throughout the northern continent, from the Arctic circle to the Mexican
Gulf, no trace has been recovered of the previous existence of anything
that properly admits of the term “native civilisation.” The rude arts of
Europe’s Stone age belong to a period lying far behind its remotest
traditions; unless we appeal to the mythic allusions of Hesiod, or to
such poetic imaginings as the _Prometheus_ of Æschylus. But all
available evidence serves to show that the condition of the native
tribes throughout the northern continent has never advanced beyond the
stage which finds its aptest illustration in the arts of their Stone
period, including the rudimentary efforts at turning to account their
ample resources of native copper without the use of fire.
But this uniformity in the condition of the aborigines, and the
consequent resemblance in their arts, habits, and mode of life, has been
the fruitful source of misleading assumptions. Everywhere the European
explorer met only rude hunting and warring tribes, exhibiting such
slight variations in all that first attracts the eye of the most
observant traveller, that an exaggerated idea of their ethnical
uniformity was the natural result. In the systematisings of the
ethnologist, the American type was classed apart as at once uniform and
distinctive; and, strange as it may now seem, this idea found nowhere
such ready favour as among those who had the fullest access to the
evidence by which its truth could be tested. It was the most
comprehensive induction of the author of _Crania Americana_, as the
fruit of his conscientious researches in American craniology. The
authors of _Indigenous Races of the Earth_ and _Types of Mankind_, no
less unhesitatingly affirmed that “identical characters pervade all the
American races, ancient and modern, over the whole continent.”[111] In
this they were sustained by the high authority of Agassiz, who, after
discussing in his _Provinces of the Animal World, and their relation to
Types of Man_, the fauna peculiar to the American continent, and
pointing out the much greater uniformity of its natural productions,
when its twin continents are compared with those of the eastern
hemisphere, thus summed up the result of his investigations: “With these
facts before us, we may expect that there should be no great diversity
among the tribes of man inhabiting this continent; and indeed the most
extensive investigation of their peculiarities has led Dr. Morton to
consider them as constituting but a single race, from the confines of
the Esquimaux down to the southernmost extremity of the continent. But,
at the same time, it should be remembered that, in accordance with the
zoological character of the whole realm, this race is divided into an
infinite number of small tribes, presenting more or less difference one
from another.” It was natural and reasonable that the men of the
sixteenth century should believe in Calibans, or Ewaipanoma, “the
Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.”
America was to them, in the most literal sense, another world; and it
was easier for them to think of it as peopled with such monstrosities
than with human beings like ourselves. But it is curious to note in this
nineteenth century the lingering traces of the old sentiment; and to see
men of science still finding it difficult to emancipate themselves from
the idea that this continent is so essentially another world, that it is
inconceivable to them that the races by which it is peopled should bear
any affinity to themselves or to others of the Old World. American
ethnologists long clung to the idea of an essentially distinct
indigenous race; and Dr. Nott, Dr. Meigs, and other investigators
welcomed every confirmation of the view of Dr. Morton as to the
occupation of the whole American continent by one peculiar type from
which alone the Eskimo were to be excepted, as an immigrant element,
possibly—according to the ingenious speculations of one distinguished
student of science,—of remotest European antiquity. Professor Huxley in
an address to the Ethnological Society in 1869, suggests hypothetically,
that the old Mexican and South American races represent the true
American stock; and that the Red Indians of North America may be the
product of an intermixture of the indigenous native race with the
Eskimo. It is noticeable, at any rate, that nearly all writers, however
widely differing on other points, follow Humboldt in classing the Eskimo
apart as a distinct type. He remarks in his preface to his _American
Researches_, that, “except those which border the polar circle, the
nations of America form a single race characterised by the formation of
the skull, the colour of the skin, the extreme thinness of the beard,
and the straight glossy hair.” Some of the characteristics thus noted
are undoubtedly widely prevalent; but the head-form, or “formation of
the skull,” is the most important; and a careful comparison of the
skulls of different tribes has long since modified the opinion,
expressed by the great traveller and reasserted by distinguished
American ethnologists.
