For convenience of discussion, Indian tribal land may be divided into
three classes: First, the land occupied by the villages; second, the
land actually employed in agriculture; third, the land claimed by the
tribe but not occupied, except as a hunting ground.
_Village sites_.--The amount of land taken up as village sites varied
considerably in different parts of the country. It varied also in the
same tribe at different times. As a rule, the North American Indians
lived in communal houses of sufficient size to accommodate several
families. In such cases the village consisted of a few large structures
closely grouped together, so that it covered very little ground. When
territory was occupied by warlike tribes, the construction of rude
palisades around the villages and the necessities of defense generally
tended to compel the grouping of houses, and the permanent village sites
of even the more populous tribes covered only a very small area. In the
case of confederated tribes and in the time of peace the tendency was
for one or more families to establish more or less permanent settlements
away from the main village, where a livelihood was more readily
obtainable. Hence, in territory which had enjoyed a considerable
interval of peace the settlements were in the nature of small
agricultural communities, established at short distances from each other
and extending in the aggregate over a considerable extent of country. In
the case of populous tribes the villages were probably of the character
of the Choctaw towns described by Adair.[4] “The barrier towns, which
are next to the Muskohge and Chikkasah countries, are compactly settled
for social defense, according to the general method of other savage
nations; but the rest, both in the center and toward the Mississippi,
are only scattered plantations, as best suits a separate easy way of
living. A stranger might be in the middle of one of their populous,
extensive towns without seeing half a dozen houses in the direct course
of his path.” More closely grouped settlements are described by Wayne in
American State Papers, 1793, in his account of an expedition down the
Maumee Valley, where he states that “The margins of the Miamis of the
Lake and the Au Glaize appear like one continuous village for a number
of miles, nor have I ever beheld such immense fields of corn in any part
of America from Canada to Florida.” Such a chain of villages as this was
probably highly exceptional; but even under such circumstances the
village sites proper formed but a very small part of the total area
occupied.
[Footnote 4: Hist. of Am. Ind., 1775, p. 282.]
From the foregoing considerations it will be seen that the amount of
land occupied as village sites under any circumstances was
inconsiderable.
_Agricultural land_.--It is practically impossible to make an accurate
estimate of the relative amount of land devoted to agricultural purposes
by any one tribe or by any family of tribes. None of the factors which
enter into the problem are known to us with sufficient accuracy to
enable reliable estimates to be made of the amount of land tilled or of
the products derived from the tillage; and only in few cases have we
trustworthy estimates of the population of the tribe or tribes
practicing agriculture. Only a rough approximation of the truth can be
reached from the scanty data available and from a general knowledge of
Indian methods of subsistence.
The practice of agriculture was chiefly limited to the region south of
the St. Lawrence and east of the Mississippi. In this region it was far
more general and its results were far more important than is commonly
supposed. To the west of the Mississippi only comparatively small areas
were occupied by agricultural tribes and these lay chiefly in New Mexico
and Arizona and along the Arkansas, Platte, and Missouri Rivers. The
rest of that region was tenanted by non-agricultural tribes--unless
indeed the slight attention paid to the cultivation of tobacco by a few
of the west coast tribes, notably the Haida, may be considered
agriculture. Within the first mentioned area most of the tribes, perhaps
all, practiced agriculture to a greater or less extent, though
unquestionably the degree of reliance placed upon it as a means of
support differed much with different tribes and localities.
Among many tribes agriculture was relied upon to supply an
important--and perhaps in the case of a few tribes, the most
important--part of the food supply. The accounts of some of the early
explorers in the southern United States, where probably agriculture was
more systematized than elsewhere, mention corn fields of great extent,
and later knowledge of some northern tribes, as the Iroquois and some of
the Ohio Valley tribes, shows that they also raised corn in great
quantities. The practice of agriculture to a point where it shall prove
the main and constant supply of a people, however, implies a degree of
sedentariness to which our Indians as a rule had not attained and an
amount of steady labor without immediate return which was peculiarly
irksome to them. Moreover, the imperfect methods pursued in clearing,
planting, and cultivating sufficiently prove that the Indians, though
agriculturists, were in the early stages of development as such--a fact
also attested by the imperfect and one-sided division of labor between
the sexes, the men as a rule taking but small share of the burdensome
tasks of clearing land, planting, and harvesting.
It is certain that by no tribe of the United States was agriculture
pursued to such an extent as to free its members from the practice of
the hunter’s or fisher’s art. Admitting the most that can be claimed for
the Indian as an agriculturist, it may be stated that, whether because
of the small population or because of the crude manner in which his
operations were carried on, the amount of land devoted to agriculture
within the area in question was infinitesimally small as compared with
the total. Upon a map colored to show only the village sites and
agricultural land, the colors would appear in small spots, while by far
the greater part of the map would remain uncolored.
