Colden was born in Scotland in 1688, and died on Long Island in 1776. He was a physician, botanist, scholar, and literary man, able and well qualified in each pursuit. The greater part of his long life was spent in this country. As councillor, lieutenant-governor, and acting governor, he was in the administration of New York from 1720 till near his death. He was a most inquisitive and intelligent investigator and observer of Indian history and character. In dedicating his work to General Oglethorpe, he claims to have been prompted to it by his interest in the welfare of the Five Nations. He is frank and positive in expressing his judgment that they had been degraded and demoralized by their intercourse with the whites. He says that he wrote the former part of his history in New York, in 1727, to thwart the manœuvres of the French in their efforts to monopolize the western fur trade. They had been allowed to import woollen goods for the Indian traffic through New York. Governor Burnet advised that a stop be put to this abuse. The New York legislature furthered his advice, and built a fort at Oswego for three hundred traders. When the Duke of York was represented here by Governor Dongan, and “Popish interests” were allowed sway,—there being at the time a mean pretence of amity between England and France,—the interests of the former were sacrificed to those of the latter. This, of course, had a bad influence on the Five Nations, as leading them to regard the French as masters. The whole of the first part of Colden’s History deals with the Iroquois as merely the centre of the rivalry between the French and the English with their respective savage allies. The English had the advantage at the start, because from the earliest period when Champlain made a hostile incursion into the country of the Iroquois, attended by their Huron enemies, the relations of enmity were decided upon, and afterwards were constantly imbittered by a series of invasions. The French sought to undo their own influence of this sort when it became necessary for them to try to win over the Iroquois to their own interest in the fur traffic. The Confederacy which existed among the Five, and afterwards the Six, Nations was roughly tried when there was so sharp a bidding for alliances between one or another of the tribes by their European tempters. An incidental and very embarrassing element came in to complicate the relations of the parties, English, French, and Indians, on the grounds of the claim advanced by the English to hold the region beyond the Alleghanies by cession from the Iroquois in a council in 1726. The question was whether the Iroquois had previous to that time obtained tenable possession of the Ohio region, by conquest of the former occupants. It would appear that after that conquest that region was for a time well-nigh deserted. When it was to some extent reoccupied, the subsequent hunters and tenants of it denied the sovereignty of the Iroquois and the rights of the English intruders who relied upon the old treaty of cession.
The rival French history while Colden was in vogue was the third volume of Bacqueville de la Potherie’s Hist. de l’Amérique Septentrionale (Paris, 1753); and another contemporary English view appeared in Wm. Smith’s Hist. of the Province of New York (1757).[1434] Nothing appeared after this of much moment as a general account of the Six Nations till Henry R. Schoolcraft made his Report to the New York authorities in 1845, which was published in a more popular form in his Notes on the Iroquois, or Contributions to American history, antiquities, and general ethnology (Albany, 1847), a book not valued overmuch.[1435]
Better work was done by J. V. H. Clark in what is in effect a good history of the Confederacy, in his Onondaga (Syracuse, 1849). The series of biographies by W. L. Stone, of Sir William Johnson, Brant, and Red Jacket, form a continuous history for a century (1735-1838).[1436] The most carefully studied work of all has been that of Lewis H. Morgan in his League of the Iroquois (1851), a book of which Parkman says (Jesuits, p. liv) that it commands a place far in advance of all others, and he adds, “Though often differing widely from Mr. Morgan’s conclusions, I cannot bear too emphatic testimony to the value of his researches.”[1437] The latest scholarly treatment of the Iroquois history is by Horatio Hale in the introduction to The Iroquois Book of Rites (Philad., 1883), which gives the forms of commemoration on the death of a chief and upon the choice of a successor.[1438]
Moving south, the material grows somewhat scant. There is little distinctive about the New Jersey tribes.[1439] For the Delawares and the Lenni Lenape, the main source is the native bark record, which as Walam-Olum was given by Squier in his Historical and Mythological Traditions of the Algonquins,[1440] as translated by Rafinesque,[1441] while a new translation is given in D. G. Brinton’s Lenâpé and their legends; with the complete text and symbols of the Walam Olum, a new translation, and an inquiry into its authenticity (Philadelphia, 1885), making a volume of his Library of aboriginal American literature; and the book is in effect a series of ethnological studies on the Indians of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland.[1442]
In addition to some of the early tracts[1443] on Maryland[1444] and Virginia and the general histories, like those of Beverly, and Stith for Virginia, and particularly Bozman for Maryland, with Henning’s Statutes, and some of the local histories,[1445] we have little for these central coast regions.[1446] In Carolina we must revert to such early books as Lawson and Brickell; to Carroll’s Hist. Collections of South Carolina, and to occasional periodic papers.[1447]
Farther south, we get help from the early Spanish and French,—Herrera, Barcia, the chroniclers of Florida, Davilla Padilla, Laudonnière, the memorials of De Soto’s march, the documents in the collections of Ternaux, Buckingham Smith, and B. F. French, all of which have been characterized elsewhere.[1448]
The later French documents in Margry and the works of Dumont and Du Pratz give us additional help.[1449] On the English side we find something in Coxe’s Carolana, in Timberlake, in Lawson,[1450] in the Wormsloe quartos on Georgia and South Carolina,[1451] and in later books like Filson’s Kentucke, John Haywood’s Nat. and Aborig. Hist. Tennessee (down to 1768), Benjamin Hawkins’s Sketch of the Creek Country (1799), and Jeffreys’ French Dominion in America. Brinton, in The National Legend of the Chata-Mus-ko-kee tribes (in the Hist. Mag., Feb., 1870), printed a translation of “What Chekilli the head chief of the upper and lower Creeks said in a talk held at Savannah in 1735,” which he derived from a German version preserved in Herrn Philipp Georg Friederichs von Reck Diarium von seiner Reise nach Georgien im Jahr 1735 (Halle, 1741).[1452] This legend is taken by Albert S. Gatschet, in his Migration Legend of the Creek Indians, with a linguistic, historic, and ethnographic introduction (Philad., 1884), as a centre round which to group the ethnography of the whole gulf water-shed of the Southern States, wherein he has carefully analyzed the legend and its language, and in this way there is formed what is perhaps the best survey we have of the southern Indians.
