Indians, since the settlement of the main body for the past century on
their reserves on the Grand river, in the Province of Ontario, curiously
illustrates the pertinacity with which they have cherished the dialectic
varieties of a common tongue. But while the essential differences of
language everywhere constitute one of the most obvious distinctions of
race, it is interesting to note the recognition by the Indians of
affinities of dialects, and even remote kinship based on such evidence;
as in the readmission of the Tuscaroras to the Iroquois family of
nations. According to Brebeuf, the kinship of the Attiwendaronks of the
Niagara peninsula was recognised by the Hurons in that designation which
classed them as a “people of a language a little different.”[119] Peter
Jones Kahkewaquonaby, a civilised Ojibway, adopted into the Mohawk
nation, in speaking of the traditions of the Indians as to their own
origin, says: “All the information I have been able to gain in relation
to the question amounts to the following. Many, many winters ago the
Great Spirit, Keche-Manedoo, created the Indians. Every nation speaking
a different language is a second creation, but all were made by the same
Supreme Being.”[120]
Among the races of the northern continent, none east of the Rocky
Mountains more fitly represent their special characteristics than the
great Huron-Iroquois family. Their language is remarkable for its
compass and elaborate grammatical structure; and the numerous dialects
of the common mother tongue furnish evidence of migration and conquest
over a wide region eastward of the Mississippi. To such philological
evidence many inquirers are now turning for a clue to the origin of the
races of the New World, and for the recovery of proofs of their affinity
to one or other of the Old World stocks. Professor Whitney, after
dwelling on the “exaggeratedly agglutinative type” of the ancient
Iberian language, and its isolation among the essentially dissimilar
languages of Aryan Europe, thus proceeds: “The Basque forms a suitable
stepping-stone from which to enter the peculiar linguistic domain of the
New World, since there is no other dialect of the Old World which so
much resembles in structure the American languages”[121]; not indeed, as
he adds, that they are all of accordant form; for he pronounces the
grouping of them in a single great family as “a classification of
ignorance.” The possibilities of ancient communication between the
opposite shores of the Atlantic, and the migration of colonists of the
New World from the Mediterranean Sea, have already been discussed in
dealing with the legend of the Lost Atlantis. Great indeed as is the
interval of time therein implied, it would not suffice to erase all
traces of affinity of languages. But it would be vain to hope for any
historical guidance recoverable from the oldest of Iroquois legends. If,
moreover, Iberian, Hittite, Egyptian, Phœnician, or other of the world’s
gray fathers, transplanted to America the germs of its long indigenous
stock, we look in vain for any traces of their Old World civilisation
north of the Mexican Gulf. Nor is it by any means an established truth
that the arts of Central America or Peru are of any very great
antiquity. Their metallurgy was at a crude, yet suggestive, stage at
which it was not likely to be long arrested. The same may be said of
their hieroglyphic records; though they certainly present some highly
significant analogies to the Chinese phase of word-writing, calculated,
along with other aspects of resemblance to that stage of partial, yet
long-enduring, civilisation of which China is the Asiatic exemplar, to
modify our estimate of the possible duration of Central and Southern
American civilisation. Nevertheless the assumption of an antiquity in
any degree approximating to that of Egypt seems wholly irreconcilable
with the evidence. Their architecture was barbaric, though imposing from
the scale on which their great temples and palaces were built. In
Central America especially, the aggregation of numerous ill-lighted
little chambers, like honey-comb cells excavated out of the huge pile,
is strongly suggestive of affinity to the Casas Grandes, and the Pueblos
of the Zuñi; and this is confirmed by the correspondence traceable
between many of their architectural details and the ornamentation of the
Pueblo pottery.
The astronomy and the calendars, both of Mexico and Peru, with their
detailed methods of recording their divisions of time, are all
suggestive of an immature phase of civilisation in the very stage of its
emergence from barbarism, modified, in some cases, by the recent
acquisition of certain arts. As to the peculiar phase of Mexican art,
and whatever other evidence of progress Mexico supplies, they appear to
me no more than natural products of the first successful intrusion of
the barbarians of the northern continent on the seats of tropical
civilisation. Certain it seems, at least, that if an earlier
civilisation had ever existed in the north, or if the representatives of
any Old World type were present there in numbers for any length of time,
some traces of their lost arts must long since have come to light.
But the conservative power of language is indisputable; and if the
kinship now claimed for the polysynthetic languages of both hemispheres
be correct, we are on the threshold of significant disclosures. The
Huron-Iroquois tongue, in its numerous ramifications, as well as some of
the native languages that have outlived the last of the races to which
they belonged, may preserve traces of affinities as yet unrecognised.
