THE INDIANS
[Illustration: A typical Indian]
%57%. When Europeans first set foot on our shores, they found the
country already inhabited, and, adopting the name given to the men of
the New World by Columbus, they called these people "Indians."
They were not "Indians," or natives of Asia, but a race by themselves,
which ages before the time of Columbus was spread over all North and
South America.
Like their descendants in the West to-day, they had red or
copper-colored skins, their eyes and long straight hair were jet black,
their faces beardless, and their cheek bones high.
%58. The Villages.%---East of the Rocky Mountains the Indians lived
in villages, often covering several acres in area, and surrounded by
stockades of two and even three rows of posts. The stockade was pierced
with loopholes, and provided with platforms on which were piles of
stones for the defenders to hurl on the heads of their enemies.
Sometimes the structures which formed the village were wigwams--rude
structures made by driving poles into the ground in a circle, drawing
their tops near together, and then covering them with bark or skins.
Sometimes the dwellings had rudely framed sides and roofs covered with
layers of elm bark. Usually these structures were fifteen or twenty feet
wide by 100 feet long. At each end was a door. Along each side were ten
or twelve stalls, in each of which lived a family, so that one house
held twenty or more families. Down the middle at regular intervals were
fire pits where the food was cooked, the smoke escaping through holes in
the roof.[1]
[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, Vol. I., pp. 17,
18.]
[Illustration: Buffalo-skin lodge]
%59. Clans and Tribes.%--All the families living in such a house
traced descent from a common female ancestor, and formed a clan. Each
clan had its own name,--usually that of some animal, as the Wolf, the
Bear, or the Turtle,--its own sachem or civil magistrate, and its own
war chiefs, and owned all the food and all the property, except weapons
and ornaments, in common. A number of such clans made a tribe, which had
one language and was governed by a council of the clan sachems.
[Illustration: Seneca long house]
%60. The Three Indian Races.%--With slight exceptions, the tribes
living east of the Mississippi are divided, by those who have studied
their languages, into three great groups:
1. The Muskhogees, who lived south of the Tennessee River and comprised
the Creek, the Seminole, the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw tribes.
2. The Iroquoian group, which occupied the country from the Delaware and
the Hudson to and beyond the St. Lawrence and Lakes Ontario and Erie,
besides isolated tracts in North Carolina and Tennessee. The chief
tribes were the Iroquois proper,--forming a confederacy in central New
York known as the Five Nations (Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas,
and Mohawks),--the Hurons, the Eries, the Cherokees, and the Tuscaroras.
[Illustration: Moccasin]
3. The Algonquian group, which occupied the rest of what is now the
United States east of the Mississippi, besides the larger part of
Canada. In this group were the Mohegans, Pequots, and Narragansetts of
New England; the Delawares; the Powhatans of Virginia; the Shawnees of
the Ohio valley, and many others living around the Great Lakes.
[Illustration: Flint Hatchet]
%61. Weapons and Implements and Clothing.%--All of these tribes had
made some progress towards civilization. They used pottery and
ornamental pipes of clay. They raised beans and squashes, pumpkins,
tobacco, and maize, or Indian corn, which they ground to meal by rubbing
between two stones. For hunting they had bows, arrows with stone heads,
hatchets of flint, and spears. In summer they went almost naked. In
winter they wore clothing made from the skins of fur-bearing animals and
the hides of buffalo and deer. For navigating streams and rivers, lakes
and bays, they constructed canoes of birch bark sewed together with
thongs of deerskin and smeared at the joints with spruce-tree gum.
%62. Traits of Character.%--Living an outdoor life, and depending for
daily food not so much on the maize they raised as on the fish they
caught and the animals they killed, the Indians were most expert
woodsmen. They were swift of foot, quick-witted, keen-sighted, and most
patient of hunger, fatigue, and cold. White men were amazed at the
rapidity with which the Indian followed the most obscure trail over the
most difficult ground, at the perfection with which he imitated the bark
of the wolf, the hoot of the owl, the call of the moose, and at the
catlike tread with which he walked over beds of autumn leaves the side
of the grazing deer.
[Illustration: Ornamental pipe]
[Illustration: Quiver, with bows and arrows]
Courage and fortitude he possessed in the highest degree. Yet with his
bravery were associated all the vices, all the dark and crooked ways,
which are the resort of the cowardly and the weak. He was treacherous,
revengeful, and cruel beyond description. Much as he loved war (and war
was his chief occupation), the fair and open fight had no charm for him.
To his mind it was madness to take the scalp of an enemy at the risk of
his own, when he might waylay him in an ambush or shoot him with an
arrow from behind a tree. He was never so happy as when, at the dead of
night, he roused his sleeping victims with an unearthly yell and
massacred them by the light of their burning home.
%63. The French and the Indians.%--The ways in which French and
English colonists acted towards the Indian are highly characteristic,
and account for much in our history.
From the day when Champlain, in 1609, joined his Huron-Algonquin
neighbors and went with them on the warpath against the Iroquois, the
French held to the policy of making friends with the Indians. No pains
were spared to win them to the cause of France. They were flattered,
petted, treated with ceremonial respect, and became the companions, as
the women often became the wives, of the Frenchmen. Much was expected of
this mingling of races. It was supposed that the Indian would be won
over to civilization and Christianity. But the Frenchmen were won over
to the Indians, and adopted Indian ways of life. They lived in wigwams,
wore Indian dress, decorated their long hair with eagle feathers, and
made their faces hideous with vermilion, ocher, and soot.