This we may supplement by Pickett’s Alabama. Col. C. C. Jones, Jr., has given us a sketch (1868) of Tomo-chi-chi, the chief who welcomed Oglethorpe.[1453]
C. C. Royce has given us glimpses of the relations of the Cherokees and the whites in the Fifth Report, Bureau of Ethnology. A recent book is G. E. Foster’s Se-Quo-Yah, the American Cadmus and modern Moses. A biography of the greatest of redmen, around whose life has been woven the manners, customs and beliefs of the early Cherokees, with a recital of their wrongs and progress toward civilization (Philadelphia, etc., 1885.)[1454] Gatschet cites the Mémoire of Milfort, a war chief of the Creeks.[1455] The Chippewas are commemorated in a paper in Beach’s Indian Miscellany.[1456] The Seminole war produced a literature[1457] bearing on the Florida tribes. Bernard Romans’ Florida (1775) gave the comments of an early English observer of the natives of the southeastern parts of the United States. Dr. Brinton’s Floridian Peninsula and the paper of Clay Maccauley on the Seminoles in the Fifth Rept. Bureau of Ethnology help out the study. The Natchez have been considered as allied with the races of middle America,[1458] and we may go back to Garcilasso de la Vega and the later Du Pratz for some of the speculations about them, to be aided by the accounts we get from the French concerning their campaigns against them.[1459]
The placing of the tribes in the Ohio Valley is embarrassed by their periodic migrations.[1460] Brinton follows the migrations of the Shawanees,[1461] and C. C. Royce seeks to identify them in their wanderings.[1462] O. H. Marshall tracks other tribes along the Great Lakes.[1463] Hiram W. Beckwith places those in Illinois and Indiana.[1464] The Wyandots[1465] have been treated, as affording a type for a short study of tribal society, by Major Powell in the Bureau of Ethnology, First Report.[1466] G. Gale’s Upper Mississippi (Chicago, 1867) gives us a condensed summary of the tribes of that region, and Miss Fletcher’s Report will help us for all this territory. Use can be also made of Caleb Atwater’s Indians of the Northwest, or a Tour to Prairie du Chien (Columbus, 1850). Dr. John G. Shea and others have used the Collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society to make known their studies of the tribes of that State.[1467] One of the most readable studies of the Indians in the neighborhood of Lake Superior is John G. Kohl’s Kitchi-Gami (1860). The authorities on the Black Hawk war throw light on the Sac and Fox tribes.[1468] Pilling’s Bibliography of the Siouan Languages (1887) affords the readiest key to the mass of books about the Sioux or Dacotah stocks from the time of Hennepin and the early adventurers in the Missouri Valley. The travellers Carver and Catlin are of importance here. Mrs. Eastman’s Dacotah, or life and legends of the Sioux (1849) is an excellent book that has not yet lost its value; and the same can be said of Francis Parkman’s California and the Oregon Trail (N. Y., 1849), which shows that historian’s earliest experience of the wild camp life. Miss Alice C. Fletcher is the latest investigator of their present life.[1469] Of the Crows we have some occasional accounts like Mrs. Margaret J. Carrington’s Absaraka.[1470] On the Modocs we have J. Miller’s Life among the Modocs (London, 1873). J. O. Dorsey has given us a paper on the Omaha sociology in the Third Rept. Bureau of Ethnology (p. 205); and we may add to this some account in the Transactions (vol. i.) of the Nebraska State Hist. Society, and a tract by Miss Fletcher on the Omaha tribe of Indians in Nebraska (Washington, 1885). The Pawnees have been described by J. B. Dunbar in the Mag. Amer. Hist. (vols. iv., v., viii., ix.) The Ojibways have had two native historians,—Geo. Copway’s Traditional Hist. of the Ojibway Nation (London, 1850), and Peter Jones’ Hist. of the Ojibway Indians, with special reference to their conversion to Christianity (London, 1861). The Minnesota Hist. Soc. Collections (vol. v.) contain other historical accounts by Wm. W. Warren and by Edw. D. Neill,—the latter touching their connection with the fur-traders. Miss Fletcher’s Report (1888) will supplement all these accounts of the aborigines of this region.