CHAPTER I.

The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century

by Francis Parkman

France and England

in North America

A Series

of Historical Narratives

Part Second

BOSTON:

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

1867.

Entered According to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by

Francis Parkman,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of

Massachusetts.

CAMBRIDGE:

STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY JOHN WILSON AND SON.

PREFACE.

Few passages of history are more striking than those which record the

efforts of the earlier French Jesuits to convert the Indians. Full as

they are of dramatic and philosophic interest, bearing strongly on the

political destinies of America, and closely involved with the history of

its native population, it is wonderful that they have been left so long

in obscurity. While the infant colonies of England still clung feebly to

the shores of the Atlantic, events deeply ominous to their future were

in progress, unknown to them, in the very heart of the continent. It

will be seen, in the sequel of this volume, that civil and religious

liberty found strange allies in this Western World.

The sources of information concerning the early Jesuits of New France

are very copious. During a period of forty years, the Superior of the

Mission sent, every summer, long and detailed reports, embodying or

accompanied by the reports of his subordinates, to the Provincial of the

Order at Paris, where they were annually published, in duodecimo

volumes, forming the remarkable series known as the Jesuit Relations.

Though the productions of men of scholastic training, they are simple

and often crude in style, as might be expected of narratives hastily

written in Indian lodges or rude mission-houses in the forest, amid

annoyances and interruptions of all kinds. In respect to the value of

their contents, they are exceedingly unequal. Modest records of

marvellous adventures and sacrifices, and vivid pictures of forest-life,

alternate with prolix and monotonous details of the conversion of

individual savages, and the praiseworthy deportment of some exemplary

neophyte. With regard to the condition and character of the primitive

inhabitants of North America, it is impossible to exaggerate their value

as an authority. I should add, that the closest examination has left me

no doubt that these missionaries wrote in perfect good faith, and that

the Relations hold a high place as authentic and trustworthy historical

documents. They are very scarce, and no complete collection of them

exists in America. The entire series was, however, republished, in 1858,

by the Canadian government, in three large octavo volumes. [1]

[1] Both editions--the old and the new--are cited in the following

pages. Where the reference is to the old edition, it is indicated by the

name of the publisher (Cramoisy), appended to the citation, in brackets.

In extracts given in the notes, the antiquated orthography and

accentuation are preserved.

These form but a part of the surviving writings of the French-American

Jesuits. Many additional reports, memoirs, journals, and letters,

official and private, have come down to us; some of which have recently

been printed, while others remain in manuscript. Nearly every prominent

actor in the scenes to be described has left his own record of events in

which he bore part, in the shape of reports to his Superiors or letters

to his friends. I have studied and compared these authorities, as well

as a great mass of collateral evidence, with more than usual care,

striving to secure the greatest possible accuracy of statement, and to

reproduce an image of the past with photographic clearness and truth.

The introductory chapter of the volume is independent of the rest; but a

knowledge of the facts set forth in it is essential to the full

understanding of the narrative which follows.

In the collection of material, I have received valuable aid from Mr. J.

G. Shea, Rev. Felix Martin, S.J., the Abbés Laverdière and H. R.

Casgrain, Dr. J. C. Taché, and the late Jacques Viger, Esq.

I propose to devote the next volume of this series to the discovery and

occupation by the French of the Valley of the Mississippi.

Boston, 1st May, 1867

Contents

The Jesuits in North America

PREFACE.

INTRODUCTION.

NATIVE TRIBES.

Divisions • The Algonquins • The Hurons • Their Houses • Fortifications

• Habits • Arts • Women • Trade • Festivities • Medicine • The Tobacco

Nation • The Neutrals • The Eries • The Andastes • The Iroquois • Indian

Social and Political Organization • Iroquois Institutions, Customs, and

Character • Indian Religion and Superstitions • The Indian Mind

CHAPTER I. 1634.

NOTRE-DAME DES ANGES.

Quebec in 1634 • Father Le Jeune • The Mission-House • Its Domestic

Economy • The Jesuits and their Designs

CHAPTER II.

LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS.

Conversion of Loyola • Foundation of the Society of Jesus • Preparation

of the Novice • Characteristics of the Order • The Canadian Jesuits

CHAPTER III. 1632, 1633.

PAUL LE JEUNE.

Le Jeune's Voyage • His First Pupils • His Studies • His Indian Teacher

• Winter at the Mission-House • Le Jeune's School • Reinforcements

CHAPTER IV. 1633, 1634.

LE JEUNE AND THE HUNTERS.

Le Jeune joins the Indians • The First Encampment • The Apostate •

Forest Life in Winter • The Indian Hut • The Sorcerer • His Persecution

of the Priest • Evil Company • Magic • Incantations • Christmas •

Starvation • Hopes of Conversion • Backsliding • Peril and Escape of Le

Jeune • His Return

CHAPTER V. 1633, 1634.

THE HURON MISSION.

Plans of Conversion • Aims and Motives • Indian Diplomacy • Hurons at

Quebec • Councils • The Jesuit Chapel • Le Borgne • The Jesuits Thwarted

• Their Perseverance • The Journey to the Hurons • Jean de Brébeuf • The

Mission Begun

CHAPTER VI. 1634, 1635.

BRÉBEUF AND HIS ASSOCIATES.

The Huron Mission-House • Its Inmates • Its Furniture • Its Guests • The

Jesuit as a Teacher • As an Engineer • Baptisms • Huron Village Life •

Festivities and Sorceries • The Dream Feast • The Priests accused of

Magic • The Drought and the Red Cross

CHAPTER VII. 1636, 1637.

THE FEAST OF THE DEAD.

Huron Graves • Preparation for the Ceremony • Disinterment • The

Mourning • The Funeral March • The Great Sepulchre • Funeral Games •

Encampment of the Mourners • Gifts • Harangues • Frenzy of the Crowd •

The Closing Scene • Another Rite • The Captive Iroquois • The Sacrifice.

CHAPTER VIII. 1636, 1637.

THE HURON AND THE JESUIT.

Enthusiasm for the Mission • Sickness of the Priests • The Pest among

the Hurons • The Jesuit on his Rounds • Efforts at Conversion • Priests

and Sorcerers • The Man-Devil • The Magician's Prescription • Indian

Doctors and Patients • Covert Baptisms • Self-Devotion of the Jesuits

CHAPTER IX. 1637.

CHARACTER OF THE CANADIAN JESUITS.

Jean de Brébeuf • Charles Garnier • Joseph Marie Chaumonot • Noël

Chabanel • Isaac Jogues • Other Jesuits • Nature of their Faith •

Supernaturalism • Visions • Miracles

CHAPTER X. 1637-1640.

PERSECUTION.

Ossossané • The New Chapel • A Triumph of the Faith • The Nether Powers

• Signs of a Tempest • Slanders • Rage against the Jesuits • Their

Boldness and Persistency • Nocturnal Council • Danger of the Priests •

Brébeuf's Letter • Narrow Escapes • Woes and Consolations

CHAPTER XI. 1638-1640.

PRIEST AND PAGAN.

Du Peron's Journey • Daily Life of the Jesuits • Their Missionary

Excursions • Converts at Ossossané • Machinery of Conversion •

Conditions of Baptism • Backsliders • The Converts and their Countrymen

• The Cannibals at St. Joseph

CHAPTER XII. 1639, 1640.

THE TOBACCO NATION--THE NEUTRALS.

A Change of Plan • Sainte Marie • Mission of the Tobacco Nation • Winter

Journeying • Reception of the Missionaries • Superstitious Terrors •

Peril of Garnier and Jogues • Mission of the Neutrals • Huron Intrigues

• Miracles • Fury of the Indians • Intervention of Saint Michael •

Return to Sainte Marie • Intrepidity of the Priests • Their Mental

Exaltation

CHAPTER XIII. 1636-1646.

QUEBEC AND ITS TENANTS.

The New Governor • Edifying Examples • Le Jeune's Correspondents • Rank

and Devotion • Nuns • Priestly Authority • Condition of Quebec • The

Hundred Associates • Church Discipline • Plays • Fireworks • Processions

• Catechizing • Terrorism • Pictures • The Converts • The Society of

Jesus • The Foresters

CHAPTER XIV. 1636-1652.

DEVOTEES AND NUNS.

The Huron Seminary • Madame de la Peltrie • Her Pious Schemes • Her Sham

Marriage • She visits the Ursulines of Tours • Marie de Saint Bernard •

Marie de l'Incarnation • Her Enthusiasm • Her Mystical Marriage • Her

Dejection • Her Mental Conflicts • Her Vision • Made Superior of the

Ursulines • The Hôtel-Dieu • The Voyage to Canada • Sillery • Labors and

Sufferings of the Nuns • Character of Marie de l'Incarnation • Of Madame

de la Peltrie

CHAPTER XV. 1636-1642.

VILLEMARIE DE MONTREAL.

Dauversiére and the Voice from Heaven • Abbé Olier • Their Schemes • The

Society of Notre-Dame de Montreal • Maisonneuve • Devout Ladies •

Mademoiselle Mance • Marguerite Bourgeoys • The Montrealists at Quebec •

Jealousy • Quarrels • Romance and Devotion • Embarkation • Foundation of

Montreal

CHAPTER XVI. 1641-1644.

ISAAC JOGUES.

The Iroquois War • Jogues • His Capture • His Journey to the Mohawks •

Lake George • The Mohawk Towns • The Missionary Tortured • Death of

Goupil • Misery of Jogues • The Mohawk "Babylon" • Fort Orange • Escape

of Jogues • Manhattan • The Voyage to France • Jogues among his Brethren

• He returns to Canada

CHAPTER XVII. 1641-1646.

THE IROQUOIS--BRESSANI--DE NOUË.

War • Distress and Terror • Richelieu • Battle • Ruin of Indian Tribes •

Mutual Destruction • Iroquois and Algonquin • Atrocities • Frightful

Position of the French • Joseph Bressani • His Capture • His Treatment •

His Escape • Anne de Nouë • His Nocturnal Journey • His Death

CHAPTER XVIII. 1642-1644.

VILLEMARIE.

Infancy of Montreal • The Flood • Vow of Maisonneuve • Pilgrimage •

D'Ailleboust • The Hôtel-Dieu • Piety • Propagandism • War • Hurons and

Iroquois • Dogs • Sally of the French • Battle • Exploit of Maisonneuve

CHAPTER XIX. 1644, 1645.

PEACE.

Iroquois Prisoners • Piskaret • His Exploits • More Prisoners • Iroquois

Embassy • The Orator • The Great Council • Speeches of Kiotsaton •

Muster of Savages • Peace Confirmed

CHAPTER XX. 1645, 1646.

THE PEACE BROKEN.

Uncertainties • The Mission of Jogues • He reaches the Mohawks • His

Reception • His Return • His Second Mission • Warnings of Danger • Rage

of the Mohawks • Murder of Jogues

CHAPTER XXI. 1646, 1647.

ANOTHER WAR.

Mohawk Inroads • The Hunters of Men • The Captive Converts • The Escape

of Marie • Her Story • The Algonquin Prisoner's Revenge • Her Flight •

Terror of the Colonists • Jesuit Intrepidity

CHAPTER XXII. 1645-1651.

PRIEST AND PURITAN.

Miscou • Tadoussac • Journeys of De Quen • Druilletes • His Winter with

the Montagnais • Influence of the Missions • The Abenaquis • Druilletes

on the Kennebec • His Embassy to Boston • Gibbons • Dudley • Bradford •

Eliot • Endicott • French and Puritan Colonization • Failure of

Druilletes's Embassy • New Regulations • New-Year's Day at Quebec.

CHAPTER XXIII. 1645-1648.

A DOOMED NATION.

Indian Infatuation • Iroquois and Huron • Huron Triumphs • The Captive

Iroquois • His Ferocity and Fortitude • Partisan Exploits • Diplomacy •

The Andastes • The Huron Embassy • New Negotiations • The Iroquois

Ambassador • His Suicide • Iroquois Honor

CHAPTER XXIV. 1645-1648.

THE HURON CHURCH.

Hopes of the Mission • Christian and Heathen • Body and Soul • Position

of Proselytes • The Huron Girl's Visit to Heaven • A Crisis • Huron

Justice • Murder and Atonement • Hopes and Fears

CHAPTER XXV. 1648, 1649.

SAINTE MARIE.

The Centre of the Missions • Fort • Convent • Hospital • Caravansary •

Church • The Inmates of Sainte Marie • Domestic Economy • Missions • A

Meeting of Jesuits • The Dead Missionary

CHAPTER XXVI. 1648.

ANTOINE DANIEL.

Huron Traders • Battle at Three Rivers • St. Joseph • Onset of the

Iroquois • Death of Daniel • The Town Destroyed

CHAPTER XXVII. 1649.

RUIN OF THE HURONS.

St. Louis on Fire • Invasion • St. Ignace captured • Brébeuf and

Lalemant • Battle at St. Louis • Sainte Marie threatened • Renewed

Fighting • Desperate Conflict • A Night of Suspense • Panic among the

Victors • Burning of St. Ignace • Retreat of the Iroquois

CHAPTER XXVIII. 1649.

THE MARTYRS.

The Ruins of St. Ignace • The Relics found • Brébeuf at the Stake • His

Unconquerable Fortitude • Lalemant • Renegade Hurons • Iroquois

Atrocities • Death of Brébeuf • His Character • Death of Lalemant

CHAPTER XXIX. 1649, 1650.

THE SANCTUARY.

Dispersion of the Hurons • Sainte Marie abandoned • Isle St. Joseph •

Removal of the Mission • The New Fort • Misery of the Hurons • Famine •

Epidemic • Employments of the Jesuits

CHAPTER XXX. 1649.

GARNIER--CHABANEL.

The Tobacco Missions • St. Jean attacked • Death of Garnier • The

Journey of Chabanel • His Death • Garreau and Grelon.

CHAPTER XXXI. 1650-1652.

THE HURON MISSION ABANDONED.

Famine and the Tomahawk • A New Asylum • Voyage of the Refugees to

Quebec • Meeting with Bressani • Desperate Courage of the Iroquois •

Inroads and Battles • Death of Buteux

CHAPTER XXXII. 1650-1866.

THE LAST OF THE HURONS.

Fate of the Vanquished • The Refugees of St. Jean Baptiste and St.

Michel • The Tobacco Nation and its Wanderings • The Modern Wyandots •

The Biter Bit • The Hurons at Quebec • Notre-Dame de Lorette.

CHAPTER XXXIII. 1650-1670.

THE DESTROYERS.

Iroquois Ambition • Its Victims • The Fate of the Neutrals • The Fate of

the Eries • The War with the Andastes • Supremacy of the Iroquois

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE END.

Failure of the Jesuits • What their Success would have involved • Future

of the Mission

INDEX.

APPENDIX.

The Jesuits in North America

in the Seventeenth Century

by Francis Parkman

INTRODUCTION.

NATIVE TRIBES.

Divisions • The Algonquins • The Hurons • Their Houses • Fortifications

• Habits • Arts • Women • Trade • Festivities • Medicine • The Tobacco

Nation • The Neutrals • The Eries • The Andastes • The Iroquois • Indian

Social and Political Organization • Iroquois Institutions, Customs, and

Character • Indian Religion and Superstitions • The Indian Mind

America, when it became known to Europeans, was, as it had long been, a

scene of wide-spread revolution. North and South, tribe was giving place

to tribe, language to language; for the Indian, hopelessly unchanging in

respect to individual and social development, was, as regarded tribal

relations and local haunts, mutable as the wind. In Canada and the

northern section of the United States, the elements of change were

especially active. The Indian population which, in 1535, Cartier found

at Montreal and Quebec, had disappeared at the opening of the next

century, and another race had succeeded, in language and customs widely

different; while, in the region now forming the State of New York, a

power was rising to a ferocious vitality, which, but for the presence of

Europeans, would probably have subjected, absorbed, or exterminated

every other Indian community east of the Mississippi and north of the

Ohio.

The vast tract of wilderness from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, and

from the Carolinas to Hudson's Bay, was divided between two great

families of tribes, distinguished by a radical difference of language. A

part of Virginia and of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Southeastern New York,

New England, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Lower Canada were occupied,

so far as occupied at all, by tribes speaking various Algonquin

languages and dialects. They extended, moreover, along the shores of the

Upper Lakes, and into the dreary Northern wastes beyond. They held

Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana, and detached bands ranged

the lonely hunting-ground of Kentucky. [1]

[1] The word Algonquin is here used in its broadest signification. It

was originally applied to a group of tribes north of the River St.

Lawrence. The difference of language between the original Algonquins and

the Abenaquis of New England, the Ojibwas of the Great Lakes, or the

Illinois of the West, corresponded to the difference between French and

Italian, or Italian and Spanish. Each of these languages, again, had its

dialects, like those of different provinces of France.

Like a great island in the midst of the Algonquins lay the country of

tribes speaking the generic tongue of the Iroquois. The true Iroquois,

or Five Nations, extended through Central New York, from the Hudson to

the Genesee. Southward lay the Andastes, on and near the Susquehanna;

westward, the Eries, along the southern shore of Lake Erie, and the

Neutral Nation, along its northern shore from Niagara towards the

Detroit; while the towns of the Hurons lay near the lake to which they

have left their name. [2]

[2] To the above general statements there was, in the first half of the

seventeenth century, but one exception worth notice. A detached branch

of the Dahcotah stock, the Winnebago, was established south of Green

Bay, on Lake Michigan, in the midst of Algonquins; and small Dahcotah

bands had also planted themselves on the eastern side of the

Mississippi, nearly in the same latitude.

There was another branch of the Iroquois in the Carolinas, consisting of

the Tuscaroras and kindred bands. In 1715 they were joined to the Five

Nations.