%64. Coureurs de Bois.%--There soon grew up in this way a class of
half-civilized vagrants, who ranged the woods in true Indian style, and
gained a living by guiding the canoes of fur traders along the rivers
and lakes of the interior. Stimulated by the profits of the fur trade,
these men pushed their traffic to the most distant tribes, spreading
French guns, French hatchets, beads, cloth, tobacco and brandy, and
French influence over the whole Northwest. Where the trader and the
_coureur de bois_ went, the priest and the soldier followed, and soon
mission houses and forts were established at all the chief passes and
places suited to control the Indian trade.
%65. The English and the Indians.%--How, meantime, did the English
act toward the Indians? In the first place, nothing led them to form
close relationship with the tribes. The fur trade--the source of
Canadian prosperity--and the zeal of priests eager for the conversion of
the heathen, which sent the traders, the _coureurs de bois_, and the
priests from tribe to tribe and from the Atlantic halfway to the
Pacific, did not appeal to the English colonists. Farming and commerce
were the sources of their wealth. Their priests and missionaries were
content to labor with the Indians near at hand.
In the second place, the policy of the French towards the Indians, while
founded on trade, was directed by one central government. The policy of
the English was directed by each colony, and was of as many kinds as
there were colonies. No English frontier exhibited such a mingling of
white men and red as was common wherever the French went. Among the
English there were fur traders, but no _coureurs de bois_. Scorn on the
one side and hatred on the other generally marked the intercourse
between the English and the Indians. One bright exception must indeed be
made. Penn was a broad-minded lover of his kind, a man of most
enlightened views on government and human rights; and in the colony
planted by him there was made a serious effort to treat the Indian as an
equal. But the day came when men not of his faith dealt with the Indians
in true English fashion.
Remembering this difference of treatment, we shall the better understand
how it happened that the French could sprinkle the West with little
posts far from Quebec and surrounded by the fiercest of tribes, while
the English could only with difficulty defend their frontier.[1]
[Footnote 1: A fine account of the Indians, and the French and English
ways of treating them, is given in Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_,
Vol. I., pp. 16-25, 41-45, 46-56, 64-80.]
%66. Early Indian Wars.%--Again and again this frontier was attacked.
In 1636 the Pequots, who dwelt along the Thames River in Connecticut,
made war on the settlers in the Connecticut River valley towns. Men were
waylaid and scalped, or taken prisoners and burned at the stake.
Determined to put an end to this, ninety men from the Connecticut towns,
with twenty from Massachusetts and some Mohegan Indians, in 1637 marched
against the marauders. They found the Pequots within a circular stockade
near the present town of Stonington, where of 400 warriors all save five
were killed.
%67. King Philip's War.%--During nearly forty years not a tribe in
all New England dared rise against the white men. But in 1675 trouble
began again. The settlers were steadily crowding the Indians off their
lands. No lands were taken without payment, yet the sales were far from
being voluntary. A new generation of Indians, too, had grown up, and,
heedless of the lesson taught their fathers, the Narragansetts,
Nipmucks, and Wampanoags, led by King Philip and Canonchet, rose upon
the English. A dreadful war followed. When it ended, in 1678, the three
tribes were annihilated. Hardly any Indians save the friendly Mohawks
were left in New England. But of ninety English towns, forty had been
the scene of fire and slaughter, and twelve had been destroyed utterly.
%68. The Iroquois.%--Elsewhere on the frontier a happier relation
existed with the Indians. The Iroquois of central New York were the
fiercest and most warlike Indians of the Atlantic coast. But the fight
with Champlain, in 1609, by turning them into implacable enemies of the
French, had rendered them all the more tolerant of the Dutch and the
English, while their complete conquest and subjugation of the Delawares,
or Lenni Lenape, prepared the way for the easy settlement of New Jersey
and Pennsylvania.
%69. Penn and the Lenni Lenape.%--These Indians were Algonquian, and
lived along the Delaware River and its tributaries. But early in the
seventeenth century they had been reduced to vassalage by the Five
Nations, had been forbidden to carry arms, and had been forced to take
the name of Women.[1]
[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, Vol. I., pp. 30-32,
80-82.]
When the Dutch and Swedes began their settlements on the South River,
and when Penn, in 1683, made a treaty with the Delawares, the settlers
had to deal with peaceful Indians. No horrid wars mark the early history
of Pennsylvania.
%70. The Powhatans in Virginia.%--Much the same may be said of the
Virginia tribes. They were far from friendly, and had they been as
fierce and warlike as the northern tribes, neither the skill of John
Smith, nor the marriage of Pocahontas (the daughter of Powhatan) with
John Rolfe, nor fear of the English muskets, would have saved Jamestown.
[Illustration: Powhatan Indians at work[1]]
[Footnote 1: From a model.]
On the other hand, the destruction of the tribes in New England and the
feud between the French and the Iroquois saved New England. For the time
had now come for the opening of the long struggle between the French and
the English for the ownership of the continent.
SUMMARY
1. The inhabitants of the New World at the time of its discovery, by
mistake called Indians, were barbarians, lived in rude, frail houses,
and used weapons and implements inferior to those of the whites.
2. The Indian tribes of eastern North America are mostly divided into
three great groups: Muskhogean, Iroquoian, and Algonquian.
3. In general, the French made the Indians their friends, while the
English drove them westward and treated them as an inferior race.
[Illustration: THE BRITISH COLONIES AND EUROPEAN POSSESSIONS 1733]