In reality, were the typical feature most insisted on as universal as it
was assumed to be, it would furnish the strongest argument for
classifying the predominant Asiatic and American types as one. All the
points appealed to suggest affinity to the Asiatic Mongol. But so far
from the Eskimo standing apart as a markedly exceptional type, if due
allowance be made for the prolonged influence of an Arctic climate, the
Huron-Iroquois approximate to them in some very notable ethnical
features. The dolichocephalic head-form, especially, is common to them,
and to the Algonkin and other Northern Indians. Of those Dr. Latham
remarks: “The Iroquois and Algonkins exhibit in the most typical form
the characteristics of the North American Indians as exhibited in the
earliest descriptions, and are the two families upon which the current
notions respecting the physiognomy, habits, and moral and intellectual
powers of the so-called Red Race are chiefly founded.” Of the former,
Mr. Parkman, who has studied their later history with the minutest care,
says: “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.”[112] To this
typical American race, accordingly, and to some of its peculiarly
distinctive usages, special attention is here directed.
* * * * *
The Iroquois were an important branch of the great stock which included
also the Hurons, or Wyandots, the native historical race of Canada. But
divided as the two were throughout the whole period of French Canadian
history by the bitterest antagonism, it is convenient to speak of them
under the term of Huron-Iroquois. In reviewing the history of this
indigenous stock, with the suggestions prompted by their peculiar
characteristics, it is desirable not only to note the physical geography
of the country which they occupied, as a region of forest and lakes,
but, still more, to keep in view this fact as a predominant
characteristic of the continent, and as one important factor in the
evolution of whatever may seem to be peculiar in the forest tribes of
North America.
The effects resulting from the physical features of a country on the
development and intermingling of its races can nowhere be wisely
overlooked. Even within the limits of the British Islands the influences
of mountain and lowlands: of the fertile stretches of Kent and the
valley of the Thames, the fens of Lincolnshire, the moorlands of
Northumbria, and the Welsh and Scottish Highlands, have largely
contributed to the perpetuation, if not in some degree to the
development, of ethnical distinctions and the diversities in language.
In this respect Britain is an epitome of Europe, with its great mountain
ranges and detached peninsulas, by means of which races have been
isolated within well-defined areas, and their languages and other
distinctive peculiarities preserved. Russia alone, of all European
countries, presents analogies to Northern Asia as a region favourable to
nomadic life; and in so far as its history differs from that of the
continent at large, it accords with such physical conditions. Throughout
the whole historic period, as doubtless in prehistoric times, the great
chain of mountains reaching from the western spur of the Pyrenees to the
Balkans has influenced European progress; while the chief navigable
river, the Danube, traversing the continent through one uniform
temperate zone, has tended still further to the perpetuation of certain
distinctive ethnical characteristics in Central Europe. In all its most
important geographical features, the northern continent of America
presents a striking contrast to this. An isosceles triangle with its
base within the Arctic circle, it tapers to a narrow isthmus towards the
equator. Its great mountain chain runs from north to south, and in near
proximity to the Pacific coast; and its chief navigable river, rising
within the Canadian Dominion, and receiving as its tributaries rivers
draining vast regions on either hand, traverses twenty degrees of
latitude before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. A lower range of
highlands towards the Atlantic seaboard forms the eastern boundary of
the great interior plain. But the Alleghanies or Appalachian system of
mountains, though they may be said to extend from the St. Lawrence to
the Mexican Gulf, rise only at a few points, as in the White Mountains
of New Hampshire, to any great elevation. They form rather a long
plateau, intersected by wide valleys, diversifying the landscape,
without constituting strongly defined barriers or lines of demarcation.