Of the Algonquin populations, the densest, despite a recent epidemic

which had swept them off by thousands, was in New England. Here were

Mohicans, Pequots, Narragansetts, Wampanoags, Massachusetts, Penacooks,

thorns in the side of the Puritan. On the whole, these savages were

favorable specimens of the Algonquin stock, belonging to that section of

it which tilled the soil, and was thus in some measure spared the

extremes of misery and degradation to which the wandering hunter tribes

were often reduced. They owed much, also, to the bounty of the sea, and

hence they tended towards the coast; which, before the epidemic,

Champlain and Smith had seen at many points studded with wigwams and

waving with harvests of maize. Fear, too, drove them eastward; for the

Iroquois pursued them with an inveterate enmity. Some paid yearly

tribute to their tyrants, while others were still subject to their

inroads, flying in terror at the sound of the Mohawk war-cry. Westward,

the population thinned rapidly; northward, it soon disappeared. Northern

New Hampshire, the whole of Vermont, and Western Massachusetts had no

human tenants but the roving hunter or prowling warrior.

We have said that this group of tribes was relatively very populous; yet

it is more than doubtful whether all of them united, had union been

possible, could have mustered eight thousand fighting men. To speak

further of them is needless, for they were not within the scope of the

Jesuit labors. The heresy of heresies had planted itself among them; and

it was for the apostle Eliot, not the Jesuit, to essay their conversion.

[3]

[3] These Indians, the Armouchiquois of the old French writers, were in

a state of chronic war with the tribes of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Champlain, on his voyage of 1603, heard strange accounts of them. The

following is literally rendered from the first narrative of that heroic,

but credulous explorer.

"They are savages of shape altogether monstrous: for their heads are

small, their bodies short, and their arms thin as a skeleton, as are

also their thighs; but their legs are stout and long, and all of one

size, and, when they are seated on their heels, their knees rise more

than half a foot above their heads, which seems a thing strange and

against Nature. Nevertheless, they are active and bold, and they have

the best country on all the coast towards Acadia."--Des Sauvages, f. 34.

This story may match that of the great city of Norembega, on the

Penobscot, with its population of dwarfs, as related by Jean Alphonse.

Landing at Boston, three years before a solitude, let the traveller push

northward, pass the River Piscataqua and the Penacooks, and cross the

River Saco. Here, a change of dialect would indicate a different tribe,

or group of tribes. These were the Abenaquis, found chiefly along the

course of the Kennebec and other rivers, on whose banks they raised

their rude harvests, and whose streams they ascended to hunt the moose

and bear in the forest desert of Northern Maine, or descended to fish in

the neighboring sea. [4]

[4] The Tarratines of New-England writers were the Abenaquis, or a

portion of them.

Crossing the Penobscot, one found a visible descent in the scale of

humanity. Eastern Maine and the whole of New Brunswick were occupied by

a race called Etchemins, to whom agriculture was unknown, though the

sea, prolific of fish, lobsters, and seals, greatly lightened their

miseries. The Souriquois, or Micmacs, of Nova Scotia, closely resembled

them in habits and condition. From Nova Scotia to the St. Lawrence,

there was no population worthy of the name. From the Gulf of St.

Lawrence to Lake Ontario, the southern border of the great river had no

tenants but hunters. Northward, between the St. Lawrence and Hudson's

Bay, roamed the scattered hordes of the Papinachois, Bersiamites, and

others, included by the French under the general name of Montagnais.

When, in spring, the French trading-ships arrived and anchored in the

port of Tadoussac, they gathered from far and near, toiling painfully

through the desolation of forests, mustering by hundreds at the point of

traffic, and setting up their bark wigwams along the strand of that wild

harbor. They were of the lowest Algonquin type. Their ordinary

sustenance was derived from the chase; though often, goaded by deadly

famine, they would subsist on roots, the bark and buds of trees, or the

foulest offal; and in extremity, even cannibalism was not rare among

them.

Ascending the St. Lawrence, it was seldom that the sight of a human form

gave relief to the loneliness, until, at Quebec, the roar of Champlain's

cannon from the verge of the cliff announced that the savage prologue of

the American drama was drawing to a close, and that the civilization of

Europe was advancing on the scene. Ascending farther, all was solitude,

except at Three Rivers, a noted place of trade, where a few Algonquins

of the tribe called Atticamegues might possibly be seen. The fear of the

Iroquois was everywhere; and as the voyager passed some wooded point, or

thicket-covered island, the whistling of a stone-headed arrow

proclaimed, perhaps, the presence of these fierce marauders. At Montreal

there was no human life, save during a brief space in early summer, when

the shore swarmed with savages, who had come to the yearly trade from

the great communities of the interior. To-day there were dances, songs,

and feastings; to-morrow all again was solitude, and the Ottawa was

covered with the canoes of the returning warriors.

Along this stream, a main route of traffic, the silence of the

wilderness was broken only by the splash of the passing paddle. To the

north of the river there was indeed a small Algonquin band, called La

Petite Nation, together with one or two other feeble communities; but

they dwelt far from the banks, through fear of the ubiquitous Iroquois.

It was nearly three hundred miles, by the windings of the stream, before

one reached that Algonquin tribe, La Nation de l'Isle, who occupied the

great island of the Allumettes. Then, after many a day of lonely travel,

the voyager found a savage welcome among the Nipissings, on the lake

which bears their name; and then circling west and south for a hundred

and fifty miles of solitude, he reached for the first time a people

speaking a dialect of the Iroquois tongue. Here all was changed.

Populous towns, rude fortifications, and an extensive, though barbarous

tillage, indicated a people far in advance of the famished wanderers of

the Saguenay, or their less abject kindred of New England. These were

the Hurons, of whom the modern Wyandots are a remnant. Both in

themselves and as a type of their generic stock they demand more than a

passing notice. [5]

[5] The usual confusion of Indian tribal names prevails in the case of

the Hurons. The following are their synonymes:--

Hurons (of French origin); Ochateguins (Champlain); Attigouantans (the

name of one of their tribes, used by Champlain for the whole nation);

Ouendat (their true name, according to Lalemant); Yendat, Wyandot,

Guyandot (corruptions of the preceding); Ouaouakecinatouek (Potier),

Quatogies (Colden).

THE HURONS.

More than two centuries have elapsed since the Hurons vanished from

their ancient seats, and the settlers of this rude solitude stand

perplexed and wondering over the relics of a lost people. In the damp

shadow of what seems a virgin forest, the axe and plough bring strange

secrets to light: huge pits, close packed with skeletons and disjointed

bones, mixed with weapons, copper kettles, beads, and trinkets. Not even

the straggling Algonquins, who linger about the scene of Huron

prosperity, can tell their origin. Yet, on ancient worm-eaten pages,

between covers of begrimed parchment, the daily life of this ruined

community, its firesides, its festivals, its funeral rites, are painted

with a minute and vivid fidelity.

The ancient country of the Hurons is now the northern and eastern

portion of Simcoe County, Canada West, and is embraced within the

peninsula formed by the Nottawassaga and Matchedash Bays of Lake Huron,

the River Severn, and Lake Simcoe. Its area was small,--its population

comparatively large. In the year 1639 the Jesuits made an enumeration of

all its villages, dwellings, and families. The result showed thirty-two

villages and hamlets, with seven hundred dwellings, about four thousand

families, and twelve thousand adult persons, or a total population of at

least twenty thousand. [6]

[6] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1640, 38 (Cramoisy). His words are,

"de feux enuiron deux mille, et enuiron douze mille personnes." There

were two families to every fire. That by "personnes" adults only are

meant cannot be doubted, as the Relations abound in incidental evidence

of a total population far exceeding twelve thousand. A Huron family

usually numbered from five to eight persons. The number of the Huron

towns changed from year to year. Champlain and Le Caron, in 1615,

reckoned them at seventeen or eighteen, with a population of about ten

thousand, meaning, no doubt, adults. Brébeuf, in 1635, found twenty

villages, and, as he thinks, thirty thousand souls. Both Le Mercier and

De Quen, as well as Dollier de Casson and the anonymous author of the

Relation of 1660, state the population at from thirty to thirty-five

thousand. Since the time of Champlain's visit, various kindred tribes or

fragments of tribes had been incorporated with the Hurons, thus more

than balancing the ravages of a pestilence which had decimated them.

The region whose boundaries we have given was an alternation of meadows

and deep forests, interlaced with footpaths leading from town to town.

Of these towns, some were fortified, but the greater number were open

and defenceless. They were of a construction common to all tribes of

Iroquois lineage, and peculiar to them. Nothing similar exists at the

present day. [7] They covered a space of from one to ten acres, the

dwellings clustering together with little or no pretension to order. In

general, these singular structures were about thirty or thirty-five feet

in length, breadth, and height; but many were much larger, and a few

were of prodigious length. In some of the villages there were dwellings

two hundred and forty feet long, though in breadth and height they did

not much exceed the others. [8] In shape they were much like an arbor

overarching a garden-walk. Their frame was of tall and strong saplings,

planted in a double row to form the two sides of the house, bent till

they met, and lashed together at the top. To these other poles were

bound transversely, and the whole was covered with large sheets of the

bark of the oak, elm, spruce, or white cedar, overlapping like the

shingles of a roof, upon which, for their better security, split poles

were made fast with cords of linden bark. At the crown of the arch,

along the entire length of the house, an opening a foot wide was left

for the admission of light and the escape of smoke. At each end was a

close porch of similar construction; and here were stowed casks of bark,

filled with smoked fish, Indian corn, and other stores not liable to

injury from frost. Within, on both sides, were wide scaffolds, four feet

from the floor, and extending the entire length of the house, like the

seats of a colossal omnibus. [9] These were formed of thick sheets of

bark, supported by posts and transverse poles, and covered with mats and

skins. Here, in summer, was the sleeping-place of the inmates, and the

space beneath served for storage of their firewood. The fires were on

the ground, in a line down the middle of the house. Each sufficed for

two families, who, in winter, slept closely packed around them. Above,

just under the vaulted roof, were a great number of poles, like the

perches of a hen-roost, and here were suspended weapons, clothing,

skins, and ornaments. Here, too, in harvest time, the squaws hung the

ears of unshelled corn, till the rude abode, through all its length,

seemed decked with a golden tapestry. In general, however, its only

lining was a thick coating of soot from the smoke of fires with neither

draught, chimney, nor window. So pungent was the smoke, that it produced

inflammation of the eyes, attended in old age with frequent blindness.

Another annoyance was the fleas; and a third, the unbridled and unruly

children. Privacy there was none. The house was one chamber, sometimes

lodging more than twenty families. [10]

[7] The permanent bark villages of the Dahcotah of the St. Peter's are

the nearest modern approach to the Huron towns. The whole Huron country

abounds with evidences of having been occupied by a numerous population.

"On a close inspection of the forest," Dr. Taché writes to me, "the

greatest part of it seems to have been cleared at former periods, and

almost the only places bearing the character of the primitive forest are

the low grounds."

[8] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 31. Champlain says that he saw

them, in 1615, more than thirty fathoms long; while Vanderdonck reports

the length, from actual measurement, of an Iroquois house, at a hundred

and eighty yards, or five hundred and forty feet!

[9] Often, especially among the Iroquois, the internal arrangement was

different. The scaffolds or platforms were raised only a foot from the

earthen floor, and were only twelve or thirteen feet long, with

intervening spaces, where the occupants stored their family provisions

and other articles. Five or six feet above was another platform, often

occupied by children. One pair of platforms sufficed for a family, and

here during summer they slept pellmell, in the clothes they wore by day,

and without pillows.

[10] One of the best descriptions of the Huron and Iroquois houses is

that of Sagard, Voyage des Hurons, 118. See also Champlain (1627), 78;

Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 31; Vanderdonck, New Netherlands, in

N. Y. Hist. Coll., Second Ser., I. 196; Lafitau, Mœurs des Sauvages, II.

10. The account given by Cartier of the houses he saw at Montreal

corresponds with the above. He describes them as about fifty yards long.

In this case, there were partial partitions for the several families,

and a sort of loft above. Many of the Iroquois and Huron houses were of

similar construction, the partitions being at the sides only, leaving a

wide passage down the middle of the house. Bartram, Observations on a

Journey from Pennsylvania to Canada, gives a description and plan of the

Iroquois Council-House in 1751, which was of this construction. Indeed,

the Iroquois preserved this mode of building, in all essential points,

down to a recent period. They usually framed the sides of their houses

on rows of upright posts, arched with separate poles for the roof. The

Hurons, no doubt, did the same in their larger structures. For a door,

there was a sheet of bark hung on wooden hinges, or suspended by cords

from above.

On the site of Huron towns which were destroyed by fire, the size,

shape, and arrangement of the houses can still, in some instances, be

traced by remains in the form of charcoal, as well as by the charred

bones and fragments of pottery found among the ashes.

Dr. Taché, after a zealous and minute examination of the Huron country,

extended through five years, writes to me as follows. "From the remains

I have found, I can vouch for the scrupulous correctness of our ancient

writers. With the aid of their indications and descriptions, I have been

able to detect the sites of villages in the midst of the forest, and by

time study, in situ, of archæological monuments, small as they are, to

understand and confirm their many interesting details of the habits, and

especially the funeral rites, of these extraordinary tribes."

He who entered on a winter night beheld a strange spectacle: the vista

of fires lighting the smoky concave; the bronzed groups encircling

each,--cooking, eating, gambling, or amusing themselves with idle

badinage; shrivelled squaws, hideous with threescore years of hardship;

grisly old warriors, scarred with Iroquois war-clubs; young aspirants,

whose honors were yet to be won; damsels gay with ochre and wampum;

restless children pellmell with restless dogs. Now a tongue of resinous

flame painted each wild feature in vivid light; now the fitful gleam

expired, and the group vanished from sight, as their nation has vanished

from history.

The fortified towns of the Hurons were all on the side exposed to

Iroquois incursions. The fortifications of all this family of tribes

were, like their dwellings, in essential points alike. A situation was

chosen favorable to defence,--the bank of a lake, the crown of a

difficult hill, or a high point of land in the fork of confluent rivers.

A ditch, several feet deep, was dug around the village, and the earth

thrown up on the inside. Trees were then felled by an alternate process

of burning and hacking the burnt part with stone hatchets, and by

similar means were cut into lengths to form palisades. These were

planted on the embankment, in one, two, three, or four concentric

rows,--those of each row inclining towards those of the other rows until

they intersected. The whole was lined within, to the height of a man,

with heavy sheets of bark; and at the top, where the palisades crossed,

was a gallery of timber for the defenders, together with wooden gutters,

by which streams of water could be poured down on fires kindled by the

enemy. Magazines of stones, and rude ladders for mounting the rampart,

completed the provision for defence. The forts of the Iroquois were

stronger and more elaborate than those of the Hurons; and to this day

large districts in New York are marked with frequent remains of their

ditches and embankments. [11]

[11] There is no mathematical regularity in these works. In their form,

the builders were guided merely by the nature of the ground. Frequently

a precipice or river sufficed for partial defence, and the line of

embankment occurs only on one or two sides. In one instance, distinct

traces of a double line of palisades are visible along the embankment.

(See Squier, Aboriginal Monuments of New York, 38.) It is probable that

the palisade was planted first, and the earth heaped around it. Indeed,

this is stated by the Tuscarora Indian, Cusick, in his curious History

of the Six Nations (Iroquois). Brébeuf says, that as early as 1636 the

Jesuits taught the Hurons to build rectangular palisaded works, with

bastions. The Iroquois adopted the same practice at an early period,

omitting the ditch and embankment; and it is probable, that, even in

their primitive defences, the palisades, where the ground was of a

nature to yield easily to their rude implements, were planted simply in

holes dug for the purpose. Such seems to have been the Iroquois fortress

attacked by Champlain in 1615.

The Muscogees, with other Southern tribes, and occasionally the

Algonquins, had palisaded towns; but the palisades were usually but a

single row, planted upright. The tribes of Virginia occasionally

surrounded their dwellings with a triple palisade.--Beverly, History of

Virginia, 149.

Among these tribes there was no individual ownership of land, but each

family had for the time exclusive right to as much as it saw fit to

cultivate. The clearing process--a most toilsome one--consisted in

hacking off branches, piling them together with brushwood around the

foot of the standing trunks, and setting fire to the whole. The squaws,

working with their hoes of wood and bone among the charred stumps, sowed

their corn, beans, pumpkins, tobacco, sunflowers, and Huron hemp. No

manure was used; but, at intervals of from ten to thirty years, when the

soil was exhausted, and firewood distant, the village was abandoned and

a new one built.

There was little game in the Huron country; and here, as among the

Iroquois, the staple of food was Indian corn, cooked without salt in a

variety of forms, each more odious than the last. Venison was a luxury

found only at feasts; dog-flesh was in high esteem; and, in some of the

towns captive bears were fattened for festive occasions. These tribes

were far less improvident than the roving Algonquins, and stores of

provision were laid up against a season of want. Their main stock of

corn was buried in caches, or deep holes in the earth, either within or

without the houses.

In respect to the arts of life, all these stationary tribes were in

advance of the wandering hunters of the North. The women made a species

of earthen pot for cooking, but these were supplanted by the copper

kettles of the French traders. They wove rush mats with no little skill.

They spun twine from hemp, by the primitive process of rolling it on

their thighs; and of this twine they made nets. They extracted oil from

fish and from the seeds of the sunflower,--the latter, apparently, only

for the purposes of the toilet. They pounded their maize in huge mortars

of wood, hollowed by alternate burnings and scrapings. Their stone axes,

spear and arrow heads, and bone fish-hooks, were fast giving place to

the iron of the French; but they had not laid aside their shields of raw

bison-hide, or of wood overlaid with plaited and twisted thongs of skin.