_Hunting claims_.--The great body of the land within the area mapped
which was occupied by agricultural tribes, and all the land outside it,
was held as a common hunting ground, and the tribal claim to territory,
independent of village sites and corn fields, amounted practically to
little else than hunting claims. The community of possession in the
tribe to the hunting ground was established and practically enforced by
hunting laws, which dealt with the divisions of game among the village,
or among the families of the hunters actually taking part in any
particular hunt. As a rule, such natural landmarks as rivers, lakes,
hills, and mountain chains served to mark with sufficient accuracy the
territorial tribal limits. In California, and among the Haida and
perhaps other tribes of the northwest coast, the value of certain
hunting and fishing claims led to their definition by artificial
boundaries, as by sticks or stones.[5]
[Footnote 5: Powers, Cont. N.A. Eth. 1877, vol. 3, p. 109: Dawson,
Queen Charlotte Islands, 1880, p. 117.]
Such precautions imply a large population, and in such regions as
California the killing of game upon the land of adjoining tribes was
rigidly prohibited and sternly punished.
As stated above, every part of the vast area included in the present map
is to be regarded as belonging, according to Indian ideas of land title,
to one or another of the Indian tribes. To determine the several tribal
possessions and to indicate the proper boundary lines between individual
tribes and linguistic families is a work of great difficulty. This is
due more to the imperfection and scantiness of available data concerning
tribal claims than to the absence of claimants or to any ambiguity in
the minds of the Indians as to the boundaries of their several
possessions.
Not only is precise data wanting respecting the limits of land actually
held or claimed by many tribes, but there are other tribes, which
disappeared early in the history of our country, the boundaries to whose
habitat is to be determined only in the most general way. Concerning
some of these, our information is so vague that the very linguistic
family they belonged to is in doubt. In the case of probably no one
family are the data sufficient in amount and accuracy to determine
positively the exact areas definitely claimed or actually held by the
tribes. Even in respect of the territory of many of the tribes of the
eastern United States, much of whose land was ceded by actual treaty
with the Government, doubt exists. The fixation of the boundary points,
when these are specifically mentioned in the treaty, as was the rule, is
often extremely difficult, owing to the frequent changes of geographic
names and the consequent disagreement of present with ancient maps.
Moreover, when the Indian’s claim to his land had been admitted by
Government, and the latter sought to acquire a title through voluntary
cession by actual purchase, land assumed a value to the Indian never
attaching to it before.
Under these circumstances, either under plea of immemorial occupancy or
of possession by right of conquest, the land was often claimed, and the
claims urged with more or less plausibility by several tribes, sometimes
of the same linguistic family, sometimes of different families.
It was often found by the Government to be utterly impracticable to
decide between conflicting claims, and not infrequently the only way out
of the difficulty lay in admitting the claim of both parties, and in
paying for the land twice or thrice. It was customary for a number of
different tribes to take part in such treaties, and not infrequently
several linguistic families were represented. It was the rule for each
tribe, through its representatives, to cede its share of a certain
territory, the natural boundaries of which as a whole are usually
recorded with sufficient accuracy. The main purpose of the Government in
treaty-making being to obtain possession of the land, comparatively
little attention was bestowed to defining the exact areas occupied by
the several tribes taking part in a treaty, except in so far as the
matter was pressed upon attention by disputing claimants. Hence the
territory claimed by each tribe taking part in the treaty is rarely
described, and occasionally not all the tribes interested in the
proposed cession are even mentioned categorically. The latter statement
applies more particularly to the territory west of the Mississippi, the
data for determining ownership to which is much less precise, and the
doubt and confusion respecting tribal boundary lines correspondingly
greater than in the country east of that river. Under the above
circumstances, it will be readily understood that to determine tribal
boundaries within accurately drawn lines is in the vast majority of
cases quite impossible.
Imperfect and defective as the terms of the treaties frequently are as
regards the definition of tribal boundaries, they are by far the most
accurate and important of the means at our command for fixing boundary
lines upon the present map. By their aid the territorial possessions of
a considerable number of tribes have been determined with desirable
precision, and such areas definitely established have served as checks
upon the boundaries of other tribes, concerning the location and extent
of whose possessions little is known.
For establishing the boundaries of such tribes as are not mentioned in
treaties, and of those whose territorial possessions are not given with
sufficient minuteness, early historical accounts are all important. Such
accounts, of course, rarely indicate the territorial possessions of the
tribes with great precision. In many cases, however, the sites of
villages are accurately given. In others the source of information
concerning a tribe is contained in a general statement of the occupancy
of certain valleys or mountain ranges or areas at the heads of certain
rivers, no limiting lines whatever being assigned. In others, still, the
notice of a tribe is limited to a brief mention of the presence in a
certain locality of hunting or war parties.
Data of this loose character would of course be worthless in an attempt
to fix boundary lines in accordance with the ideas of the modern
surveyor. The relative positions of the families and the relative size
of the areas occupied by them, however, and not their exact boundaries,
are the chief concern in a linguistic map, and for the purpose of
establishing these, and, in a rough way, the boundaries of the territory
held by the tribes composing them, these data are very important, and
when compared with one another and corrected by more definite data, when
such are at hand, they have usually been found to be sufficient for the
purpose.