Washington;[1392] and in 1841 the public first got the fruits of George Catlin’s wanderings among the Indians of the Northwest, in his Letters and notes on the manners, customs and condition of the North American Indians, written during eight years’ travel among the wildest tribes of Indians in North America, in 1832-39 (N. Y., 1841), in two volumes. The book went through various editions in this country and in London.[1393] It was but the forerunner of various other books illustrative of his experience among the tribes; but it remains the most important.[1394] The sufficient summary of all that Catlin did to elucidate the Indian character and life will be found in Thomas Donaldson’s George Catlin’s Indian Gallery in the U. S. Nat. Museum, with memoirs and statistics, being part v. of the Smithsonian Report for 1885.[1395]
The great work of Schoolcraft has been elsewhere described in the present volume.[1396]
The agencies for acquiring and disseminating knowledge respecting the condition, past and present, of the red race have been and are much the same as those which improve the study of the archæological aspects of their history: such publications as the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society (1845-1848); the Reports of the governmental geological surveys, and those upon trans-continental railway routes; those upon national boundaries; those of the Smithsonian Institution, with its larger Contributions, and of late years the Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology; the reports of such institutions as the Peabody Museum of Archæology; and those of the Indian agents of the Federal government, of chief importance among which is Miss Alice C. Fletcher’s Indian Education and Civilization, published by the Bureau of Education (Washington, 1888). To these must be added the great mass of current periodical literature reached through Poole’s Index, and the action and papers of the government, not always easily discoverable, through Poore’s Descriptive Catalogue.
The maps of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are, in addition to the reports of traders, missionaries, and adventurers, the means which we have of placing the territories of the many Indian tribes which, since the contact of Europeans, have been found in North America; but the abiding-places of the tribes have been far from permanent. Many of these early maps are given in other volumes of the present History.[1397] Geographers like Hutchins and military men like Bouquet found it incumbent on them to study this question.[1398] Benjamin Smith Barton surveyed the field in 1797; but the earliest of special map seems to have been that compiled by Albert Gallatin, who endeavored to place the tribes of the Atlantic slope as they were in 1600, and those beyond the Alleghanies as they were in 1800. The map in the American Gazetteer (London, 1762) gives some information,[1399] and that of Adair in 1775 is reproduced elsewhere.[1400] In 1833, Catlin endeavored to give a geographical position to all the tribes in the United States on a map, given in his great work and reproduced in the Smithsonian Report, part v. (1885). In 1840 compiled maps were given on a small scale in George Bancroft’s third volume of his United States, and another in Marryat’s Travels, vol. ii. The government has from time to time published maps showing the Indian occupation of territory, and the present reservations are shown on maps in Donaldson’s Public Domain and in the Smithsonian Report, part v. (1885).[1401]
The migrations and characteristics of the Eskimos have already been discussed,[1402] and the journals of the Arctic explorers will yield light upon their later conditions. We find those of the Hudson Bay region depicted in all the books relating to the life of the Company’s factors.[1403] The Beothuks of Newfoundland, which are thought to have become extinct in 1828,[1404] are described in Hatton and Harvey’s Newfoundland; by T. G. B. Lloyd in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (London), 1874, p. 21; 1875, p. 222; by A. S. Gatschet in the American Philosophical Society’s Transactions (Philad., 1885-86, vols. xxii. xxiii.); and in the Nineteenth Century, Dec., 1888. Leclercq in his Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie (Paris, 1691) gives us an account of the natives on the western side of the gulf.[1405]
The Micmacs of Nova Scotia are considered in Lescarbot and the later histories and in the documentary collections of that colony; and as they played a part in the French wars, the range of that military history covers some material concerning them.[1406]