They still used, too, their primitive breastplates and greaves of twigs

interwoven with cordage. [12] The masterpiece of Huron handiwork,

however, was the birch canoe, in the construction of which the

Algonquins were no less skilful. The Iroquois, in the absence of the

birch, were forced to use the bark of the elm, which was greatly

inferior both in lightness and strength. Of pipes, than which nothing

was more important in their eyes, the Hurons made a great variety, some

of baked clay, others of various kinds of stone, carved by the men,

during their long periods of monotonous leisure, often with great skill

and ingenuity. But their most mysterious fabric was wampum. This was at

once their currency, their ornament, their pen, ink, and parchment; and

its use was by no means confined to tribes of the Iroquois stock. It

consisted of elongated beads, white and purple, made from the inner part

of certain shells. It is not easy to conceive how, with their rude

implements, the Indians contrived to shape and perforate this

intractable material. The art soon fell into disuse, however; for wampum

better than their own was brought them by the traders, besides abundant

imitations in glass and porcelain. Strung into necklaces, or wrought

into collars, belts, and bracelets, it was the favorite decoration of

the Indian girls at festivals and dances. It served also a graver

purpose. No compact, no speech, or clause of a speech, to the

representative of another nation, had any force, unless confirmed by the

delivery of a string or belt of wampum. [13] The belts, on occasions of

importance, were wrought into significant devices, suggestive of the

substance of the compact or speech, and designed as aids to memory. To

one or more old men of the nation was assigned the honorable, but very

onerous, charge of keepers of the wampum,--in other words, of the

national records; and it was for them to remember and interpret the

meaning of the belts. The figures on wampum-belts were, for the most

part, simply mnemonic. So also were those carved on wooden tablets, or

painted on bark and skin, to preserve in memory the songs of war,

hunting, or magic. [14] The Hurons had, however, in common with other

tribes, a system of rude pictures and arbitrary signs, by which they

could convey to each other, with tolerable precision, information

touching the ordinary subjects of Indian interest.

[12] Some of the northern tribes of California, at the present day, wear

a sort of breastplate "composed of thin parallel battens of very tough

wood, woven together with a small cord."

[13] Beaver-skins and other valuable furs were sometimes, on such

occasions, used as a substitute.

[14] Engravings of many specimens of these figured songs are given in

the voluminous reports on the condition of the Indians, published by

Government, under the editorship of Mr. Schoolcraft. The specimens are

chiefly Algonquin.

Their dress was chiefly of skins, cured with smoke after the well-known

Indian mode. That of the women, according to the Jesuits, was more

modest than that "of our most pious ladies of France." The young girls

on festal occasions must be excepted from this commendation, as they

wore merely a kilt from the waist to the knee, besides the wampum

decorations of the breast and arms. Their long black hair, gathered

behind the neck, was decorated with disks of native copper, or gay

pendants made in France, and now occasionally unearthed in numbers from

their graves. The men, in summer, were nearly naked,--those of a kindred

tribe wholly so, with the sole exception of their moccasins. In winter

they were clad in tunics and leggins of skin, and at all seasons, on

occasions of ceremony, were wrapped from head to foot in robes of beaver

or otter furs, sometimes of the greatest value. On the inner side, these

robes were decorated with painted figures and devices, or embroidered

with the dyed quills of the Canada hedgehog. In this art of embroidery,

however, the Hurons were equalled or surpassed by some of the Algonquin

tribes. They wore their hair after a variety of grotesque and startling

fashions. With some, it was loose on one side, and tight braided on the

other; with others, close shaved, leaving one or more long and cherished

locks; while, with others again, it bristled in a ridge across the

crown, like the back of a hyena. [15] When in full dress, they were

painted with ochre, white clay, soot, and the red juice of certain

berries. They practised tattooing, sometimes covering the whole body

with indelible devices. [16] When of such extent, the process was very

severe; and though no murmur escaped the sufferer, he sometimes died

from its effects.

[15] See Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 35.--"Quelles hures!" exclaimed some

astonished Frenchman. Hence the name, Hurons.

[16] Bressani, Relation Abrégée, 72.--Champlain has a picture of a

warrior thus tattooed.

Female life among the Hurons had no bright side. It was a youth of

license, an age of drudgery. Despite an organization which, while it

perhaps made them less sensible of pain, certainly made them less

susceptible of passion, than the higher races of men, the Hurons were

notoriously dissolute, far exceeding in this respect the wandering and

starving Algonquins. [17] Marriage existed among them, and polygamy was

exceptional; but divorce took place at the will or caprice of either

party. A practice also prevailed of temporary or experimental marriage,

lasting a day, a week, or more. The seal of the compact was merely the

acceptance of a gift of wampum made by the suitor to the object of his

desire or his whim. These gifts were never returned on the dissolution

of the connection; and as an attractive and enterprising damsel might,

and often did, make twenty such marriages before her final

establishment, she thus collected a wealth of wampum with which to adorn

herself for the village dances. [18] This provisional matrimony was no

bar to a license boundless and apparently universal, unattended with

loss of reputation on either side. Every instinct of native delicacy

quickly vanished under the influence of Huron domestic life; eight or

ten families, and often more, crowded into one undivided house, where

privacy was impossible, and where strangers were free to enter at all

hours of the day or night.

[17] Among the Iroquois there were more favorable features in the

condition of women. The matrons had often a considerable influence on

the decisions of the councils. Lafitau, whose book appeared in 1724,

says that the nation was corrupt in his time, but that this was a

degeneracy from their ancient manners. La Potherie and Charlevoix make a

similar statement. Megapolensis, however, in 1644, says that they were

then exceedingly debauched; and Greenhalgh, in 1677, gives ample

evidence of a shameless license. One of their most earnest advocates of

the present day admits that the passion of love among them had no other

than an animal existence. (Morgan, League of the Iroquois, 322.) There

is clear proof that the tribes of the South were equally corrupt. (See

Lawson, Carolina, 34, and other early writers.) On the other hand,

chastity in women was recognized as a virtue by many tribes. This was

peculiarly the case among the Algonquins of Gaspé, where a lapse in this

regard was counted a disgrace. (See Le Clerc, Nouvelle Relation de la

Gaspésie, 417, where a contrast is drawn between the modesty of the

girls of this region and the open prostitution practised among those of

other tribes.) Among the Sioux, adultery on the part of a woman is

punished by mutilation.

The remarkable forbearance observed by Eastern and Northern tribes

towards female captives was probably the result of a superstition.

Notwithstanding the prevailing license, the Iroquois and other tribes

had among themselves certain conventional rules which excited the

admiration of the Jesuit celibates. Some of these had a superstitious

origin; others were in accordance with the iron requirements of their

savage etiquette. To make the Indian a hero of romance is mere nonsense.

[18] "Il s'en trouue telle qui passe ainsi sa ieunesse, qui aura en plus

de vingt maris, lesquels vingt maris ne sont pas seuls en la jouyssance

de la beste, quelques mariez qu'ils soient: car la nuict venuë, les

ieunes femmes courent d'une cabane en une autre, come font les ieunes

hommes de leur costé, qui en prennent par ou bon leur semble, toutesfois

sans violence aucune, et n'en reçoiuent aucune infamie, ny injure, la

coustume du pays estant telle."--Champlain (1627), 90. Compare Sagard,

Voyage des Hurons, 176. Both were personal observers.

The ceremony, even of the most serious marriage, consisted merely in the

bride's bringing a dish of boiled maize to the bridegroom, together with

an armful of fuel. There was often a feast of the relatives, or of the

whole village.

Once a mother, and married with a reasonable permanency, the Huron woman

from a wanton became a drudge. In March and April she gathered the

year's supply of firewood. Then came sowing, tilling, and harvesting,

smoking fish, dressing skins, making cordage and clothing, preparing

food. On the march it was she who bore the burden; for, in the words of

Champlain, "their women were their mules." The natural effect followed.

In every Huron town were shrivelled hags, hideous and despised, who, in

vindictiveness, ferocity, and cruelty, far exceeded the men.

To the men fell the task of building the houses, and making weapons,

pipes, and canoes. For the rest, their home-life was a life of leisure

and amusement. The summer and autumn were their seasons of serious

employment,--of war, hunting, fishing, and trade. There was an

established system of traffic between the Hurons and the Algonquins of

the Ottawa and Lake Nipissing: the Hurons exchanging wampum,

fishing-nets, and corn for fish and furs. [19] From various relics found

in their graves, it may be inferred that they also traded with tribes of

the Upper Lakes, as well as with tribes far southward, towards the Gulf

of Mexico. Each branch of traffic was the monopoly of the family or clan

by whom it was opened. They might, if they could, punish interlopers, by

stripping them of all they possessed, unless the latter had succeeded in

reaching home with the fruits of their trade,--in which case the

outraged monopolists had no further right of redress, and could not

attempt it without a breaking of the public peace, and exposure to the

authorized vengeance of the other party. [20] Their fisheries, too, were

regulated by customs having the force of laws. These pursuits, with

their hunting,--in which they were aided by a wolfish breed of dogs

unable to bark,--consumed the autumn and early winter; but before the

new year the greater part of the men were gathered in their villages.

[19] Champlain (1627), 84.

[20] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 156 (Cramoisy).

Now followed their festal season; for it was the season of idleness for

the men, and of leisure for the women. Feasts, gambling, smoking, and

dancing filled the vacant hours. Like other Indians, the Hurons were

desperate gamblers, staking their all,--ornaments, clothing, canoes,

pipes, weapons, and wives. One of their principal games was played with

plum-stones, or wooden lozenges, black on one side and white on the

other. These were tossed up in a wooden bowl, by striking it sharply

upon the ground, and the players betted on the black or white. Sometimes

a village challenged a neighboring village. The game was played in one

of the houses. Strong poles were extended from side to side, and on

these sat or perched the company, party facing party, while two players

struck the bowl on the ground between. Bets ran high; and Brébeuf

relates, that once, in midwinter, with the snow nearly three feet deep,

the men of his village returned from a gambling visit, bereft of their

leggins, and barefoot, yet in excellent humor. [21] Ludicrous as it may

appear, these games were often medical prescriptions, and designed as a

cure of the sick.

[21] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 113.--This game is still a

favorite among the Iroquois, some of whom hold to the belief that they

will play it after death in the realms of bliss. In all their important

games of chance, they employed charms, incantations, and all the

resources of their magical art, to gain good luck.

Their feasts and dances were of various character, social, medical, and

mystical or religious. Some of their feasts were on a scale of

extravagant profusion. A vain or ambitious host threw all his substance

into one entertainment, inviting the whole village, and perhaps several

neighboring villages also. In the winter of 1635 there was a feast at

the village of Contarrea, where thirty kettles were on the fires, and

twenty deer and four bears were served up. [22] The invitation was

simple. The messenger addressed the desired guest with the concise

summons, "Come and eat"; and to refuse was a grave offence. He took his

dish and spoon, and repaired to the scene of festivity. Each, as he

entered, greeted his host with the guttural ejaculation, Ho! and ranged

himself with the rest, squatted on the earthen floor or on the platform

along the sides of the house. The kettles were slung over the fires in

the midst. First, there was a long prelude of lugubrious singing. Then

the host, who took no share in the feast, proclaimed in a loud voice the

contents of each kettle in turn, and at each announcement the company

responded in unison, Ho! The attendant squaws filled with their ladles

the bowls of all the guests. There was talking, laughing, jesting,

singing, and smoking; and at times the entertainment was protracted

through the day.

[22] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 111.

When the feast had a medical or mystic character, it was indispensable

that each guest should devour the whole of the portion given him,

however enormous. Should he fail, the host would be outraged, the

community shocked, and the spirits roused to vengeance. Disaster would

befall the nation,--death, perhaps, the individual. In some cases, the

imagined efficacy of the feast was proportioned to the rapidity with

which the viands were despatched. Prizes of tobacco were offered to the

most rapid feeder; and the spectacle then became truly porcine. [23]

These festins à manger tout were much dreaded by many of the Hurons,

who, however, were never known to decline them.

[23] This superstition was not confined to the Hurons, but extended to

many other tribes, including, probably, all the Algonquins, with some of

which it holds in full force to this day. A feaster, unable to do his

full part, might, if he could, hire another to aid him; otherwise, he

must remain in his place till the work was done.

Invitation to a dance was no less concise than to a feast. Sometimes a

crier proclaimed the approaching festivity through the village. The

house was crowded. Old men, old women, and children thronged the

platforms, or clung to the poles which supported the sides and roof.

Fires were raked out, and the earthen floor cleared. Two chiefs sang at

the top of their voices, keeping time to their song with tortoise-shell

rattles. [24] The men danced with great violence and gesticulation; the

women, with a much more measured action. The former were nearly divested

of clothing,--in mystical dances, sometimes wholly so; and, from a

superstitious motive, this was now and then the case with the women.

Both, however, were abundantly decorated with paint, oil, beads, wampum,

trinkets, and feathers.

[24] Sagard gives specimens of their songs. In both dances and feasts

there was no little variety. These were sometimes combined. It is

impossible, in brief space, to indicate more than their general

features. In the famous "war-dance,"--which was frequently danced, as it

still is, for amusement,--speeches, exhortations, jests, personal

satire, and repartee were commonly introduced as a part of the

performance, sometimes by way of patriotic stimulus, sometimes for

amusement. The music in this case was the drum and the war-song. Some of

the other dances were also interspersed with speeches and sharp

witticisms, always taken in good part, though Lafitau says that he has

seen the victim so pitilessly bantered that he was forced to hide his

head in his blanket.

Religious festivals, councils, the entertainment of an envoy, the

inauguration of a chief, were all occasions of festivity, in which

social pleasure was joined with matter of grave import, and which at

times gathered nearly all the nation into one great and harmonious

concourse. Warlike expeditions, too, were always preceded by feasting,

at which the warriors vaunted the fame of their ancestors, and their own

past and prospective exploits. A hideous scene of feasting followed the

torture of a prisoner. Like the torture itself, it was, among the

Hurons, partly an act of vengeance, and partly a religious rite. If the

victim had shown courage, the heart was first roasted, cut into small

pieces, and given to the young men and boys, who devoured it to increase

their own courage. The body was then divided, thrown into the kettles,

and eaten by the assembly, the head being the portion of the chief. Many

of the Hurons joined in the feast with reluctance and horror, while

others took pleasure in it. [25] This was the only form of cannibalism

among them, since, unlike the wandering Algonquins, they were rarely

under the desperation of extreme famine.

[25] "Il y en a qui en mangent auec plaisir."--Brébeuf, Relation des

Hurons, 1636, 121.--Le Mercier gives a description of one of these

scenes, at which he was present. (Ibid., 1637, 118.) The same horrible

practice prevailed to a greater extent among the Iroquois. One of the

most remarkable instances of Indian cannibalism is that furnished by a

Western tribe, the Miamis, among whom there was a clan, or family, whose

hereditary duty and privilege it was to devour the bodies of prisoners

burned to death. The act had somewhat of a religious character, was

attended with ceremonial observances, and was restricted to the family

in question.--See Hon. Lewis Cass, in the appendix to Colonel Whiting's

poem, "Ontwa."

A great knowledge of simples for the cure of disease is popularly

ascribed to the Indian. Here, however, as elsewhere, his knowledge is in

fact scanty. He rarely reasons from cause to effect, or from effect to

cause. Disease, in his belief, is the result of sorcery, the agency of

spirits or supernatural influences, undefined and indefinable. The

Indian doctor was a conjurer, and his remedies were to the last degree

preposterous, ridiculous, or revolting. The well-known Indian

sweating-bath is the most prominent of the few means of cure based on

agencies simply physical; and this, with all the other natural remedies,

was applied, not by the professed doctor, but by the sufferer himself,

or his friends. [26]

[26] The Indians had many simple applications for wounds, said to have

been very efficacious; but the purity of their blood, owing to the

absence from their diet of condiments and stimulants, as well as to

their active habits, aided the remedy. In general, they were remarkably

exempt from disease or deformity, though often seriously injured by

alternations of hunger and excess. The Hurons sometimes died from the

effects of their festins à manger tout.

The Indian doctor beat, shook, and pinched his patient, howled, whooped,

rattled a tortoise-shell at his ear to expel the evil spirit, bit him

till blood flowed, and then displayed in triumph a small piece of wood,

bone, or iron, which he had hidden in his mouth, and which he affirmed

was the source of the disease, now happily removed. [27] Sometimes he

prescribed a dance, feast, or game; and the whole village bestirred

themselves to fulfil the injunction to the letter. They gambled away

their all; they gorged themselves like vultures; they danced or played

ball naked among the snow-drifts from morning till night. At a medical

feast, some strange or unusual act was commonly enjoined as vital to the

patient's cure: as, for example, the departing guest, in place of the

customary monosyllable of thanks, was required to greet his host with an

ugly grimace. Sometimes, by prescription, half the village would throng

into the house where the patient lay, led by old women disguised with

the heads and skins of bears, and beating with sticks on sheets of dry

bark. Here the assembly danced and whooped for hours together, with a

din to which a civilized patient would promptly have succumbed.

Sometimes the doctor wrought himself into a prophetic fury, raving

through the length and breadth of the dwelling, snatching firebrands and

flinging them about him, to the terror of the squaws, with whom, in

their combustible tenements, fire was a constant bugbear.

[27] The Hurons believed that the chief cause of disease and death was a

monstrous serpent, that lived under the earth. By touching a tuft of

hair, a feather, or a fragment of bone, with a portion of his flesh or

fat, the sorcerer imparted power to it of entering the body of his

victim, and gradually killing him. It was an important part of the

doctor's function to extract these charms from the vitals of his

patient.--Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 75.

Among the Hurons and kindred tribes, disease was frequently ascribed to

some hidden wish ungratified. Hence the patient was overwhelmed with

gifts, in the hope, that, in their multiplicity, the desideratum might

be supplied. Kettles, skins, awls, pipes, wampum, fish-hooks, weapons,

objects of every conceivable variety, were piled before him by a host of

charitable contributors; and if, as often happened, a dream, the Indian

oracle, had revealed to the sick man the secret of his cure, his demands

were never refused, however extravagant, idle, nauseous, or abominable.

[28] Hence it is no matter of wonder that sudden illness and sudden

cures were frequent among the Hurons. The patient reaped profit, and the

doctor both profit and honor.

[28] "Dans le pays de nos Hurons, il se faict aussi des assemblées de

toutes les filles d'vn bourg auprés d'vne malade, tant à sa priere,

suyuant la resuerie ou le songe qu'elle en aura euë, que par

l'ordonnance de Loki (the doctor), pour sa santé et guerison. Les filles

ainsi assemblées, on leur demande à toutes, les vnes apres les autres,

celuy qu'elles veulent des ieunes hommes du bourg pour dormir auec elles

la nuict prochaine: elles en nomment chacune vn, qui sont aussi-tost

aduertis par les Maistres de la ceremonie, lesquels viennent tous au

soir en la presence de la malade dormir chacun auec celle qui l'a

choysi, d'vn bout à l'autre de la Cabane, et passent ainsi toute la

nuict, pendant que deux Capitaines aux deux bouts du logis chantent et

sonnent de leur Tortuë du soir au lendemain matin, que la ceremonie

cesse. Dieu vueille abolir vne si damnable et malheureuse

ceremonie."--Sagard, Voyage des Hurons, 158.--This unique mode of cure,

which was called Andacwandet, is also described by Lalemant, who saw it.