As a whole, the continent of North America, eastward from the Rocky
Mountains, may be described as a level area, so slightly modified by any
elevated regions throughout its whole extent, from the Arctic circle to
the Gulf of Mexico, as to present no other impediment except its forests
to the wanderings of nomadic tribes. It is interlaced with rivers, and
diversified everywhere with lakes, alike available for navigation and
for fishing; and, until the intrusion of European immigrants, its
forests and prairies abounded with game far in excess of the wants of
its population. Everything thus tended to perpetuate the condition of
nomadic hunter tribes. This stage of native American history inevitably
drew to a close under the influence of European institutions and
civilisation; but it is interesting to note, that the same absence of
any well-defined geographical limitations of area, which tended to
perpetuate the nomadic habits of the savage, has aided in consolidating
the great confederacy of the United States, and maintaining an ethnical
and political conformity throughout the northern continent in striking
contrast to the diversities in race and political institutions in
Europe.
History and native traditions alike confirm the idea that the valley of
the St. Lawrence was the habitat of the Huron-Iroquois stock as far back
as evidence can be appealed to. The Huron traditions tell of a time when
the Province of Quebec was the home of the race eastward to the sea;
while those of three at least of the members of the Iroquois confederacy
in legendary fashion claimed their birth from the soil south of the
great river. When the French explorers, under the leadership of Jacques
Cartier, first entered the St. Lawrence, in 1535, they found at
Stadaconé and Hochelaga—the old native sites now occupied by the cities
of Quebec and Montreal,—a population apparently of the Huron-Iroquois
stock; and, in so far as reliance may be placed on their traditions,
Canada was then populous throughout the whole valley of the St. Lawrence
with industrious native tribes, the representatives of a race that had
occupied the same region for unnumbered centuries. “Some fanciful tales
of a supernatural origin from the heart of a mountain; of a migration to
the eastern seaboard; and of a subsequent return to the country of the
lakes and rivers, where they finally settled, comprise,” says
Brownell,[113] “most that is noticeable in the native traditions of the
Six Nations prior to the grand confederation.” But the value of such
traditionary transmission of national history among unlettered tribes
has received repeated confirmation; and incidents in the history of
their famous league, perpetuated with circumstantial minuteness in the
traditions of the Iroquois, are assignable apparently to the fifteenth
century. The older event of the overthrow of the Alligéwi, in the Ohio
valley, of which independent traditional records have been handed down
by the Lenni-Lenape, or Delawares, and by the Iroquois, is now believed
to be correctly assignable to a date nearly contemporaneous with the
assumption of the authority of Bretwalda of the Heptarchy by Egbert of
Wessex,—that memorable step in the fusion of “nations” not greatly more
important than those of the Iroquois league, until their divisions in
speech and polity were effaced in the unity of the English people. As to
“the fanciful tale of a supernatural origin from the heart of a
mountain,” it is simply a literal rendering of the old Greek metaphor of
the autochthones, or children of the soil, symbolised by the Athenians
wearing the grasshopper in their hair; and is by no means peculiar to
the Iroquois. Mr. Horatio Hale derived from Manderong, an old Wyandot
chief, the story, as narrated to him by the Hurons of Lorette. They took
him, he said, to a mountain, and showed him the opening in its side from
whence the progenitors of the people emerged, when they “first came out
of the ground.”[114] The late Huron chief, Tahourenché, or
François-Xavier Picard, communicated to me the same legendary tradition
of the indigenous origin of his people; telling me, though with a smile,
that they came out of the side of a mountain between Quebec and the
great sea. He connected this with other incidents, all pointing to a
traditional belief that the northern shores of the lower St. Lawrence
were the original home of the race; and he spoke of certain ancient
events in the history of his people as having occurred when they lived
beside the big sea. The earliest authentic reference to this tradition
occurs in the _Relations_ for 1636, where Brebeuf, after a brief
allusion to certain of their magical songs and dances, says: “The origin
of all such mysteries is assigned by them to a being of superhuman
stature, who was wounded in the forehead by one of their nation, at the
time when they lived near the sea.” The references to a migration from
the seaboard obviously point to one of those incidents in the life of
the nation which marked for them an epoch like the Hegira of the Arabs.