But in no respect are the Huron-Iroquois more correctly adducible as a
typical race of American aborigines than in the absence of all evidence
of their ever having acquired any of the arts upon which civilisation
depends. We look in vain in their vocabularies for terms of science, or
for names adapted to the arts and manufactures on which social progress
depends. But they had developed a gift of oratory, for which their
language amply sufficed, and from which we may infer the presence in
this race of savages of latent powers, capable of wondrous development.
“Their languages show, in their elaborate mechanism, as well as in their
fulness of expression and grasp of thought, the evidence of the mental
capacity of those who speak them. Scholars who admire the inflections of
the Greek and Sanscrit verb, with their expressive force and clearness,
will not be less impressed with the ingenious structure of the verb in
Iroquois. It comprises nine tenses, three moods, the active and passive
voices, and at least, twenty of those forms which in the Semitic
grammars are styled conjugations. The very names of these forms will
suffice to give evidence of the care and minuteness with which the
framers of this remarkable language have endeavoured to express every
shade of meaning. We have the diminutive and augmentative forms, the
cis-locative and trans-locative, the duplicative, reiterative, motional,
causative, progressive, attributive, frequentative, and many
others.”[122] To speak, indeed, of the Iroquois as, in a consciously
active sense, the framers of all this would be misleading. But it
unquestionably grew up in the deliberations around the council fire,
where the conflicting aims of confederate tribes were swayed by the
eloquence of some commanding orator, until the fiercest warrior of this
forest race learned to value more the successful wielding of the tongue
in the _Kanonsionni_, or figurative Long House of the League, even than
the wielding of the tomahawk in the field. At the organisation of the
confederacy, the Canyengas or Mohawks were figuratively said to have
“built a house,” _rodinonsonnih_, or rather to have “built the long
house” in which the council fire of the Five Nations was kindled. Of
this the Senecas, lying on the extreme west, were styled the
“door-keepers,” and the Onondagas, whose territory was central, were the
custodians. The whole usage is rhetorical and figurative. Under such
influences the language of the Huron-Iroquois was framed, and it grew
rich in emotional and persuasive forms. It only needed the evolution of
a true alphabet out of the pictorial symbolism on their painted robes,
or the grave-posts of their chiefs, to inaugurate a literature which
should embody the orations of the Iroquois Demosthenes, and the songs of
a native Homer, for whom a vehicle of thought was already prepared, rich
and flexible as poet could desire.
So far as the physical traits of the American aborigines furnish any
evidence of ethnical affinity they unquestionably suggest some common
line of descent with the Asiatic Mongol; and this is consistent with the
agglutinate characteristics common to a large class of languages of both
continents. But, on the other hand, the characteristic head-form of the
Huron-Iroquois, as well as that of Algonkin and other northern tribes,
deviates alike from the brachycephalic type of the southern Indians and
from that of the Asiatic Mongols. Humboldt, who enjoyed rare
opportunities for studying the ethnical characteristics of both
continents, but to whom, nevertheless, the northern races, with their
dolichocephalic type of head were unknown, dwells, in his _American
Researches_, on the striking resemblance which the American race bear to
the Asiatic Mongols. Latham classes both under the common head of
Mongolidæ; and Dr. Charles Pickering, of the American Exploring
Expedition, arrived at the same conclusion as the result of his own
independent study of the races of both continents. Nevertheless, however
great may be the resemblance in many points between the true Red Indian
and the Asiatic Mongol, it falls short of even an approximate physical
identity. The Mongolian of Asia is not indeed to be spoken of as one
unvarying type any more than the American. But the extent to which the
Mongolian head-form and peculiar physiognomy characterise one widely
diffused section of the population of the eastern continent, gives it
special prominence among the great ethnical divisions of the human race.
Morton assigns 1421 as the cranial capacity of eighteen Mongol, and only
1234 as that of 164 American skulls other than Peruvian or Mexican. Dr.