(Relation des Hurons, 1639, 84.) It was one of the recognized remedies.

For the medical practices of the Hurons, see also Champlain, Brébeuf,

Lafitau, Charlevoix, and other early writers. Those of the Algonquins

were in some points different. The doctor often consulted the spirits,

to learn the cause and cure of the disease, by a method peculiar to that

family of tribes. He shut himself in a small conical lodge, and the

spirits here visited him, manifesting their presence by a violent

shaking of the whole structure. This superstition will be described in

another connection.

THE HURON-IROQUOIS FAMILY.

And now, before entering upon the very curious subject of Indian social

and tribal organization, it may be well briefly to observe the position

and prominent distinctive features of the various communities speaking

dialects of the generic tongue of the Iroquois. In this remarkable

family of tribes occur the fullest developments of Indian character, and

the most conspicuous examples of Indian intelligence. If the higher

traits popularly ascribed to the race are not to be found here, they are

to be found nowhere. A palpable proof of the superiority of this stock

is afforded in the size of the Iroquois and Huron brains. In average

internal capacity of the cranium, they surpass, with few and doubtful

exceptions, all other aborigines of North and South America, not

excepting the civilized races of Mexico and Peru. [29]

[29] "On comparing five Iroquois heads, I find that they give an average

internal capacity of eighty-eight cubic inches, which is within two

inches of the Caucasian mean."--Morton, Crania Americana, 195.--It is

remarkable that the internal capacity of the skulls of the barbarous

American tribes is greater than that of either the Mexicans or the

Peruvians. "The difference in volume is chiefly confined to the

occipital and basal portions,"--in other words, to the region of the

animal propensities; and hence, it is argued, the ferocious, brutal, and

uncivilizable character of the wild tribes.--See J. S. Phillips,

Admeasurements of Crania of the Principal Groups of Indians in the

United States.

In the woody valleys of the Blue Mountains, south of the Nottawassaga

Bay of Lake Huron, and two days' journey west of the frontier Huron

towns, lay the nine villages of the Tobacco Nation, or Tionnontates.

[30] In manners, as in language, they closely resembled the Hurons. Of

old they were their enemies, but were now at peace with them, and about

the year 1640 became their close confederates. Indeed, in the ruin which

befell that hapless people, the Tionnontates alone retained a tribal

organization; and their descendants, with a trifling exception, are to

this day the sole inheritors of the Huron or Wyandot name. Expatriated

and wandering, they held for generations a paramount influence among the

Western tribes. [31] In their original seats among the Blue Mountains,

they offered an example extremely rare among Indians, of a tribe raising

a crop for the market; for they traded in tobacco largely with other

tribes. Their Huron confederates, keen traders, would not suffer them to

pass through their country to traffic with the French, preferring to

secure for themselves the advantage of bartering with them in French

goods at an enormous profit. [32]

[30] Synonymes: Tionnontates, Etionontates, Tuinontatek, Dionondadies,

Khionontaterrhonons, Petuneux or Nation du Petun (Tobacco).

[31] "L'ame de tous les Conseils."--Charlevoix, Voyage, 199.--In 1763

they were Pontiac's best warriors.

[32] On the Tionnontates, see Le Mercier, Relation, 1637, 163; Lalemant,

Relation, 1641, 69; Ragueneau, Relation, 1648, 61. An excellent summary

of their character and history, by Mr. Shea, will be found in Hist.

Mag., V. 262.

Journeying southward five days from the Tionnontate towns, the forest

traveller reached the border villages of the Attiwandarons, or Neutral

Nation. [33] As early as 1626, they were visited by the Franciscan

friar, La Roche Dallion, who reports a numerous population in

twenty-eight towns, besides many small hamlets. Their country, about

forty leagues in extent, embraced wide and fertile districts on the

north shore of Lake Erie, and their frontier extended eastward across

the Niagara, where they had three or four outlying towns. [34] Their

name of Neutrals was due to their neutrality in the war between the

Hurons and the Iroquois proper. The hostile warriors, meeting in a

Neutral cabin, were forced to keep the peace, though, once in the open

air, the truce was at an end. Yet this people were abundantly ferocious,

and, while holding a pacific attitude betwixt their warring kindred,

waged deadly strife with the Mascoutins, an Algonquin horde beyond Lake

Michigan. Indeed, it was but recently that they had been at blows with

seventeen Algonquin tribes. [35] They burned female prisoners, a

practice unknown to the Hurons. [36] Their country was full of game, and

they were bold and active hunters. In form and stature they surpassed

even the Hurons, whom they resembled in their mode of life, and from

whose language their own, though radically similar, was dialectically

distinct. Their licentiousness was even more open and shameless; and

they stood alone in the extravagance of some of their usages. They kept

their dead in their houses till they became insupportable; then scraped

the flesh from the bones, and displayed them in rows along the walls,

there to remain till the periodical Feast of the Dead, or general

burial. In summer, the men wore no clothing whatever, but were usually

tattooed from head to foot with powdered charcoal.

[33] Attiwandarons, Attiwendaronk, Atirhagenrenrets, Rhagenratka (Jesuit

Relations), Attionidarons (Sagard). They, and not the Eries, were the

Kahkwas of Seneca tradition.

[34] Lalemant, Relation des Hurons, 1641, 71.--The Niagara was then

called the River of the Neutrals, or the Onguiaahra. Lalemant estimates

the Neutral population, in 1640, at twelve thousand, in forty villages.

[35] Lettre du Père La Roche Dallion, 8 Juillet, 1627, in Le Clerc,

Établissement de la Foy, I. 346.

[36] Women were often burned by the Iroquois: witness the case of

Catherine Mercier in 1651, and many cases of Indian women mentioned by

the early writers.

The sagacious Hurons refused them a passage through their country to the

French; and the Neutrals apparently had not sense or reflection enough

to take the easy and direct route of Lake Ontario, which was probably

open to them, though closed against the Hurons by Iroquois enmity. Thus

the former made excellent profit by exchanging French goods at high

rates for the valuable furs of the Neutrals. [37]

[37] The Hurons became very jealous, when La Roche Dallion visited the

Neutrals, lest a direct trade should be opened between the latter and

the French, against whom they at once put in circulation a variety of

slanders: that they were a people who lived on snakes and venom; that

they were furnished with tails; and that French women, though having but

one breast, bore six children at a birth. The missionary nearly lost his

life in consequence, the Neutrals conceiving the idea that he would

infect their country with a pestilence.--La Roche Dallion, in Le Clerc,

I. 346.

Southward and eastward of Lake Erie dwelt a kindred people, the Eries,

or Nation of the Cat. Little besides their existence is known of them.

They seem to have occupied Southwestern New York, as far east as the

Genesee, the frontier of the Senecas, and in habits and language to have

resembled the Hurons. [38] They were noted warriors, fought with

poisoned arrows, and were long a terror to the neighboring Iroquois.

[39]

[38] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 46.

[39] Le Mercier, Relation, 1654, 10.--"Nous les appellons la Nation

Chat, à cause qu'il y a dans leur pais vne quantité prodigieuse de Chats

sauuages."--Ibid.--The Iroquois are said to have given the same name,

Jegosasa, Cat Nation, to the Neutrals.--Morgan, League of the Iroquois,

41.

Synonymes: Eriés, Erigas, Eriehronon, Riguehronon. The Jesuits never had

a mission among them, though they seem to have been visited by

Champlain's adventurous interpreter, Étienne Brulé, in the summer of

1615.--They are probably the Carantoüans of Champlain.

On the Lower Susquehanna dwelt the formidable tribe called by the French

Andastes. Little is known of them, beyond their general resemblance to

their kindred, in language, habits, and character. Fierce and resolute

warriors, they long made head against the Iroquois of New York, and were

vanquished at last more by disease than by the tomahawk. [40]

[40] Gallatin erroneously places the Andastes on the Alleghany, Bancroft

and others adopting the error. The research of Mr. Shea has shown their

identity with the Susquehannocks of the English, and the Minquas of the

Dutch.--See Hist. Mag., II. 294.

Synonymes: Andastes, Andastracronnons, Andastaeronnons, Andastaguez,

Antastoui (French), Susquehannocks (English), Mengwe, Minquas (Dutch),

Conestogas, Conessetagoes (English).

In Central New York, stretching east and west from the Hudson to the

Genesee, lay that redoubted people who have lent their name to the

tribal family of the Iroquois, and stamped it indelibly on the early

pages of American history. Among all the barbarous nations of the

continent, the Iroquois of New York stand paramount. Elements which

among other tribes were crude, confused, and embryotic, were among them

systematized and concreted into an established polity. The Iroquois was

the Indian of Indians. A thorough savage, yet a finished and developed

savage, he is perhaps an example of the highest elevation which man can

reach without emerging from his primitive condition of the hunter. A

geographical position, commanding on one hand the portal of the Great

Lakes, and on the other the sources of the streams flowing both to the

Atlantic and the Mississippi, gave the ambitious and aggressive

confederates advantages which they perfectly understood, and by which

they profited to the utmost. Patient and politic as they were ferocious,

they were not only conquerors of their own race, but the powerful allies

and the dreaded foes of the French and English colonies, flattered and

caressed by both, yet too sagacious to give themselves without reserve

to either. Their organization and their history evince their intrinsic

superiority. Even their traditionary lore, amid its wild puerilities,

shows at times the stamp of an energy and force in striking contrast

with the flimsy creations of Algonquin fancy. That the Iroquois, left

under their institutions to work out their destiny undisturbed, would

ever have developed a civilization of their own, I do not believe. These

institutions, however, are sufficiently characteristic and curious, and

we shall soon have occasion to observe them. [41]

[41] The name Iroquois is French. Charlevoix says: "Il a été formé du

terme Hiro, ou Hero, qui signifie J'ai dit, et par lequel ces sauvages

finissent tous leur discours, comme les Latins faisoient autrefois par

leur Dixi; et de Koué, qui est un cri tantôt de tristesse, lorsqu'on le

prononce en traînant, et tantôt de joye, quand on le prononce plus

court."--Hist. de la N. F., I. 271.--Their true name is Hodenosaunee, or

People of the Long House, because their confederacy of five distinct

nations, ranged in a line along Central New York, was likened to one of

the long bark houses already described, with five fires and five

families. The name Agonnonsionni, or Aquanuscioni, ascribed to them by

Lafitau and Charlevoix, who translated it "House-Makers," Faiseurs de

Cabannes, may be a conversion of the true name with an erroneous

rendering. The following are the true names of the five nations

severally, with their French and English synonymes. For other synonymes,

see "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," 8, note.

English French

Ganeagaono, Mohawk, Agnier.

Onayotekaono, Oneida, Onneyut.

Onundagaono, Onondaga, Onnontagué.

Gweugwehono, Cayuga, Goyogouin.

Nundawaono, Seneca, Tsonnontouans.

The Iroquois termination in ono--or onon, as the French write it--simply

means people.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION.

In Indian social organization, a problem at once suggests itself. In

these communities, comparatively populous, how could spirits so fierce,

and in many respects so ungoverned, live together in peace, without law

and without enforced authority? Yet there were towns where savages lived

together in thousands with a harmony which civilization might envy. This

was in good measure due to peculiarities of Indian character and habits.

This intractable race were, in certain external respects, the most

pliant and complaisant of mankind. The early missionaries were charmed

by the docile acquiescence with which their dogmas were received; but

they soon discovered that their facile auditors neither believed nor

understood that to which they had so promptly assented. They assented

from a kind of courtesy, which, while it vexed the priests, tended

greatly to keep the Indians in mutual accord. That well-known

self-control, which, originating in a form of pride, covered the savage

nature of the man with a veil, opaque, though thin, contributed not a

little to the same end. Though vain, arrogant, boastful, and vindictive,

the Indian bore abuse and sarcasm with an astonishing patience. Though

greedy and grasping, he was lavish without stint, and would give away

his all to soothe the manes of a departed relative, gain influence and

applause, or ingratiate himself with his neighbors. In his dread of

public opinion, he rivalled some of his civilized successors.

All Indians, and especially these populous and stationary tribes, had

their code of courtesy, whose requirements were rigid and exact; nor

might any infringe it without the ban of public censure. Indian nature,

inflexible and unmalleable, was peculiarly under the control of custom.

Established usage took the place of law,--was, in fact, a sort of common

law, with no tribunal to expound or enforce it. In these wild

democracies,--democracies in spirit, though not in form,--a respect for

native superiority, and a willingness to yield to it, were always

conspicuous. All were prompt to aid each other in distress, and a

neighborly spirit was often exhibited among them. When a young woman was

permanently married, the other women of the village supplied her with

firewood for the year, each contributing an armful. When one or more

families were without shelter, the men of the village joined in building

them a house. In return, the recipients of the favor gave a feast, if

they could; if not, their thanks were sufficient. [42] Among the

Iroquois and Hurons--and doubtless among the kindred tribes--there were

marked distinctions of noble and base, prosperous and poor; yet, while

there was food in the village, the meanest and the poorest need not

suffer want. He had but to enter the nearest house, and seat himself by

the fire, when, without a word on either side, food was placed before

him by the women. [43]

[42] The following testimony concerning Indian charity and hospitality

is from Ragueneau: "As often as we have seen tribes broken up, towns

destroyed, and their people driven to flight, we have seen them, to the

number of seven or eight hundred persons, received with open arms by

charitable hosts, who gladly gave them aid, and even distributed among

them a part of the lands already planted, that they might have the means

of living."--Relation, 1650, 28.

[43] The Jesuit Brébeuf, than whom no one knew the Hurons better, is

very emphatic in praise of their harmony and social spirit. Speaking of

one of the four nations of which the Hurons were composed, he says: "Ils

ont vne douceur et vne affabilité quasi incroyable pour des Sauuages;

ils ne se picquent pas aisément.... Ils se maintiennent dans cette si

parfaite intelligence par les frequentes visites, les secours qu'ils se

donnent mutuellement dans leurs maladies, par les festins et les

alliances.... Ils sont moins en leurs Cabanes que chez leurs amis....

S'ils ont vn bon morceau, ils en font festin à leurs amis, et ne le

mangent quasi iamais en leur particulier," etc.--Relation des Hurons,

1636, 118.

Contrary to the received opinion, these Indians, like others of their

race, when living in communities, were of a very social disposition.

Besides their incessant dances and feasts, great and small, they were

continually visiting, spending most of their time in their neighbors'

houses, chatting, joking, bantering one another with witticisms, sharp,

broad, and in no sense delicate, yet always taken in good part. Every

village had its adepts in these wordy tournaments, while the shrill

laugh of young squaws, untaught to blush, echoed each hardy jest or

rough sarcasm.

In the organization of the savage communities of the continent, one

feature, more or less conspicuous, continually appears. Each nation or

tribe--to adopt the names by which these communities are usually

known--is subdivided into several clans. These clans are not locally

separate, but are mingled throughout the nation. All the members of each

clan are, or are assumed to be, intimately joined in consanguinity.

Hence it is held an abomination for two persons of the same clan to

intermarry; and hence, again, it follows that every family must contain

members of at least two clans. Each clan has its name, as the clan of

the Hawk, of the Wolf, or of the Tortoise; and each has for its emblem

the figure of the beast, bird, reptile, plant, or other object, from

which its name is derived. This emblem, called totem by the Algonquins,

is often tattooed on the clansman's body, or rudely painted over the

entrance of his lodge. The child belongs to the clan, not of the father,

but of the mother. In other words, descent, not of the totem alone, but

of all rank, titles, and possessions, is through the female. The son of

a chief can never be a chief by hereditary title, though he may become

so by force of personal influence or achievement. Neither can he inherit

from his father so much as a tobacco-pipe. All possessions alike pass of

right to the brothers of the chief, or to the sons of his sisters, since

these are all sprung from a common mother. This rule of descent was

noticed by Champlain among the Hurons in 1615. That excellent observer

refers it to an origin which is doubtless its true one. The child may

not be the son of his reputed father, but must be the son of his

mother,--a consideration of more than ordinary force in an Indian

community. [44]

[44] "Les enfans ne succedent iamais aux biens et dignitez de leurs

peres, doubtant comme i'ay dit de leur geniteur, mais bien font-ils

leurs successeurs et heritiers, les enfans de leurs sœurs, et desquels

ils sont asseurez d'estre yssus et sortis."--Champlain (1627), 91.

Captain John Smith had observed the same, several years before, among

the tribes of Virginia: "For the Crowne, their heyres inherite not, but

the first heyres of the Sisters."--True Relation, 43 (ed. Deane).

This system of clanship, with the rule of descent inseparable from it,

was of very wide prevalence. Indeed, it is more than probable that close

observation would have detected it in every tribe east of the

Mississippi; while there is positive evidence of its existence in by far

the greater number. It is found also among the Dahcotah and other tribes

west of the Mississippi; and there is reason to believe it universally

prevalent as far as the Rocky Mountains, and even beyond them. The fact

that with most of these hordes there is little property worth

transmission, and that the most influential becomes chief, with little

regard to inheritance, has blinded casual observers to the existence of

this curious system.

It was found in full development among the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees,

and other Southern tribes, including that remarkable people, the

Natchez, who, judged by their religious and political institutions, seem

a detached offshoot of the Toltec family. It is no less conspicuous

among the roving Algonquins of the extreme North, where the number of

totems is almost countless. Everywhere it formed the foundation of the

polity of all the tribes, where a polity could be said to exist.