When Champlain followed Cartier nearly seventy years later he found only
a few Algonkins in their birch-bark wigwams, where the palisaded towns
of the Huron-Iroquois had stood. But no Algonkin legend claims this as
their early home. The invariable tradition of the Ojibways points to the
Lake Superior region and the country stretching towards Hudson Bay as
the ancestral home of the Algonkin tribes.
Such information as can thus be gleaned from a variety of independent
sources, as from the somewhat confused yet trustworthy narrative of
David Cusick, the Tuscarora historian, and from Peter Dooyentate, the
Wyandot historian, all leads to the same conclusion. From remote and
altogether pre-Columbian centuries, the Hurons and other allied
tribes—the occupants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of
various detached portions of the country north of the St. Lawrence and
eastward of the Georgian Bay,—appear to have been in possession of the
whole region to which their oldest traditions pointed as the cradle of
the race; while nations of the Algonkin stock lay beyond them to the
north-west. The great river and the lakes from whence it flows into the
lower valley formed a well-defined southern boundary for affiliated
tribes; but the first Dutch and English explorers of the Hudson, and of
the tract of country which now constitutes the western part of the State
of New York, found the river-valleys and lake shores in occupation of
the Iroquois confederacy, then consisting of Mohawks, Oneidas,
Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas. These constituted the five nations of
the famous Iroquois league. But the Hurons of Canada, with whom they
were latterly at deadly feud, appear to have been the oldest
representatives of the common race, and were still in occupation of
their ancestral home when Cartier first explored the St. Lawrence. The
same race had spread far to the south; and its representatives, in
detached groups, long continued to perpetuate its influence. These
included the Conestogas or Andastes, the Andastogues, the Carantouans,
the Cherohakahs or Nottoways, the Tuscaroras, and others, under various
names. It is not always easy to recognise the same tribe under its
widely dissimilar designations. The Susquehannocks of the English and
the Minquas of the Dutch, appear to be the Andastes under other
designations, and Champlain’s Carantouans may have been the Eries. Under
those and other names the Huron-Iroquois stock extended to the country
of the Tuscaroras in North Carolina. Still farther south Gallatin
surmised, from linguistic evidence, a connection between the Cherokees
and the Iroquois.[115] This fact Mr. Hale has placed beyond doubt; and
having detected in the language of the former a grammatical structure
mainly Huron-Iroquois, while the vocabulary is to a great extent
foreign, he is inclined to think that we thus recover traces of a
people, far south in Alabama and Georgia, the descendants of refugees of
the conquered Alligéwi, adopted into one of the nations of their
Iroquois conquerors.[116]
From one after another of the outlying southern offshoots of the common
stock, additions were made from time to time, to restore the numbers of
the decimated Iroquois. Westward of the confederacy was the country of
the Eries, an offshoot of the Seneca nation, occupying the southern
shore of the great lake which perpetuates their name. Immediately to the
north of the Eries, within the Canadian frontier, the Attiwendaronks, or
Neuters, occupied the peninsula of Niagara, while the Tiontates or
Petuns, and other tribes of the same stock, were settled in the fertile
region between Lakes Erie and Huron. In 1714, the Tuscaroras, when
driven by the English out of North Carolina, were welcomed by their
Iroquois kinsmen, and received into the league which thenceforth bore
the name of the Six Nations. Towards the middle of the same century the
waste of war made them ready to welcome any additions to their numbers;
and the Tuteloes and Nanticokes, both apparently Algonkin, furnished
fresh accessions to the diminished numbers of the confederacy, but
without taking their place as distinct nations.
