[Sidenote: 1881.]
On New Year’s Day, after the children had given their pretty presents
to Uncle Fritz, and after he had shown them his New Year’s cards and
other greetings, he asked if they had brought anything to read.
“We are all alive about the Indians,” said Laura. “We have seen Miss La
Flesche, who is lovely, and we have heard her talk Indian. She never
would have roasted Father Jogues by a slow fire. Is she the same sort
as the Iroquois?”
Uncle Fritz sent for the second volume of the Archæologia Americana,
and showed them Mr. Gallatin’s map of the United States, and the
division of it into nine great Indian families. Fergus said the map
was copied in a volume of Bancroft’s History. The children saw that
the Massachusetts Indians are Algonkins, or, as Mr. Gallatin says,
Algonkin-Lenape. The Iroquois, who were so cruel to the poor Jesuit
Father, are of another race.
“I am glad,” said Blanche, “that it was no cousin of my nice Waban who
did such awful things.”
Blanche lives on Waban Street, though the sign-painters spell it Wabon.
Uncle Fritz said grimly that he was glad Blanche knew he was “nice.”
The children saw that the Algonkin family covered most of the United
States north of the Gulf States and east of the Mississippi, excepting
New York and most of Pennsylvania, where were Iroquois tribes; and
that there were Iroquois tribes west of the Niagara in the peninsula
of Canada. They saw that the Algonkins extended far north, half up the
side of Hudson’s Bay.
“But, you know,” said Uncle Fritz, “that they are all great wanderers.
You may catch a bit of dialect thousands of miles off from the tribe
where you first found it. When Mr. Bartlett was on the frontier of
Mexico, he happened to notice a sort of ‘click,’ like the Zulu ‘click,’
in the language of the Apaches, the roving horsemen of those regions.
Mr. Bartlett is a very accurate linguist, and he remembered that Dr.
Richardson said of the Athapescans on the Arctic Ocean that they had
such a ‘click.’ He looked in their vocabularies, and he found they used
some of the same words the Apaches did. These Apaches had strayed away
from them, nobody knows when.”
“Apache sounds like Athapescan,” said Fergus; and Uncle Fritz nodded
approval of the bold etymology.
“Well, then,” said Tom Rising, “I suppose any of these people painted
yellow on the map, these Chippeways and the rest, can read your Eliot’s
Bible, Uncle Fritz.”
“No, my boy, that is asking too much. For the Massachusetts dialect
and Eliot’s spelling of it are now two hundred years old, and probably
always our Indians differed from the Hudson’s Bay Indians, for
instance, as much as Italians from Frenchmen. Still Eliot’s grammar
and dictionary are useful now to the missionaries among any Algonkin
tribes.”
The children began comparing words in the vocabulary in Mr. Gallatin’s
book, and trying to learn them. Here is the Indian for “man,” from one
language of each of the nine great Eastern races. Mr. Gallatin gives
specimens of forty-four languages, which are all grouped under these
nine divisions:--