The Franciscans and Jesuits, close students of the languages and

superstitions of the Indians, were by no means so zealous to analyze

their organization and government. In the middle of the seventeenth

century the Hurons as a nation had ceased to exist, and their political

portraiture, as handed down to us, is careless and unfinished. Yet some

decisive features are plainly shown. The Huron nation was a confederacy

of four distinct contiguous nations, afterwards increased to five by the

addition of the Tionnontates;--it was divided into clans;--it was

governed by chiefs, whose office was hereditary through the female;--the

power of these chiefs, though great, was wholly of a persuasive or

advisory character;--there were two principal chiefs, one for peace, the

other for war;--there were chiefs assigned to special national

functions, as the charge of the great Feast of the Dead, the direction

of trading voyages to other nations, etc.;--there were numerous other

chiefs, equal in rank, but very unequal in influence, since the measure

of their influence depended on the measure of their personal

ability;--each nation of the confederacy had a separate organization,

but at certain periods grand councils of the united nations were held,

at which were present, not chiefs only, but also a great concourse of

the people; and at these and other councils the chiefs and principal men

voted on proposed measures by means of small sticks or reeds, the

opinion of the plurality ruling. [45]

[45] These facts are gathered here and there from Champlain, Sagard,

Bressani, and the Jesuit Relations prior to 1650. Of the Jesuits,

Brébeuf is the most full and satisfactory. Lafitau and Charlevoix knew

the Huron institutions only through others.

The names of the four confederate Huron nations were the Ataronchronons,

Attignenonghac, Attignaouentans, and Ahrendarrhonons. There was also a

subordinate "nation" called Tohotaenrat, which had but one town. (See

the map of the Huron Country.) They all bore the name of some animal or

other object: thus the Attignaouentans were the Nation of the Bear. As

the clans are usually named after animals, this makes confusion, and may

easily lead to error. The Bear Nation was the principal member of the

league.

THE IROQUOIS.

The Iroquois were a people far more conspicuous in history, and their

institutions are not yet extinct. In early and recent times, they have

been closely studied, and no little light has been cast upon a subject

as difficult and obscure as it is curious. By comparing the statements

of observers, old and new, the character of their singular organization

becomes sufficiently clear. [46]

[46] Among modern students of Iroquois institutions, a place far in

advance of all others is due to Lewis H. Morgan, himself an Iroquois by

adoption, and intimate with the race from boyhood. His work, The League

of the Iroquois, is a production of most thorough and able research,

conducted under peculiar advantages, and with the aid of an efficient

co-laborer, Hasanoanda (Ely S. Parker), an educated and highly

intelligent Iroquois of the Seneca nation. Though often differing widely

from Mr. Morgan's conclusions, I cannot bear a too emphatic testimony to

the value of his researches. The Notes on the Iroquois of Mr. H. R.

Schoolcraft also contain some interesting facts; but here, as in all Mr.

Schoolcraft's productions, the reader must scrupulously reserve his

right of private judgment. None of the old writers are so satisfactory

as Lafitau. His work, Mœurs des Sauvages Ameriquains comparées aux Mœurs

des Premiers Temps, relates chiefly to the Iroquois and Hurons: the

basis for his account of the former being his own observations and those

of Father Julien Garnier, who was a missionary among them more than

sixty years, from his novitiate to his death.

Both reason and tradition point to the conclusion, that the Iroquois

formed originally one undivided people. Sundered, like countless other

tribes, by dissension, caprice, or the necessities of the hunter life,

they separated into five distinct nations, cantoned from east to west

along the centre of New York, in the following order: Mohawks, Oneidas,

Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas. There was discord among them; wars

followed, and they lived in mutual fear, each ensconced in its palisaded

villages. At length, says tradition, a celestial being, incarnate on

earth, counselled them to compose their strife and unite in a league of

defence and aggression. Another personage, wholly mortal, yet

wonderfully endowed, a renowned warrior and a mighty magician, stands,

with his hair of writhing snakes, grotesquely conspicuous through the

dim light of tradition at this birth of Iroquois nationality. This was

Atotarho, a chief of the Onondagas; and from this honored source has

sprung a long line of chieftains, heirs not to the blood alone, but to

the name of their great predecessor. A few years since, there lived in

Onondaga Hollow a handsome Indian boy on whom the dwindled remnant of

the nation looked with pride as their destined Atotarho. With earthly

and celestial aid the league was consummated, and through all the land

the forests trembled at the name of the Iroquois.

The Iroquois people was divided into eight clans. When the original

stock was sundered into five parts, each of these clans was also

sundered into five parts; and as, by the principle already indicated,

the clans were intimately mingled in every village, hamlet, and cabin,

each one of the five nations had its portion of each of the eight clans.

[47] When the league was formed, these separate portions readily resumed

their ancient tie of fraternity. Thus, of the Turtle clan, all the

members became brothers again, nominal members of one family, whether

Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, or Senecas; and so, too, of the

remaining clans. All the Iroquois, irrespective of nationality, were

therefore divided into eight families, each tracing its descent to a

common mother, and each designated by its distinctive emblem or totem.

This connection of clan or family was exceedingly strong, and by it the

five nations of the league were linked together as by an eightfold

chain.

[47] With a view to clearness, the above statement is made categorical.

It requires, however, to be qualified. It is not quite certain, that, at

the formation of the confederacy, there were eight clans, though there

is positive proof of the existence of seven. Neither is it certain,

that, at the separation, every clan was represented in every nation.

Among the Mohawks and Oneidas there is no positive proof of the

existence of more than three clans,--the Wolf, Bear, and Tortoise;

though there is presumptive evidence of the existence of several

others.--See Morgan, 81, note.

The eight clans of the Iroquois were as follows: Wolf, Bear, Beaver,

Tortoise, Deer, Snipe, Heron, Hawk. (Morgan, 79.) The clans of the Snipe

and the Heron are the same designated in an early French document as La

famille du Petit Pluvier and La famille du Grand Pluvier. (New York

Colonial Documents, IX. 47.) The anonymous author of this document adds

a ninth clan, that of the Potato, meaning the wild Indian potato,

Glycine apios. This clan, if it existed, was very inconspicuous, and of

little importance.

Remarkable analogies exist between Iroquois clanship and that of other

tribes. The eight clans of the Iroquois were separated into two

divisions, four in each. Originally, marriage was interdicted between

all the members of the same division, but in time the interdict was

limited to the members of the individual clans. Another tribe, the

Choctaws, remote from the Iroquois, and radically different in language,

had also eight clans, similarly divided, with a similar interdict of

marriage.--Gallatin, Synopsis, 109.

The Creeks, according to the account given by their old chief,

Sekopechi, to Mr. D. W. Eakins, were divided into nine clans, named in

most cases from animals: clanship being transmitted, as usual, through

the female.

The clans were by no means equal in numbers, influence, or honor. So

marked were the distinctions among them, that some of the early writers

recognize only the three most conspicuous,--those of the Tortoise, the

Bear, and the Wolf. To some of the clans, in each nation, belonged the

right of giving a chief to the nation and to the league. Others had the

right of giving three, or, in one case, four chiefs; while others could

give none. As Indian clanship was but an extension of the family

relation, these chiefs were, in a certain sense, hereditary; but the law

of inheritance, though binding, was extremely elastic, and capable of

stretching to the farthest limits of the clan. The chief was almost

invariably succeeded by a near relative, always through the female, as a

brother by the same mother, or a nephew by the sister's side. But if

these were manifestly unfit, they were passed over, and a chief was

chosen at a council of the clan from among remoter kindred. In these

cases, the successor is said to have been nominated by the matron of the

late chief's household. [48] Be this as it may, the choice was never

adverse to the popular inclination. The new chief was "raised up," or

installed, by a formal council of the sachems of the league; and on

entering upon his office, he dropped his own name, and assumed that

which, since the formation of the league, had belonged to this especial

chieftainship.

[48] Lafitau, I. 471.

The number of these principal chiefs, or, as they have been called by

way of distinction, sachems, varied in the several nations from eight to

fourteen. The sachems of the five nations, fifty in all, assembled in

council, formed the government of the confederacy. All met as equals,

but a peculiar dignity was ever attached to the Atotarho of the

Onondagas.

There was a class of subordinate chiefs, in no sense hereditary, but

rising to office by address, ability, or valor. Yet the rank was clearly

defined, and the new chief installed at a formal council. This class

embodied, as might be supposed, the best talent of the nation, and the

most prominent warriors and orators of the Iroquois have belonged to it.

In its character and functions, however, it was purely civil. Like the

sachems, these chiefs held their councils, and exercised an influence

proportionate to their number and abilities.

There was another council, between which and that of the subordinate

chiefs the line of demarcation seems not to have been very definite. The

Jesuit Lafitau calls it "the senate." Familiar with the Iroquois at the

height of their prosperity, he describes it as the central and

controlling power, so far, at least, as the separate nations were

concerned. In its character it was essentially popular, but popular in

the best sense, and one which can find its application only in a small

community. Any man took part in it whose age and experience qualified

him to do so. It was merely the gathered wisdom of the nation. Lafitau

compares it to the Roman Senate, in the early and rude age of the

Republic, and affirms that it loses nothing by the comparison. He thus

describes it: "It is a greasy assemblage, sitting sur leur derrière,

crouched like apes, their knees as high as their ears, or lying, some on

their bellies, some on their backs, each with a pipe in his mouth,

discussing affairs of state with as much coolness and gravity as the

Spanish Junta or the Grand Council of Venice." [49]

[49] Lafitau, I. 478.

The young warriors had also their councils; so, too, had the women; and

the opinions and wishes of each were represented by means of deputies

before the "senate," or council of the old men, as well as before the

grand confederate council of the sachems.

The government of this unique republic resided wholly in councils. By

councils all questions were settled, all regulations

established,--social, political, military, and religious. The war-path,

the chase, the council-fire,--in these was the life of the Iroquois; and

it is hard to say to which of the three he was most devoted.

The great council of the fifty sachems formed, as we have seen, the

government of the league. Whenever a subject arose before any of the

nations, of importance enough to demand its assembling, the sachems of

that nation might summon their colleagues by means of runners, bearing

messages and belts of wampum. The usual place of meeting was the valley

of Onondaga, the political as well as geographical centre of the

confederacy. Thither, if the matter were one of deep and general

interest, not the sachems alone, but the greater part of the population,

gathered from east and west, swarming in the hospitable lodges of the

town, or bivouacked by thousands in the surrounding fields and forests.

While the sachems deliberated in the council-house, the chiefs and old

men, the warriors, and often the women, were holding their respective

councils apart; and their opinions, laid by their deputies before the

council of sachems, were never without influence on its decisions.

The utmost order and deliberation reigned in the council, with rigorous

adherence to the Indian notions of parliamentary propriety. The

conference opened with an address to the spirits, or the chief of all

the spirits. There was no heat in debate. No speaker interrupted

another. Each gave his opinion in turn, supporting it with what reason

or rhetoric he could command,--but not until he had stated the subject

of discussion in full, to prove that he understood it, repeating also

the arguments, pro and con, of previous speakers. Thus their debates

were excessively prolix; and the consumption of tobacco was immoderate.

The result, however, was a thorough sifting of the matter in hand; while

the practised astuteness of these savage politicians was a marvel to

their civilized contemporaries. "It is by a most subtle policy," says

Lafitau, "that they have taken the ascendant over the other nations,

divided and overcome the most warlike, made themselves a terror to the

most remote, and now hold a peaceful neutrality between the French and

English, courted and feared by both." [50]

[50] Lafitau, I. 480.--Many other French writers speak to the same

effect. The following are the words of the soldier historian, La

Potherie, after describing the organization of the league: "C'est donc

là cette politique qui les unit si bien, à peu près comme tous les

ressorts d'une horloge, qui par une liaison admirable de toutes les

parties qui les composent, contribuent toutes unanimement au merveilleux

effet qui en resulte."--Hist. de l'Amérique Septentrionale, III. 32.--He

adds: "Les François ont avoüé eux-mêmes qu'ils étoient nez pour la

guerre, & quelques maux qu'ils nous ayent faits nous les avons toujours

estimez."--Ibid., 2.--La Potherie's book was published in 1722.

Unlike the Hurons, they required an entire unanimity in their decisions.

The ease and frequency with which a requisition seemingly so difficult

was fulfilled afford a striking illustration of Indian nature,--on one

side, so stubborn, tenacious, and impracticable; on the other, so pliant

and acquiescent. An explanation of this harmony is to be found also in

an intense spirit of nationality: for never since the days of Sparta

were individual life and national life more completely fused into one.

The sachems of the league were likewise, as we have seen, sachems of

their respective nations; yet they rarely spoke in the councils of the

subordinate chiefs and old men, except to present subjects of

discussion. [51] Their influence in these councils was, however, great,

and even paramount; for they commonly succeeded in securing to their

interest some of the most dexterous and influential of the conclave,

through whom, while they themselves remained in the background, they

managed the debates. [52]

[51] Lafitau, I. 479.

[52] The following from Lafitau is very characteristic: "Ce que je dis

de leur zèle pour le bien public n'est cependant pas si universel, que

plusieurs ne pensent à leur interêts particuliers, & que les Chefs

(sachems) principalement ne fassent joüer plusieurs ressorts secrets

pour venir à bout de leurs intrigues. Il y en a tel, dont l'adresse jouë

si bien à coup sûr, qu'il fait déliberer le Conseil plusieurs jours de

suite, sur une matière dont la détermination est arrêtée entre lui & les

principales têtes avant d'avoir été mise sur le tapis. Cependant comme

les Chefs s'entre-regardent, & qu'aucun ne veut paroître se donner une

superiorité qui puisse piquer la jalousie, ils se ménagent dans les

Conseils plus que les autres; & quoiqu'ils en soient l'ame, leur

politique les oblige à y parler peu, & à écouter plûtôt le sentiment

d'autrui, qu'à y dire le leur; mais chacun a un homme à sa main, qui est

comme une espèce de Brûlot, & qui étant sans consequence pour sa

personne hazarde en pleine liberté tout ce qu'il juge à propos, selon

qu'il l'a concerté avec le Chef même pour qui il agit."--Mœurs des

Sauvages, I. 481.

There was a class of men among the Iroquois always put forward on public

occasions to speak the mind of the nation or defend its interests.

Nearly all of them were of the number of the subordinate chiefs. Nature

and training had fitted them for public speaking, and they were deeply

versed in the history and traditions of the league. They were in fact

professed orators, high in honor and influence among the people. To a

huge stock of conventional metaphors, the use of which required nothing

but practice, they often added an astute intellect, an astonishing

memory, and an eloquence which deserved the name.

In one particular, the training of these savage politicians was never

surpassed. They had no art of writing to record events, or preserve the

stipulations of treaties. Memory, therefore, was tasked to the utmost,

and developed to an extraordinary degree. They had various devices for

aiding it, such as bundles of sticks, and that system of signs, emblems,

and rude pictures, which they shared with other tribes. Their famous

wampum-belts were so many mnemonic signs, each standing for some act,

speech, treaty, or clause of a treaty. These represented the public

archives, and were divided among various custodians, each charged with

the memory and interpretation of those assigned to him. The meaning of

the belts was from time to time expounded in their councils. In

conferences with them, nothing more astonished the French, Dutch, and

English officials than the precision with which, before replying to

their addresses, the Indian orators repeated them point by point.

It was only in rare cases that crime among the Iroquois or Hurons was

punished by public authority. Murder, the most heinous offence, except

witchcraft, recognized among them, was rare. If the slayer and the slain

were of the same household or clan, the affair was regarded as a family

quarrel, to be settled by the immediate kin on both sides. This, under

the pressure of public opinion, was commonly effected without bloodshed,

by presents given in atonement. But if the murderer and his victim were

of different clans or different nations, still more, if the slain was a

foreigner, the whole community became interested to prevent the discord

or the war which might arise. All directed their efforts, not to bring

the murderer to punishment, but to satisfy the injured parties by a

vicarious atonement. [53] To this end, contributions were made and

presents collected. Their number and value were determined by

established usage. Among the Hurons, thirty presents of very

considerable value were the price of a man's life. That of a woman's was

fixed at forty, by reason of her weakness, and because on her depended

the continuance and increase of the population. This was when the slain

belonged to the nation. If of a foreign tribe, his death demanded a

higher compensation, since it involved the danger of war. [54] These

presents were offered in solemn council, with prescribed formalities.

The relatives of the slain might refuse them, if they chose, and in this

case the murderer was given them as a slave; but they might by no means

kill him, since, in so doing, they would incur public censure, and be

compelled in their turn to make atonement. Besides the principal gifts,

there was a great number of less value, all symbolical, and each

delivered with a set form of words: as, "By this we wash out the blood

of the slain: By this we cleanse his wound: By this we clothe his corpse

with a new shirt: By this we place food on his grave": and so, in

endless prolixity, through particulars without number. [55]

[53] Lalemant, while inveighing against a practice which made the

public, and not the criminal, answerable for an offence, admits that

heinous crimes were more rare than in France, where the guilty party

himself was punished.--Lettre au P. Provincial, 15 May, 1645.

[54] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, 80.

[55] Ragueneau, Relation des Hurons, 1648, gives a description of one of

these ceremonies at length. Those of the Iroquois on such occasions were

similar. Many other tribes had the same custom, but attended with much

less form and ceremony. Compare Perrot, 73-76.

The Hurons were notorious thieves; and perhaps the Iroquois were not

much better, though the contrary has been asserted. Among both, the

robbed was permitted not only to retake his property by force, if he

could, but to strip the robber of all he had. This apparently acted as a

restraint in favor only of the strong, leaving the weak a prey to the

plunderer; but here the tie of family and clan intervened to aid him.

Relatives and clansmen espoused the quarrel of him who could not right

himself. [56]

[56] The proceedings for detecting thieves were regular and methodical,

after established customs. According to Bressani, no thief ever

inculpated the innocent.

Witches, with whom the Hurons and Iroquois were grievously infested,

were objects of utter abomination to both, and any one might kill them

at any time. If any person was guilty of treason, or by his character

and conduct made himself dangerous or obnoxious to the public, the

council of chiefs and old men held a secret session on his case,

condemned him to death, and appointed some young man to kill him. The

executioner, watching his opportunity, brained or stabbed him unawares,

usually in the dark porch of one of the houses. Acting by authority, he

could not be held answerable; and the relatives of the slain had no

redress, even if they desired it. The council, however, commonly

obviated all difficulty in advance, by charging the culprit with

witchcraft, thus alienating his best friends.