But of all the nations of the stock thus widely spread westward and
southward, the Hurons are the native historical race of Canada,
intimately identified with incidents of its early settlement and of
friendly intercourse with _La Nouvelle France_. Their language is now
recognised as the oldest form of the common speech of the
Huron-Iroquois, and it is not creditable to Canadian philologists that
its grammar still remains unrepresented in any accurate printed form.
The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec did, indeed, publish in
its _Transactions_, in 1831, the translation of a Latin MS., compiled
with much industry by a missionary who had laboured among the Hurons of
Lorette, and whose anonymous work was found amongst the papers of the
mission. But it is the production of one ignorant of the science of
language, and gives no adequate idea either of the grammatical structure
or of the variety and richness of the Huron tongue.
The languages or dialects spoken by many native Indian tribes have
undoubtedly perished with the races to which they pertained; but the
numerous Huron-Iroquois dialects still existing, not only in written
form, but as living tongues, afford valuable materials for ethnical
study. The history of other Indian tribes abundantly accounts for the
multiplication of a minute diversity of languages so specially
characteristic of the American continent, with the endless subdivisions
of its indigenous population into petty tribes, kept apart by
internecine feuds. The number of native American languages is estimated
by Vater, in his _Linguarum Totius Orbis Index_, at about five hundred.
But the question forthwith arises: What shall be regarded as
constituting a language? For, in the wanderings of little bands of
Indian nomads, and the adoption of refugees from disbanded tribes,
dialects multiply indefinitely. Nearly six hundred of such are
catalogued by Mr. Bancroft, in his _Native Races of the Pacific States_,
as spoken between Alaska and the Isthmus of Panama.
Until recently the tendency has been to assume an underlying unity of
speech for the whole American languages, based on the polysynthetic or
holophrastic characteristic ascribed to the whole; just as by an
exaggerated estimate of the prevalence of a predominant head-form, one
physical type was long assumed to characterise the American race from
Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego. Perhaps, so far as language is
concerned, the present tendency is towards the opposite extreme. Major
Powell, the chief of the Ethnographical Bureau at Washington, recognises
eighty groups of languages in North America, between which no affinity
is thus far apparent. Fifty-five of those he believes to be
satisfactorily determined as distinct stocks. On the other hand,
Professor Whitney, after noticing the complexity of the inquiry when
directed to the native American languages, thus proceeds: “Yet it is the
confident opinion of linguistic scholars that a fundamental unity lies
at the base of all these infinitely varying forms of speech; that they
may be, and probably are, all descended from a single parent
language.”[117]
Here then is a field for much useful research, with the promise of
valuable results. The subject is rendered more important owing to the
fact that, of nearly all the nations of the North American continent,
their languages are the only surviving memorials of the race. Already,
under the efficient supervision of the Ethnographic Bureau of the United
States, systematic contributions are being secured for this important
branch of knowledge, so far as their own geographical area is concerned.
A no less important area is embraced in the Dominion of Canada, and the
attention of the Government is now directed to the necessity for timely
action in this matter. In the North-West, and in British Columbia,
languages are disappearing and races becoming extinct. Mr. Hale has
contributed to the American Philosophical Society’s _Transactions_ a
valuable monogram on the Tutelo tribe and language, derived mainly from
Nikonha, the last full-blood Tutelo, who survived till upwards of a
hundred years of age. He was married to a Cayuga woman, and lived among
her people on their Grand river reserve. “My only knowledge of the
Tuteloes,” says Mr. Hale, “had been derived from the few notices
comprised in Gallatin’s _Synopsis of the Indian Tribes_, where they are
classed with the nations of the Huron-Iroquois stock. At the same time
the distinguished author, with the scientific caution which marked all
his writings, is careful to mention that no vocabulary of the language
was known. That which was now obtained showed, beyond question, that the
language was totally distinct from the Huron-Iroquois tongues, and that
it was closely allied to the language of the Dakota family.”[118] But
for the timely exertion of a philological student, this interesting link
in the history of the Huron-Iroquois relations with affiliated tribes
would have been lost beyond recall.