Paul Topinard, in discussing the American type, adds: “If we are to rely
on the method of cubic measurement followed by Morton, the American
skull is one of the least capacious of the whole human race.”[123] But
Dr. Morton’s results are in some respects misleading. The mean capacity
yielded by the measurements of 214 American skulls in the Peabody Museum
of Archæology, including a considerable number of females, is 1331; and
with a carefully selected series, excluding exceptionally large and
small crania, the results would be higher. Twenty-six male California
skulls, for example, yield a mean capacity of 1470. The Huron-Iroquois
crania would rank among such exceptional examples.[124] The forehead is,
indeed, low and receding, but the general cerebral capacity is good; and
Dr. Morton specially notes its approximation to the European mean.[125]
But the assumption of uniformity in the ethnical characteristics of the
various races of North and South America is untenable. All probabilities
rather favour the idea of different ethnical centres, a diversity of
origin, and considerable admixture of races. All evidence, moreover,
whether physical or philological, whatever else it may prove, leaves no
room for doubt as to a greatly prolonged period of isolation of the
native races of the New World. Whether they came from the Mediterranean,
in that old mythic dawn the memory of which survived in the legend of a
submerged Atlantis; or the history of their primeval migration still
lingers among fading traces of philological affinity with the Basques;
or if, with the still more remote glimpses which affinite Arctic
ethnology has been assumed to supply, we seek to follow the palæolithic
race of Central Europe’s Reindeer period in the long pilgrimage to
Behring Straits, and so to the later home of the American Mongol; this,
at least, becomes more and more obvious, that they brought with them no
arts derived from the ancient civilisations of Egypt or of Asia. So far,
at least, as the northern continent is concerned, no evidence tends to
suggest that the aborigines greatly differed at any earlier period from
the condition in which they were found by Cartier when he first entered
the St. Lawrence. They were absolutely ignorant of metallurgy; and
notwithstanding the abundance of pure native copper accessible to them,
they cannot be said even to have attained to that rudimentary stage of
metallurgic art which for Europe is spoken of as its “Copper Age.”
Copper was to them no more than a malleable stone, which they fashioned
into axes and knives with their stone hammers. Their pottery was of the
most primitive crudeness, hand-fashioned by their women without the aid
of the potter’s wheel. The grass or straw-plaiting of their basket-work
might seem to embody the hint of the weaver’s loom; but the products of
the chase furnished them with skins of the bear and deer, sufficient for
all purposes of clothing. They had advanced in no degree beyond the
condition of the neolithic savage of Europe’s Stone age when, at the
close of the fifteenth century, they were abruptly brought into contact
with its cultured arts. The gifted historian, Mr. Francis Parkman, who
has thrown so fascinating an interest over the story of their share in
the long-protracted struggle of the French and English colonists of
North America, says of them: “Among all the barbarous nations of the
continent the Iroquois stand paramount. Elements which among other
tribes were crude, confused, and embryotic, were among them systematised
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.” Yet with this high
estimate of the race as pre-eminent among Red Indian nations, he adds:
“That the Iroquois, left under their institutions to work out their
destiny undisturbed, would ever have developed a civilisation of their
own, I do not believe.”[126] They had not, in truth, taken the first
step in such a direction; and, were it not for the evidence which
language supplies, it would be conceivable that they, and the whole
barbarian nations of which they are a type, were Mongol intruders of a
later date than the Northmen of the tenth century; who, it seems far
from improbable, encountered only the Eskimo of the Labrador coast, or
their more southern congeners, then extending to the south of the St.
Lawrence. The prevalence of a brachycephalic type of head among southern
Indian tribes, while dolichocephalic characteristics are common to the
Eskimo and to the Huron-Iroquois and other northern nations, lends
countenance to the idea of an intermixture of Red Indian and Eskimo
blood. The head-forms, however, though both long, differ in other
respects; and a divergence is apparent on comparing the bones of the
face, with a corresponding difference in their physiognomy.
Dr. Latham recognised the Iroquois as one of the most typical families
of the North American race, and Mr. Parkman styles them “the Indian of
the Indians.” The whole Huron-Iroquois history illustrates their
patient, politic diplomacy, their devotion to hunting and to war. But
their policy gave no comprehensive aim to wars which reduced their
numbers, and threatened their very existence as a race. Throughout the
entire period of any direct knowledge of them by Europeans, there is
constant evidence of feuds between members of the common stock, due in
part, indeed, to their becoming involved in the rivalries of French and
English colonists, but also traceable to hereditary animosities
perpetuated through many generations. The strongly marked diversities in
the dialects of the Six Nations is itself an evidence of their long
separation, prior to their confederation, in the earlier half of the
fifteenth century. By far the most trustworthy narrative of this famous
league is embodied by Mr. Horatio Hale in _The Iroquois Book of Rites_,
a contribution to aboriginal American literature of singular interest
and value. Among the members of this confederacy the Tuscaroras occupy a
peculiar position. They were reunited to the common stock so recently as
1714, but their traditions accord with those of the whole Huron-Iroquois
family in pointing to the Lower St. Lawrence as their original home; and
the diversity of the Tuscarora dialect from those of the older nations
of the league furnishes a valuable gauge of the significance of such
differences as evidence of the length of period during which the various
members of the common stock had been separated. On the other hand, the
manner in which, in the absence of any hereditary feud, the Iroquois
respected the bonds of consanguinity, and welcomed the fugitive
immigrants from North Carolina, throws an interesting light on the
history of the race, and the large extent of country occupied by it in
the time of its greatest prosperity.