The military organization of the Iroquois was exceedingly imperfect and

derived all its efficiency from their civil union and their personal

prowess. There were two hereditary war-chiefs, both belonging to the

Senecas; but, except on occasions of unusual importance, it does not

appear that they took a very active part in the conduct of wars. The

Iroquois lived in a state of chronic warfare with nearly all the

surrounding tribes, except a few from whom they exacted tribute. Any man

of sufficient personal credit might raise a war-party when he chose. He

proclaimed his purpose through the village, sang his war-songs, struck

his hatchet into the war-post, and danced the war-dance. Any who chose

joined him; and the party usually took up their march at once, with a

little parched-corn-meal and maple-sugar as their sole provision. On

great occasions, there was concert of action,--the various parties

meeting at a rendezvous, and pursuing the march together. The leaders of

war-parties, like the orators, belonged, in nearly all cases, to the

class of subordinate chiefs. The Iroquois had a discipline suited to the

dark and tangled forests where they fought. Here they were a terrible

foe: in an open country, against a trained European force, they were,

despite their ferocious valor, far less formidable.

In observing this singular organization, one is struck by the

incongruity of its spirit and its form. A body of hereditary oligarchs

was the head of the nation, yet the nation was essentially democratic.

Not that the Iroquois were levellers. None were more prompt to

acknowledge superiority and defer to it, whether established by usage

and prescription, or the result of personal endowment. Yet each man,

whether of high or low degree, had a voice in the conduct of affairs,

and was never for a moment divorced from his wild spirit of

independence. Where there was no property worthy the name, authority had

no fulcrum and no hold. The constant aim of sachems and chiefs was to

exercise it without seeming to do so. They had no insignia of office.

They were no richer than others; indeed, they were often poorer,

spending their substance in largesses and bribes to strengthen their

influence. They hunted and fished for subsistence; they were as foul,

greasy, and unsavory as the rest; yet in them, withal, was often seen a

native dignity of bearing, which ochre and bear's grease could not hide,

and which comported well with their strong, symmetrical, and sometimes

majestic proportions.

To the institutions, traditions, rites, usages, and festivals of the

league the Iroquois was inseparably wedded. He clung to them with Indian

tenacity; and he clings to them still. His political fabric was one of

ancient ideas and practices, crystallized into regular and enduring

forms. In its component parts it has nothing peculiar to itself. All its

elements are found in other tribes: most of them belong to the whole

Indian race. Undoubtedly there was a distinct and definite effort of

legislation; but Iroquois legislation invented nothing. Like all sound

legislation, it built of materials already prepared. It organized the

chaotic past, and gave concrete forms to Indian nature itself. The

people have dwindled and decayed; but, banded by its ties of clan and

kin, the league, in feeble miniature, still subsists, and the degenerate

Iroquois looks back with a mournful pride to the glory of the past.

Would the Iroquois, left undisturbed to work out their own destiny, ever

have emerged from the savage state? Advanced as they were beyond most

other American tribes, there is no indication whatever of a tendency to

overpass the confines of a wild hunter and warrior life. They were

inveterately attached to it, impracticable conservatists of barbarism,

and in ferocity and cruelty they matched the worst of their race. Nor

did the power of expansion apparently belonging to their system ever

produce much result. Between the years 1712 and 1715, the Tuscaroras, a

kindred people, were admitted into the league as a sixth nation; but

they were never admitted on equal terms. Long after, in the period of

their decline, several other tribes were announced as new members of the

league; but these admissions never took effect. The Iroquois were always

reluctant to receive other tribes, or parts of tribes, collectively,

into the precincts of the "Long House." Yet they constantly practised a

system of adoptions, from which, though cruel and savage, they drew

great advantages. Their prisoners of war, when they had burned and

butchered as many of them as would serve to sate their own ire and that

of their women, were divided, man by man, woman by woman, and child by

child, adopted into different families and clans, and thus incorporated

into the nation. It was by this means, and this alone, that they could

offset the losses of their incessant wars. Early in the eighteenth

century, and even long before, a vast proportion of their population

consisted of adopted prisoners. [57]

[57] Relation, 1660, 7 (anonymous). The Iroquois were at the height of

their prosperity about the year 1650. Morgan reckons their number at

this time at 25,000 souls; but this is far too high an estimate. The

author of the Relation of 1660 makes their whole number of warriors

2,200. Le Mercier, in the Relation of 1665, says 2,350. In the Journal

of Greenhalgh, an Englishman who visited them in 1677, their warriors

are set down at 2,150. Du Chesneau, in 1681, estimates them at 2,000; De

la Barre, in 1684, at 2,600, they having been strengthened by adoptions.

A memoir addressed to the Marquis de Seignelay, in 1687, again makes

them 2,000. (See N. Y. Col. Docs., IX. 162, 196, 321.) These estimates

imply a total population of ten or twelve thousand.

The anonymous writer of the Relation of 1660 may well remark: "It is

marvellous that so few should make so great a havoc, and strike such

terror into so many tribes."

It remains to speak of the religious and superstitious ideas which so

deeply influenced Indian life.

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITIONS.

The religious belief of the North-American Indians seems, on a first

view, anomalous and contradictory. It certainly is so, if we adopt the

popular impression. Romance, Poetry, and Rhetoric point, on the one

hand, to the august conception of a one all-ruling Deity, a Great

Spirit, omniscient and omnipresent; and we are called to admire the

untutored intellect which could conceive a thought too vast for Socrates

and Plato. On the other hand, we find a chaos of degrading, ridiculous,

and incoherent superstitions. A closer examination will show that the

contradiction is more apparent than real. We will begin with the lowest

forms of Indian belief, and thence trace it upward to the highest

conceptions to which the unassisted mind of the savage attained.

To the Indian, the material world is sentient and intelligent. Birds,

beasts, and reptiles have ears for human prayers, and are endowed with

an influence on human destiny. A mysterious and inexplicable power

resides in inanimate things. They, too, can listen to the voice of man,

and influence his life for evil or for good. Lakes, rivers, and

waterfalls are sometimes the dwelling-place of spirits; but more

frequently they are themselves living beings, to be propitiated by

prayers and offerings. The lake has a soul; and so has the river, and

the cataract. Each can hear the words of men, and each can be pleased or

offended. In the silence of a forest, the gloom of a deep ravine,

resides a living mystery, indefinite, but redoubtable. Through all the

works of Nature or of man, nothing exists, however seemingly trivial,

that may not be endowed with a secret power for blessing or for bane.

Men and animals are closely akin. Each species of animal has its great

archetype, its progenitor or king, who is supposed to exist somewhere,

prodigious in size, though in shape and nature like his subjects. A

belief prevails, vague, but perfectly apparent, that men themselves owe

their first parentage to beasts, birds, or reptiles, as bears, wolves,

tortoises, or cranes; and the names of the totemic clans, borrowed in

nearly every case from animals, are the reflection of this idea. [58]

[58] This belief occasionally takes a perfectly definite shape. There

was a tradition among Northern and Western tribes, that men were created

from the carcasses of beasts, birds, and fishes, by Manabozho, a

mythical personage, to be described hereafter. The Amikouas, or People

of the Beaver, an Algonquin tribe of Lake Huron, claimed descent from

the carcass of the great original beaver, or father of the beavers. They

believed that the rapids and cataracts on the French River and the Upper

Ottawa were caused by dams made by their amphibious ancestor. (See the

tradition in Perrot, Mémoire sur les Mœurs, Coustumes et Relligion des

Sauvages de l'Amérique Septentrionale, p. 20.) Charlevoix tells the same

story. Each Indian was supposed to inherit something of the nature of

the animal whence he sprung.

An Indian hunter was always anxious to propitiate the animals he sought

to kill. He has often been known to address a wounded bear in a long

harangue of apology. [59] The bones of the beaver were treated with

especial tenderness, and carefully kept from the dogs, lest the spirit

of the dead beaver, or his surviving brethren, should take offence. [60]

This solicitude was not confined to animals, but extended to inanimate

things. A remarkable example occurred among the Hurons, a people

comparatively advanced, who, to propitiate their fishing-nets, and

persuade them to do their office with effect, married them every year to

two young girls of the tribe, with a ceremony more formal than that

observed in the case of mere human wedlock. [61] The fish, too, no less

than the nets, must be propitiated; and to this end they were addressed

every evening from the fishing-camp by one of the party chosen for that

function, who exhorted them to take courage and be caught, assuring them

that the utmost respect should be shown to their bones. The harangue,

which took place after the evening meal, was made in solemn form; and

while it lasted, the whole party, except the speaker, were required to

lie on their backs, silent and motionless, around the fire. [62]

[59] McKinney, Tour to the Lakes, 284, mentions the discomposure of a

party of Indians when shown a stuffed moose. Thinking that its spirit

would be offended at the indignity shown to its remains, they surrounded

it, making apologetic speeches, and blowing tobacco-smoke at it as a

propitiatory offering.

[60] This superstition was very prevalent, and numerous examples of it

occur in old and recent writers, from Father Le Jeune to Captain Carver.

[61] There are frequent allusions to this ceremony in the early writers.

The Algonquins of the Ottawa practised it, as well as the Hurons.

Lalemant, in his chapter "Du Regne de Satan en ces Contrées" (Relation

des Hurons, 1639), says that it took place yearly, in the middle of

March. As it was indispensable that the brides should be virgins, mere

children were chosen. The net was held between them; and its spirit, or

oki, was harangued by one of the chiefs, who exhorted him to do his part

in furnishing the tribe with food. Lalemant was told that the spirit of

the net had once appeared in human form to the Algonquins, complaining

that he had lost his wife, and warning them, that, unless they could

find him another equally immaculate, they would catch no more fish.

[62] Sagard, Le Grand Voyage du Pays des Hurons, 257. Other old writers

make a similar statement.

Besides ascribing life and intelligence to the material world, animate

and inanimate, the Indian believes in supernatural existences, known

among the Algonquins as Manitous, and among the Iroquois and Hurons as

Okies or Otkons. These words comprehend all forms of supernatural being,

from the highest to the lowest, with the exception, possibly, of certain

diminutive fairies or hobgoblins, and certain giants and anomalous

monsters, which appear under various forms, grotesque and horrible, in

the Indian fireside legends. [63] There are local manitous of streams,

rocks, mountains, cataracts, and forests. The conception of these beings

betrays, for the most part, a striking poverty of imagination. In nearly

every case, when they reveal themselves to mortal sight, they bear the

semblance of beasts, reptiles, or birds, in shapes unusual or distorted.

[64] There are other manitous without local habitation, some good, some

evil, countless in number and indefinite in attributes. They fill the

world, and control the destinies of men,--that is to say, of Indians:

for the primitive Indian holds that the white man lives under a

spiritual rule distinct from that which governs his own fate. These

beings, also, appear for the most part in the shape of animals.

Sometimes, however, they assume human proportions; but more frequently

they take the form of stones, which, being broken, are found full of

living blood and flesh.

[63] Many tribes have tales of diminutive beings, which, in the absence

of a better word, may be called fairies. In the Travels of Lewis and

Clarke, there is mention of a hill on the Missouri, supposed to be

haunted by them. These Western fairies correspond to the Puck Wudj

Ininee of Ojibwa tradition. As an example of the monsters alluded to,

see the Saginaw story of the Weendigoes, in Schoolcraft, Algic

Researches, II. 105.

[64] The figure of a large bird is perhaps the most common,--as, for

example, the good spirit of Rock Island: "He was white, with wings like

a swan, but ten times larger."--Autobiography of Blackhawk, 70.

Each primitive Indian has his guardian manitou, to whom he looks for

counsel, guidance, and protection. These spiritual allies are gained by

the following process. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, the Indian boy

blackens his face, retires to some solitary place, and remains for days

without food. Superstitious expectancy and the exhaustion of abstinence

rarely fail of their results. His sleep is haunted by visions, and the

form which first or most often appears is that of his guardian

manitou,--a beast, a bird, a fish, a serpent, or some other object,

animate or inanimate. An eagle or a bear is the vision of a destined

warrior; a wolf, of a successful hunter; while a serpent foreshadows the

future medicine-man, or, according to others, portends disaster. [65]

The young Indian thenceforth wears about his person the object revealed

in his dream, or some portion of it,--as a bone, a feather, a

snake-skin, or a tuft of hair. This, in the modern language of the

forest and prairie, is known as his "medicine." The Indian yields to it

a sort of worship, propitiates it with offerings of tobacco, thanks it

in prosperity, and upbraids it in disaster. [66] If his medicine fails

to bring the desired success, he will sometimes discard it and adopt

another. The superstition now becomes mere fetich-worship, since the

Indian regards the mysterious object which he carries about him rather

as an embodiment than as a representative of a supernatural power.

[65] Compare Cass, in North-American Review, Second Series, XIII. 100. A

turkey-buzzard, according to him, is the vision of a medicine-man. I

once knew an old Dahcotah chief, who was greatly respected, but had

never been to war, though belonging to a family of peculiarly warlike

propensities. The reason was, that, in his initiatory fast, he had

dreamed of an antelope,--the peace-spirit of his people.

Women fast, as well as men,--always at the time of transition from

childhood to maturity. In the Narrative of John Tanner, there is an

account of an old woman who had fasted, in her youth, for ten days, and

throughout her life placed the firmest faith in the visions which had

appeared to her at that time. Among the Northern Algonquins, the

practice, down to a recent day, was almost universal.

[66] The author has seen a Dahcotah warrior open his medicine-bag, talk

with an air of affectionate respect to the bone, feather, or horn

within, and blow tobacco-smoke upon it as an offering. "Medicines" are

acquired not only by fasting, but by casual dreams, and otherwise. They

are sometimes even bought and sold. For a curious account of

medicine-bags and fetich-worship among the Algonquins of Gaspé, see Le

Clerc, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie, Chap. XIII.

Indian belief recognizes also another and very different class of

beings. Besides the giants and monsters of legendary lore, other

conceptions may be discerned, more or less distinct, and of a character

partly mythical. Of these the most conspicuous is that remarkable

personage of Algonquin tradition, called Manabozho, Messou, Michabou,

Nanabush, or the Great Hare. As each species of animal has its archetype

or king, so, among the Algonquins, Manabozho is king of all these animal

kings. Tradition is diverse as to his origin. According to the most

current belief, his father was the West-Wind, and his mother a

great-granddaughter of the Moon. His character is worthy of such a

parentage. Sometimes he is a wolf, a bird, or a gigantic hare,

surrounded by a court of quadrupeds; sometimes he appears in human

shape, majestic in stature and wondrous in endowment, a mighty magician,

a destroyer of serpents and evil manitous; sometimes he is a vain and

treacherous imp, full of childish whims and petty trickery, the butt and

victim of men, beasts, and spirits. His powers of transformation are

without limit; his curiosity and malice are insatiable; and of the

numberless legends of which he is the hero, the greater part are as

trivial as they are incoherent. [67] It does not appear that Manabozho

was ever an object of worship; yet, despite his absurdity, tradition

declares him to be chief among the manitous, in short, the "Great

Spirit." [68] It was he who restored the world, submerged by a deluge.

He was hunting in company with a certain wolf, who was his brother, or,

by other accounts, his grandson, when his quadruped relative fell

through the ice of a frozen lake, and was at once devoured by certain

serpents lurking in the depths of the waters. Manabozho, intent on

revenge, transformed himself into the stump of a tree, and by this

artifice surprised and slew the king of the serpents, as he basked with

his followers in the noontide sun. The serpents, who were all manitous,

caused, in their rage, the waters of the lake to deluge the earth.

Manabozho climbed a tree, which, in answer to his entreaties, grew as

the flood rose around it, and thus saved him from the vengeance of the

evil spirits. Submerged to the neck, he looked abroad on the waste of

waters, and at length descried the bird known as the loon, to whom he

appealed for aid in the task of restoring the world. The loon dived in

search of a little mud, as material for reconstruction, but could not

reach the bottom. A musk-rat made the same attempt, but soon reappeared

floating on his back, and apparently dead. Manabozho, however, on

searching his paws, discovered in one of them a particle of the desired

mud, and of this, together with the body of the loon, created the world

anew. [69]

[67] Mr. Schoolcraft has collected many of these tales. See his Algic

Researches, Vol. I. Compare the stories of Messou, given by Le Jeune

(Relations, 1633, 1634), and the account of Nanabush, by Edwin James, in

his notes to Tanner's Narrative of Captivity and Adventures during a

Thirty-Years' Residence among the Indians; also the account of the Great

Hare, in the Mémoire of Nicolas Perrot, Chaps. I., II.

[68] "Presque toutes les Nations Algonquines ont donné le nom de Grand

Lièvre au Premier Esprit, quelques-uns l'appellent Michabou

(Manabozho)."--Charlevoix, Journal Historique, 344.

[69] This is a form of the story still current among the remoter

Algonquins. Compare the story of Messou, in Le Jeune, Relation, 1633,

16. It is substantially the same.

There are various forms of this tradition, in some of which Manabozho

appears, not as the restorer, but as the creator of the world, forming

mankind from the carcasses of beasts, birds, and fishes. [70] Other

stories represent him as marrying a female musk-rat, by whom he became

the progenitor of the human race. [71]

[70] In the beginning of all things, Manabozho, in the form of the Great

Hare, was on a raft, surrounded by animals who acknowledged him as their

chief. No land could be seen. Anxious to create the world, the Great

Hare persuaded the beaver to dive for mud; but the adventurous diver

floated to the surface senseless. The otter next tried, and failed like

his predecessor. The musk-rat now offered himself for the desperate

task. He plunged, and, after remaining a day and night beneath the

surface, reappeared, floating on his back beside the raft, apparently

dead, and with all his paws fast closed. On opening them, the other

animals found in one of them a grain of sand, and of this the Great Hare

created the world.--Perrot, Mémoire, Chap. I.

[71] Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 16.--The musk-rat is always a conspicuous

figure in Algonquin cosmogony.

It is said that Messou, or Manabozho, once gave to an Indian the gift of

immortality, tied in a bundle, enjoining him never to open it. The

Indian's wife, however, impelled by curiosity, one day cut the string,

the precious gift flew out, and Indians have ever since been subject to

death. Le Jeune, Relation, 1634, 13.

Searching for some higher conception of supernatural existence, we find,

among a portion of the primitive Algonquins, traces of a vague belief in

a spirit dimly shadowed forth under the name of Atahocan, to whom it

does not appear that any attributes were ascribed or any worship

offered, and of whom the Indians professed to know nothing whatever;

[72] but there is no evidence that this belief extended beyond certain

tribes of the Lower St. Lawrence. Others saw a supreme manitou in the

Sun. [73] The Algonquins believed also in a malignant manitou, in whom

the early missionaries failed not to recognize the Devil, but who was

far less dreaded than his wife. She wore a robe made of the hair of her

victims, for she was the cause of death; and she it was whom, by

yelling, drumming, and stamping, they sought to drive away from the

sick. Sometimes, at night, she was seen by some terrified squaw in the

forest, in shape like a flame of fire; and when the vision was announced

to the circle crouched around the lodge-fire, they burned a fragment of

meat to appease the female fiend.

[72] Le Jeune, Relation, 1633, 16; Relation, 1634, 13.

[73] Biard, Relation, 1611, Chap. VIII.--This belief was very prevalent.

The Ottawas, according to Ragueneau (Relation des Hurons, 1648, 77),

were accustomed to invoke the "Maker of Heaven" at their feasts; but

they recognized as distinct persons the Maker of the Earth, the Maker of

Winter, the God of the Waters, and the Seven Spirits of the Wind. He

says, at the same time, "The people of these countries have received

from their ancestors no knowledge of a God"; and he adds, that there is

no sentiment of religion in this invocation.

The East, the West, the North, and the South were vaguely personified as

spirits or manitous. Some of the winds, too, were personal existences.

The West-Wind, as we have seen, was father of Manabozho. There was a

Summer-Maker and a Winter-Maker; and the Indians tried to keep the

latter at bay by throwing firebrands into the air.

When we turn from the Algonquin family of tribes to that of the

Iroquois, we find another cosmogony, and other conceptions of spiritual

existence. While the earth was as yet a waste of waters, there was,

according to Iroquois and Huron traditions, a heaven with lakes,

streams, plains, and forests, inhabited by animals, by spirits, and, as

some affirm, by human beings. Here a certain female spirit, named

Ataentsic, was once chasing a bear, which, slipping through a hole, fell

down to the earth. Ataentsic's dog followed, when she herself, struck

with despair, jumped after them. Others declare that she was kicked out

of heaven by the spirit, her husband, for an amour with a man; while

others, again, hold the belief that she fell in the attempt to gather

for her husband the medicinal leaves of a certain tree. Be this as it

may, the animals swimming in the watery waste below saw her falling, and

hastily met in council to determine what should be done. The case was

referred to the beaver. The beaver commended it to the judgment of the

tortoise, who thereupon called on the other animals to dive, bring up

mud, and place it on his back. Thus was formed a floating island, on

which Ataentsic fell; and here, being pregnant, she was soon delivered

of a daughter, who in turn bore two boys, whose paternity is

unexplained. They were called Taouscaron and Jouskeha, and presently

fell to blows, Jouskeha killing his brother with the horn of a stag. The

back of the tortoise grew into a world full of verdure and life; and

Jouskeha, with his grandmother, Ataentsic, ruled over its destinies.

[74]

[74] The above is the version of the story given by Brébeuf, Relation

des Hurons, 1636, 86 (Cramoisy). No two Indians told it precisely alike,

though nearly all the Hurons and Iroquois agreed as to its essential

points. Compare Vanderdonck, Cusick, Sagard, and other writers.

According to Vanderdonck, Ataentsic became mother of a deer, a bear, and

a wolf, by whom she afterwards bore all the other animals, mankind

included. Brébeuf found also among the Hurons a tradition inconsistent

with that of Ataentsic, and bearing a trace of Algonquin origin. It

declares, that, in the beginning, a man, a fox, and a skunk found

themselves together on an island, and that the man made the world out of

mud brought him by the skunk.

The Delawares, an Algonquin tribe, seem to have borrowed somewhat of the

Iroquois cosmogony, since they believed that the earth was formed on the

back of a tortoise.

According to some, Jouskeha became the father of the human race; but, in

the third generation, a deluge destroyed his posterity, so that it was

necessary to transform animals into men.--Charlevoix, III. 345.

He is the Sun; she is the Moon. He is beneficent; but she is malignant,

like the female demon of the Algonquins. They have a bark house, made

like those of the Iroquois, at the end of the earth, and they often come

to feasts and dances in the Indian villages. Jouskeha raises corn for

himself, and makes plentiful harvests for mankind. Sometimes he is seen,

thin as a skeleton, with a spike of shrivelled corn in his hand, or

greedily gnawing a human limb; and then the Indians know that a grievous

famine awaits them. He constantly interposes between mankind and the

malice of his wicked grandmother, whom, at times, he soundly cudgels. It

was he who made lakes and streams: for once the earth was parched and

barren, all the water being gathered under the armpit of a colossal

frog; but Jouskeha pierced the armpit, and let out the water. No prayers

were offered to him, his benevolent nature rendering them superfluous.

[75]

[75] Compare Brébeuf, as before cited, and Sagard, Voyage des Hurons, p.

228.

The early writers call Jouskeha the creator of the world, and speak of

him as corresponding to the vague Algonquin deity, Atahocan. Another

deity appears in Iroquois mythology, with equal claims to be regarded as

supreme. He is called Areskoui, or Agreskoui, and his most prominent

attributes are those of a god of war. He was often invoked, and the

flesh of animals and of captive enemies was burned in his honor. [76]

Like Jouskeha, he was identified with the sun; and he is perhaps to be

regarded as the same being, under different attributes. Among the

Iroquois proper, or Five Nations, there was also a divinity called

Tarenyowagon, or Teharonhiawagon, [77] whose place and character it is

very difficult to determine. In some traditions he appears as the son of

Jouskeha. He had a prodigious influence; for it was he who spoke to men

in dreams. The Five Nations recognized still another superhuman

personage,--plainly a deified chief or hero. This was Taounyawatha, or

Hiawatha, said to be a divinely appointed messenger, who made his abode

on earth for the political and social instruction of the chosen race,

and whose counterpart is to be found in the traditions of the Peruvians,

Mexicans, and other primitive nations. [78]

[76] Father Jogues saw a female prisoner burned to Areskoui, and two

bears offered to him to atone for the sin of not burning more

captives.--Lettre de Jogues, 5 Aug., 1643.

[77] Le Mercier, Relation, 1670, 66; Dablon, Relation, 1671, 17. Compare

Cusick, Megapolensis, and Vanderdonck. Some writers identify

Tarenyowagon and Hiawatha. Vanderdonck assumes that Areskoui is the

Devil, and Tarenyowagon is God. Thus Indian notions are often

interpreted by the light of preconceived ideas.

[78] For the tradition of Hiawatha, see Clark, History of Onondaga, I.

21. It will also be found in Schoolcraft's Notes on the Iroquois, and in

his History, Condition, and Prospects of Indian Tribes.

The Iroquois name for God is Hawenniio, sometimes written Owayneo; but

this use of the word is wholly due to the missionaries. Hawenniio is an

Iroquois verb, and means, he rules, he is master. There is no Iroquois

word which, in its primitive meaning, can be interpreted, the Great

Spirit, or God. On this subject, see Études Philologiques sur quelques

Langues Sauvages (Montreal, 1866), where will also be found a curious

exposure of a few of Schoolcraft's ridiculous blunders in this

connection.

Close examination makes it evident that the primitive Indian's idea of a

Supreme Being was a conception no higher than might have been expected.

The moment he began to contemplate this object of his faith, and sought

to clothe it with attributes, it became finite, and commonly ridiculous.

The Creator of the World stood on the level of a barbarous and degraded

humanity, while a natural tendency became apparent to look beyond him to

other powers sharing his dominion. The Indian belief, if developed,

would have developed into a system of polytheism. [79]

[79] Some of the early writers could discover no trace of belief in a

supreme spirit of any kind. Perrot, after a life spent among the

Indians, ignores such an idea. Allouez emphatically denies that it

existed among the tribes of Lake Superior. (Relation, 1667, 11.) He

adds, however, that the Sacs and Foxes believed in a great génie, who

lived not far from the French settlements.--Ibid., 21.

In the primitive Indian's conception of a God the idea of moral good has

no part. His deity does not dispense justice for this world or the next,

but leaves mankind under the power of subordinate spirits, who fill and

control the universe. Nor is the good and evil of these inferior beings

a moral good and evil. The good spirit is the spirit that gives good

luck, and ministers to the necessities and desires of mankind: the evil

spirit is simply a malicious agent of disease, death, and mischance.

In no Indian language could the early missionaries find a word to

express the idea of God. Manitou and Oki meant anything endowed with

supernatural powers, from a snake-skin, or a greasy Indian conjurer, up

to Manabozho and Jouskeha. The priests were forced to use a

circumlocution,--"The Great Chief of Men," or "He who lives in the Sky."

[80] Yet it should seem that the idea of a supreme controlling spirit

might naturally arise from the peculiar character of Indian belief. The

idea that each race of animals has its archetype or chief would easily

suggest the existence of a supreme chief of the spirits or of the human

race,--a conception imperfectly shadowed forth in Manabozho. The Jesuit

missionaries seized this advantage. "If each sort of animal has its

king," they urged, "so, too, have men; and as man is above all the

animals, so is the spirit that rules over men the master of all the

other spirits." The Indian mind readily accepted the idea, and tribes in

no sense Christian quickly rose to the belief in one controlling spirit.

The Great Spirit became a distinct existence, a pervading power in the

universe, and a dispenser of justice. Many tribes now pray to him,

though still clinging obstinately to their ancient superstitions; and

with some, as the heathen portion of the modern Iroquois, he is clothed

with attributes of moral good. [81]

[80] See "Divers Sentimens," appended to the Relation of 1635, § 27; and

also many other passages of early missionaries.

[81] In studying the writers of the last and of the present century, it

is to be remembered that their observations were made upon savages who

had been for generations in contact, immediate or otherwise, with the

doctrines of Christianity. Many observers have interpreted the religious

ideas of the Indians after preconceived ideas of their own; and it may

safely be affirmed that an Indian will respond with a grunt of

acquiescence to any question whatever touching his spiritual state.

Loskiel and the simple-minded Heckewelder write from a missionary point

of view; Adair, to support a theory of descent from the Jews; the worthy

theologian, Jarvis, to maintain his dogma, that all religious ideas of

the heathen world are perversions of revelation; and so, in a greater or

less degree, of many others. By far the most close and accurate

observers of Indian superstition were the French and Italian Jesuits of

the first half of the seventeenth century. Their opportunities were

unrivalled; and they used them in a spirit of faithful inquiry,

accumulating facts, and leaving theory to their successors. Of recent

American writers, no one has given so much attention to the subject as

Mr. Schoolcraft; but, in view of his opportunities and his zeal, his

results are most unsatisfactory. The work in six large quarto volumes,

History, Condition, and Prospects of Indian Tribes, published by

Government under his editorship, includes the substance of most of his

previous writings. It is a singularly crude and illiterate production,

stuffed with blunders and contradictions, giving evidence on every page

of a striking unfitness either for historical or philosophical inquiry,

and taxing to the utmost the patience of those who would extract what is

valuable in it from its oceans of pedantic verbiage.

The primitive Indian believed in the immortality of the soul, [82] but

he did not always believe in a state of future reward and punishment.

Nor, when such a belief existed, was the good to be rewarded a moral

good, or the evil to be punished a moral evil. Skilful hunters, brave

warriors, men of influence and consideration, went, after death, to the

happy hunting-ground; while the slothful, the cowardly, and the weak

were doomed to eat serpents and ashes in dreary regions of mist and

darkness. In the general belief, however, there was but one land of

shades for all alike. The spirits, in form and feature as they had been

in life, wended their way through dark forests to the villages of the

dead, subsisting on bark and rotten wood. On arriving, they sat all day

in the crouching posture of the sick, and, when night came, hunted the

shades of animals, with the shades of bows and arrows, among the shades

of trees and rocks: for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike

immortal, and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead.

[82] The exceptions are exceedingly rare. Father Gravier says that a

Peoria Indian once told him that there was no future life. It would be

difficult to find another instance of the kind.

The belief respecting the land of souls varied greatly in different

tribes and different individuals. Among the Hurons there were those who

held that departed spirits pursued their journey through the sky, along

the Milky Way, while the souls of dogs took another route, by certain

constellations, known as the "Way of the Dogs." [83]

[83] Sagard, Voyage des Hurons, 233.

At intervals of ten or twelve years, the Hurons, the Neutrals, and other

kindred tribes, were accustomed to collect the bones of their dead, and

deposit them, with great ceremony, in a common place of burial. The

whole nation was sometimes assembled at this solemnity; and hundreds of

corpses, brought from their temporary resting-places, were inhumed in

one capacious pit. From this hour the immortality of their souls began.

They took wing, as some affirmed, in the shape of pigeons; while the

greater number declared that they journeyed on foot, and in their own

likeness, to the land of shades, bearing with them the ghosts of the

wampum-belts, beaver-skins, bows, arrows, pipes, kettles, beads, and

rings buried with them in the common grave. [84] But as the spirits of

the old and of children are too feeble for the march, they are forced to

stay behind, lingering near their earthly villages, where the living

often hear the shutting of their invisible cabin-doors, and the weak

voices of the disembodied children driving birds from their corn-fields.

[85] An endless variety of incoherent fancies is connected with the

Indian idea of a future life. They commonly owe their origin to dreams,

often to the dreams of those in extreme sickness, who, on awaking,

supposed that they had visited the other world, and related to the

wondering bystanders what they had seen.

[84] The practice of burying treasures with the dead is not peculiar to

the North American aborigines. Thus, the London Times of Oct. 28, 1865,

describing the funeral rites of Lord Palmerston, says: "And as the

words, 'Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,' were pronounced, the chief

mourner, as a last precious offering to the dead, threw into the grave

several diamond and gold rings."

[85] Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 99 (Cramoisy).

The Indian land of souls is not always a region of shadows and gloom.

The Hurons sometimes represented the souls of their dead--those of their

dogs included--as dancing joyously in the presence of Ataentsic and

Jouskeha. According to some Algonquin traditions, heaven was a scene of

endless festivity, the ghosts dancing to the sound of the rattle and the

drum, and greeting with hospitable welcome the occasional visitor from

the living world: for the spirit-land was not far off, and roving

hunters sometimes passed its confines unawares.

Most of the traditions agree, however, that the spirits, on their

journey heavenward, were beset with difficulties and perils. There was a

swift river which must be crossed on a log that shook beneath their

feet, while a ferocious dog opposed their passage, and drove many into

the abyss. This river was full of sturgeon and other fish, which the

ghosts speared for their subsistence. Beyond was a narrow path between

moving rocks, which each instant crashed together, grinding to atoms the

less nimble of the pilgrims who essayed to pass. The Hurons believed

that a personage named Oscotarach, or the Head-Piercer, dwelt in a bark

house beside the path, and that it was his office to remove the brains

from the heads of all who went by, as a necessary preparation for

immortality. This singular idea is found also in some Algonquin

traditions, according to which, however, the brain is afterwards

restored to its owner. [86]

[86] On Indian ideas of another life, compare Sagard, the Jesuit

Relations, Perrot, Charlevoix, and Lafitau, with Tanner, James,

Schoolcraft, and the Appendix to Morse's Indian Report.

Le Clerc recounts a singular story, current in his time among the

Algonquins of Gaspé and Northern New Brunswick. The favorite son of an

old Indian died; whereupon the father, with a party of friends, set out

for the land of souls to recover him. It was only necessary to wade

through a shallow lake, several days' journey in extent. This they did,

sleeping at night on platforms of poles which supported them above the

water. At length they arrived, and were met by Papkootparout, the Indian

Pluto, who rushed on them in a rage, with his war-club upraised; but,

presently relenting, changed his mind, and challenged them to a game of

ball. They proved the victors, and won the stakes, consisting of corn,

tobacco, and certain fruits, which thus became known to mankind. The

bereaved father now begged hard for his son's soul, and Papkootparout at

last gave it to him, in the form and size of a nut, which, by pressing

it hard between his hands, he forced into a small leather bag. The

delighted parent carried it back to earth, with instructions to insert

it in the body of his son, who would thereupon return to life. When the

adventurers reached home, and reported the happy issue of their journey,

there was a dance of rejoicing; and the father, wishing to take part in

it, gave his son's soul to the keeping of a squaw who stood by. Being

curious to see it, she opened the bag; on which it escaped at once, and

took flight for the realms of Papkootparout, preferring them to the

abodes of the living.--Le Clerc, Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie,

310-328.

Dreams were to the Indian a universal oracle. They revealed to him his

guardian spirit, taught him the cure of his diseases, warned him of the

devices of sorcerers, guided him to the lurking-places of his enemy or

the haunts of game, and unfolded the secrets of good and evil destiny.

The dream was a mysterious and inexorable power, whose least behests

must be obeyed to the letter,--a source, in every Indian town, of

endless mischief and abomination. There were professed dreamers, and

professed interpreters of dreams. One of the most noted festivals among

the Hurons and Iroquois was the Dream Feast, a scene of frenzy, where

the actors counterfeited madness, and the town was like a bedlam turned

loose. Each pretended to have dreamed of something necessary to his

welfare, and rushed from house to house, demanding of all he met to

guess his secret requirement and satisfy it.

Believing that the whole material world was instinct with powers to

influence and control his fate, that good and evil spirits, and

existences nameless and indefinable, filled all Nature, that a pervading

sorcery was above, below, and around him, and that issues of life and

death might be controlled by instruments the most unnoticeable and

seemingly the most feeble, the Indian lived in perpetual fear. The

turning of a leaf, the crawling of an insect, the cry of a bird, the

creaking of a bough, might be to him the mystic signal of weal or woe.

An Indian community swarmed with sorcerers, medicine-men, and diviners,

whose functions were often united in the same person. The sorcerer, by

charms, magic songs, magic feasts, and the beating of his drum, had

power over the spirits and those occult influences inherent in animals

and inanimate things. He could call to him the souls of his enemies.

They appeared before him in the form of stones. He chopped and bruised

them with his hatchet; blood and flesh issued forth; and the intended

victim, however distant, languished and died. Like the sorcerer of the

Middle Ages, he made images of those he wished to destroy, and,

muttering incantations, punctured them with an awl, whereupon the

persons represented sickened and pined away.

The Indian doctor relied far more on magic than on natural remedies.

Dreams, beating of the drum, songs, magic feasts and dances, and howling

to frighten the female demon from his patient, were his ordinary methods

of cure.

The prophet, or diviner, had various means of reading the secrets of

futurity, such as the flight of birds, and the movements of water and

fire. There was a peculiar practice of divination very general in the

Algonquin family of tribes, among some of whom it still subsists. A

small, conical lodge was made by planting poles in a circle, lashing the

tops together at the height of about seven feet from the ground, and

closely covering them with hides. The prophet crawled in, and closed the

aperture after him. He then beat his drum and sang his magic songs to

summon the spirits, whose weak, shrill voices were soon heard, mingled

with his lugubrious chanting, while at intervals the juggler paused to

interpret their communications to the attentive crowd seated on the

ground without. During the whole scene, the lodge swayed to and fro with

a violence which has astonished many a civilized beholder, and which

some of the Jesuits explain by the ready solution of a genuine diabolic

intervention. [87]

[87] This practice was first observed by Champlain. (See "Pioneers of

France in the New World." ) From his time to the present, numerous

writers have remarked upon it. Le Jeune, in the Relation of 1637, treats

it at some length. The lodge was sometimes of a cylindrical, instead of

a conical form.

The sorcerers, medicine-men, and diviners did not usually exercise the

function of priests. Each man sacrificed for himself to the powers he

wished to propitiate, whether his guardian spirit, the spirits of

animals, or the other beings of his belief. The most common offering was

tobacco, thrown into the fire or water; scraps of meat were sometimes

burned to the manitous; and, on a few rare occasions of public

solemnity, a white dog, the mystic animal of many tribes, was tied to

the end of an upright pole, as a sacrifice to some superior spirit, or

to the sun, with which the superior spirits were constantly confounded

by the primitive Indian. In recent times, when Judaism and Christianity

have modified his religious ideas, it has been, and still is, the

practice to sacrifice dogs to the Great Spirit. On these public

occasions, the sacrificial function is discharged by chiefs, or by

warriors appointed for the purpose. [88]

[88] Many of the Indian feasts were feasts of sacrifice,--sometimes to

the guardian spirit of the host, sometimes to an animal of which he has

dreamed, sometimes to a local or other spirit. The food was first

offered in a loud voice to the being to be propitiated, after which the

guests proceeded to devour it for him. This unique method of sacrifice

was practised at war-feasts and similar solemnities. For an excellent

account of Indian religious feasts, see Perrot, Chap. V.

One of the most remarkable of Indian sacrifices was that practised by

the Hurons in the case of a person drowned or frozen to death. The flesh

of the deceased was cut off, and thrown into a fire made for the

purpose, as an offering of propitiation to the spirits of the air or

water. What remained of the body was then buried near the

fire.--Brébeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1636, 108.

The tribes of Virginia, as described by Beverly and others, not only had

priests who offered sacrifice, but idols and houses of worship.

Among the Hurons and Iroquois, and indeed all the stationary tribes,

there was an incredible number of mystic ceremonies, extravagant,

puerile, and often disgusting, designed for the cure of the sick or for

the general weal of the community. Most of their observances seem

originally to have been dictated by dreams, and transmitted as a sacred

heritage from generation to generation. They consisted in an endless

variety of dances, masqueradings, and nondescript orgies; and a

scrupulous adherence to all the traditional forms was held to be of the

last moment, as the slightest failure in this respect might entail

serious calamities. If children were seen in their play imitating any of

these mysteries, they were grimly rebuked and punished. In many tribes

secret magical societies existed, and still exist, into which members

are initiated with peculiar ceremonies. These associations are greatly

respected and feared. They have charms for love, war, and private

revenge, and exert a great, and often a very mischievous influence. The

societies of the Metai and the Wabeno, among the Northern Algonquins,

are conspicuous examples; while other societies of similar character

have, for a century, been known to exist among the Dahcotah. [89]

[89] The Friendly Society of the Spirit, of which the initiatory

ceremonies were seen and described by Carver (Travels, 271), preserves

to this day its existence and its rites.

A notice of the superstitious ideas of the Indians would be imperfect

without a reference to the traditionary tales through which these ideas

are handed down from father to son. Some of these tales can be traced

back to the period of the earliest intercourse with Europeans. One at

least of those recorded by the first missionaries, on the Lower St.

Lawrence, is still current among the tribes of the Upper Lakes. Many of

them are curious combinations of beliefs seriously entertained with

strokes intended for humor and drollery, which never fail to awaken

peals of laughter in the lodge-circle. Giants, dwarfs, cannibals,

spirits, beasts, birds, and anomalous monsters, transformations, tricks,

and sorcery, form the staple of the story. Some of the Iroquois tales

embody conceptions which, however preposterous, are of a bold and

striking character; but those of the Algonquins are, to an incredible

degree, flimsy, silly, and meaningless; nor are those of the Dahcotah

tribes much better. In respect to this wigwam lore, there is a curious

superstition of very wide prevalence. The tales must not be told in

summer; since at that season, when all Nature is full of life, the

spirits are awake, and, hearing what is said of them, may take offence;

whereas in winter they are fast sealed up in snow and ice, and no longer

capable of listening. [90]

[90] The prevalence of this fancy among the Algonquins in the remote

parts of Canada is well established. The writer found it also among the

extreme western bands of the Dahcotah. He tried, in the month of July,

to persuade an old chief, a noted story-teller, to tell him some of the

tales; but, though abundantly loquacious in respect to his own

adventures, and even his dreams, the Indian obstinately refused, saying

that winter was the time for the tales, and that it was bad to tell them

in summer.

Mr. Schoolcraft has published a collection of Algonquin tales, under the

title of Algic Researches. Most of them were translated by his wife, an

educated Ojibwa half-breed. This book is perhaps the best of Mr.

Schoolcraft's works, though its value is much impaired by the want of a

literal rendering, and the introduction of decorations which savor more

of a popular monthly magazine than of an Indian wigwam. Mrs. Eastman's

interesting Legends of the Sioux (Dahcotah) is not free from the same

defect. Other tales are scattered throughout the works of Mr.

Schoolcraft and various modern writers. Some are to be found in the

works of Lafitau and the other Jesuits. But few of the Iroquois legends

have been printed, though a considerable number have been written down.

The singular History of the Five Nations, by the old Tuscarora Indian,

Cusick, gives the substance of some of them. Others will be found in

Clark's History of Onondaga.

It is obvious that the Indian mind has never seriously occupied itself

with any of the higher themes of thought. The beings of its belief are

not impersonations of the forces of Nature, the courses of human

destiny, or the movements of human intellect, will, and passion. In the

midst of Nature, the Indian knew nothing of her laws. His perpetual

reference of her phenomena to occult agencies forestalled inquiry and

precluded inductive reasoning. If the wind blew with violence, it was

because the water-lizard, which makes the wind, had crawled out of his

pool; if the lightning was sharp and frequent, it was because the young

of the thunder-bird were restless in their nest; if a blight fell upon

the corn, it was because the Corn Spirit was angry; and if the beavers

were shy and difficult to catch, it was because they had taken offence

at seeing the bones of one of their race thrown to a dog. Well, and even

highly developed, in a few instances,--I allude especially to the

Iroquois,--with respect to certain points of material concernment, the

mind of the Indian in other respects was and is almost hopelessly

stagnant. The very traits that raise him above the servile races are

hostile to the kind and degree of civilization which those races so

easily attain. His intractable spirit of independence, and the pride

which forbids him to be an imitator, reinforce but too strongly that

savage lethargy of mind from which it is so hard to rouse him. No race,

perhaps, ever offered greater difficulties to those laboring for its

improvement.

To sum up the results of this examination, the primitive Indian was as

savage in his religion as in his life. He was divided between

fetich-worship and that next degree of religious development which

consists in the worship of deities embodied in the human form. His

conception of their attributes was such as might have been expected. His

gods were no whit better than himself. Even when he borrows from

Christianity the idea of a Supreme and Universal Spirit, his tendency is

to reduce Him to a local habitation and a bodily shape; and this

tendency disappears only in tribes that have been long in contact with

civilized white men. The primitive Indian, yielding his untutored homage

to One All-pervading and Omnipotent Spirit, is a dream of poets,

rhetoricians, and sentimentalists.

CHAPTER I.

1634.

NOTRE-DAME DES ANGES.

Quebec in 1634 • Father Le Jeune • The Mission-House • Its Domestic

Economy • The Jesuits and their Designs

Opposite Quebec lies the tongue of land called Point Levi. One who, in

the summer of the year 1634, stood on its margin and looked northward,

across the St. Lawrence, would have seen, at the distance of a mile or

more, a range of lofty cliffs, rising on the left into the bold heights

of Cape Diamond, and on the right sinking abruptly to the bed of the

tributary river St. Charles. Beneath these cliffs, at the brink of the

St. Lawrence, he would have descried a cluster of warehouses, sheds, and

wooden tenements. Immediately above, along the verge of the precipice,

he could have traced the outlines of a fortified work, with a flagstaff,

and a few small cannon to command the river; while, at the only point

where Nature had made the heights accessible, a zigzag path connected

the warehouses and the fort.

Now, embarked in the canoe of some Montagnais Indian, let him cross the

St. Lawrence, land at the pier, and, passing the cluster of buildings,

climb the pathway up the cliff. Pausing for rest and breath, he might

see, ascending and descending, the tenants of this outpost of the

wilderness: a soldier of the fort, or an officer in slouched hat and

plume; a factor of the fur company, owner and sovereign lord of all

Canada; a party of Indians; a trader from the upper country, one of the

precursors of that hardy race of coureurs de bois, destined to form a

conspicuous and striking feature of the Canadian population: next,

perhaps, would appear a figure widely different. The close, black

cassock, the rosary hanging from the waist, and the wide, black hat,

looped up at the sides, proclaimed the Jesuit,--Father Le Jeune,

Superior of the Residence of Quebec.

And now, that we may better know the aspect and condition of the infant

colony and incipient mission, we will follow the priest on his way.

Mounting the steep path, he reached the top of the cliff, some two

hundred feet above the river and the warehouses. On the left lay the

fort built by Champlain, covering a part of the ground now forming

Durham Terrace and the Place d'Armes. Its ramparts were of logs and

earth, and within was a turreted building of stone, used as a barrack,

as officers' quarters, and for other purposes. [1] Near the fort stood a

small chapel, newly built. The surrounding country was cleared and

partially cultivated; yet only one dwelling-house worthy the name

appeared. It was a substantial cottage, where lived Madame Hébert, widow

of the first settler of Canada, with her daughter, her son-in-law

Couillard, and their children, good Catholics all, who, two years

before, when Quebec was evacuated by the English, [2] wept for joy at

beholding Le Jeune, and his brother Jesuit, De Nouë, crossing their

threshold to offer beneath their roof the long-forbidden sacrifice of

the Mass. There were inclosures with cattle near at hand; and the house,

with its surroundings, betokened industry and thrift.

[1] Compare the various notices in Champlain (1632) with that of Du

Creux, Historia Canadensis, 204.

[2] See "Pioneers of France in the New World." Hébert's cottage seems to

have stood between Ste.-Famille and Couillard Streets, as appears by a

contract of 1634, cited by M. Ferland.

Thence Le Jeune walked on, across the site of the modern market-place,

and still onward, near the line of the cliffs which sank abruptly on his

right. Beneath lay the mouth of the St. Charles; and, beyond, the

wilderness shore of Beauport swept in a wide curve eastward, to where,

far in the distance, the Gulf of Montmorenci yawned on the great river.

[3] The priest soon passed the clearings, and entered the woods which

covered the site of the present suburb of St. John. Thence he descended

to a lower plateau, where now lies the suburb of St. Roch, and, still

advancing, reached a pleasant spot at the extremity of the

Pointe-aux-Lièvres, a tract of meadow land nearly inclosed by a sudden

bend of the St. Charles. Here lay a canoe or skiff; and, paddling across

the narrow stream, Le Jeune saw on the meadow, two hundred yards from

the bank, a square inclosure formed of palisades, like a modern picket

fort of the Indian frontier. [4] Within this inclosure were two

buildings, one of which had been half burned by the English, and was not

yet repaired. It served as storehouse, stable, workshop, and bakery.

Opposite stood the principal building, a structure of planks, plastered

with mud, and thatched with long grass from the meadows. It consisted of

one story, a garret, and a cellar, and contained four principal rooms,

of which one served as chapel, another as refectory, another as kitchen,

and the fourth as a lodging for workmen. The furniture of all was plain

in the extreme. Until the preceding year, the chapel had had no other

ornament than a sheet on which were glued two coarse engravings; but the

priests had now decorated their altar with an image of a dove

representing the Holy Ghost, an image of Loyola, another of Xavier, and

three images of the Virgin. Four cells opened from the refectory, the

largest of which was eight feet square. In these lodged six priests,

while two lay brothers found shelter in the garret. The house had been

hastily built, eight years before, and now leaked in all parts. Such was

the Residence of Notre-Dame des Anges. Here was nourished the germ of a

vast enterprise, and this was the cradle of the great mission of New

France. [5]

[3] The settlement of Beauport was begun this year, or the year

following, by the Sieur Giffard, to whom a large tract had been granted

here--Langevin, Notes sur les Archives de N. D. de Beauport, 5.

[4] This must have been very near the point where the streamlet called

the River Lairet enters the St. Charles. The place has a triple historic

interest. The wintering-place of Cartier in 1535-6 (see "Pioneers of

France") seems to have been here. Here, too, in 1759, Montcalm's bridge

of boats crossed the St. Charles; and in a large intrenchment, which

probably included the site of the Jesuit mission-house, the remnants of

his shattered army rallied, after their defeat on the Plains of

Abraham.--See the very curious Narrative of the Chevalier Johnstone,

published by the Historical Society of Quebec.

[5] The above particulars are gathered from the Relations of 1626

(Lalemant), and 1632, 1633, 1634, 1635 (Le Jeune), but chiefly from a

long letter of the Father Superior to the Provincial of the Jesuits at

Paris, containing a curiously minute report of the state of the mission.

It was sent from Quebec by the returning ships in the summer of 1634,

and will be found in Carayon, Première Mission des Jésuites au Canada,

122. The original is in the archives of the Order at Rome.

Of the six Jesuits gathered in the refectory for the evening meal, one

was conspicuous among the rest,--a tall, strong man, with features that

seemed carved by Nature for a soldier, but which the mental habits of

years had stamped with the visible impress of the priesthood. This was

Jean de Brébeuf, descendant of a noble family of Normandy, and one of

the ablest and most devoted zealots whose names stand on the missionary

rolls of his Order. His companions were Masse, Daniel, Davost, De Nouë,

and the Father Superior, Le Jeune. Masse was the same priest who had

been the companion of Father Biard in the abortive mission of Acadia.

[6] By reason of his useful qualities, Le Jeune nicknamed him "le Père

Utile." At present, his special function was the care of the pigs and

cows, which he kept in the inclosure around the buildings, lest they

should ravage the neighboring fields of rye, barley, wheat, and maize.

[7] De Nouë had charge of the eight or ten workmen employed by the

mission, who gave him at times no little trouble by their repinings and

complaints. [8] They were forced to hear mass every morning and prayers

every evening, besides an exhortation on Sunday. Some of them were for

returning home, while two or three, of a different complexion, wished to

be Jesuits themselves. The Fathers, in their intervals of leisure,

worked with their men, spade in hand. For the rest, they were busied in

preaching, singing vespers, saying mass and hearing confessions at the

fort of Quebec, catechizing a few Indians, and striving to master the

enormous difficulties of the Huron and Algonquin languages.

[6] See "Pioneers of France in the New World."

[7] "Le P. Masse, que je nomme quelquefois en riant le Père Utile, est

bien cognu de V. R. Il a soin des choses domestiques et du bestail que

nous avons, en quoy il a très-bien reussy."--Lettre du P. Paul le Jeune

au R. P. Provincial, in Carayon, 122.--Le Jeune does not fail to send an

inventory of the "bestail" to his Superior, namely: "Deux grosses truies

qui nourissent chacune quatre petits cochons, deux vaches, deux petites

genisses, et un petit taureau."

[8] The methodical Le Jeune sets down the causes of their discontent

under six different heads, each duly numbered. Thus:--

"1º. C'est le naturel des artisans de se plaindre et de gronder."

"2º. La diversité des gages les fait murmurer," etc.

Well might Father Le Jeune write to his Superior, "The harvest is

plentiful, and the laborers few." These men aimed at the conversion of a

continent. From their hovel on the St. Charles, they surveyed a field of

labor whose vastness might tire the wings of thought itself; a scene

repellent and appalling, darkened with omens of peril and woe. They were

an advance-guard of the great army of Loyola, strong in a discipline

that controlled not alone the body and the will, but the intellect, the

heart, the soul, and the inmost consciousness. The lives of these early

Canadian Jesuits attest the earnestness of their faith and the intensity

of their zeal; but it was a zeal bridled, curbed, and ruled by a guiding

hand. Their marvellous training in equal measure kindled enthusiasm and

controlled it, roused into action a mighty power, and made it as

subservient as those great material forces which modern science has

learned to awaken and to govern. They were drilled to a factitious

humility, prone to find utterance in expressions of self-depreciation

and self-scorn, which one may often judge unwisely, when he condemns

them as insincere. They were devoted believers, not only in the

fundamental dogmas of Rome, but in those lesser matters of faith which

heresy despises as idle and puerile superstitions. One great aim

engrossed their lives. "For the greater glory of God"--ad majorem Dei

gloriam--they would act or wait, dare, suffer, or die, yet all in

unquestioning subjection to the authority of the Superiors, in whom they

recognized the agents of Divine authority itself.