The earliest home of the whole Huron-Iroquois stock was within the area
of Quebec and Eastern Ontario, and they have thus a claim on the
interest of Canadians as their precursors in the occupation of the soil;
while, in so far as its actual occupancy by the representatives of the
common stock is concerned, the Hurons were welcomed to a friendly, if
fatal, alliance with the early French colonists; and the Iroquois of the
Six Nations have enjoyed a home, under the protection of England, on the
western Canadian reserves set apart for their use upwards of a century
ago.
There is one notable inconsistency in the traditions of the
Huron-Iroquois which is significant. The fathers of the common stock
dwelt, according to their most cherished memories, in their northern
home on the St. Lawrence, and beside the great sea. It ranked also among
the ancient traditions of the “Wampum-keepers,” or official annalists,
that there came a time when, from whatever cause, the
Caniengas—Ka-nyen-ke-ha-ka, or Flint people, _i.e._ the Mohawks,—the
“eldest brother” of the family, led the way from the northern shore of
the St. Lawrence to their later home in what is now the State of New
York. But the prehistoric character of this later tradition is shown by
the fact that the Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas, all claimed for
themselves the character of autochthones in their later home. The
precise spot where, according to the cherished legend of the Oneidas,
they literally sprang from the soil, is still marked by “the Oneida
Stone,” a large boulder of flesh-coloured syenite, from which the latter
called themselves Oniota-aug, “the people begot from the stone.” It
occupies a commanding site overlooking a fine expanse of country
stretching to the Oneida Lake. But, according to Mr. Hale, the name of
the Oneida nation, in the council of the league, was _Nihatirontakowa_,
usually rendered the “great-tree people,” or literally “those of the
great log.” This designation is connected, most probably as an
afterthought, with a legendary meeting of their people with
Hiawatha.[127] The beautiful legend of this benefactor of his people has
been embalmed in the Indian epic of Longfellow, and dealt with as a
chapter of genuine history in Mr. Horatio Hale’s _Iroquois Book of
Rites_. At a period when the tribes were being wasted by constant wars
within and without, a wise and beneficent chief arose among the
Onondagas. His name is rendered: “he who seeks the wampum belt.” He had
long viewed with grief the dissensions and misery of his people, and
conceived the idea of a federal union which should ensure peace. The
system which he devised was to be not a loose and transitory league,
such as the Indian tribes were familiar with; but a permanent
organisation, foreshadowing as it were the federal union of the
Anglo-American Colonies. “While each nation was to retain its own
council and its management of local affairs, the general control was to
be lodged in a federal senate, composed of representatives elected by
each nation, holding office during good behaviour, and acknowledged as
ruling chiefs throughout the confederacy. Still further, and more
remarkably, the confederation was not to be a limited one. It was to be
infinitely expansive. The avowed design of its proposer was to abolish
war altogether. He wished the federation to extend until all the tribes
of men should be included in it. Such,” says Mr. Hale, “is the positive
testimony of the Iroquois themselves, and their statement is supported
by historical evidence.”[128] The league survived far on into the
eighteenth century; but the dream of universal peace among the nations
of the New World, if it ever found any realisation, had vanished in the
reawakening of the demon of strife.
In all the accounts of the Iroquois their league is noted as
distinguishing them from the Algonkins and other ruder tribes of North
America. The story of this league has been reproduced by successive
historians, not without rhetorical exaggerations borrowed from the
institutions of civilised nations, both of ancient and modern times. The
late Hon. L. H. Morgan says of this tribal union: “Under their federal
system the Iroquois flourished in independence, and capable of
self-protection, long after the New England and Virginia races had
surrendered their jurisdictions, and fallen into the condition of
dependent nations; and they now stand forth upon the canvas of Indian
history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil institutions,
their sagacity in the administration of the league, and their courage in
its defence. When their power and sovereignty finally passed away, it
was through the events of peaceful intercourse, gradually progressing to
this result.”[129] Schoolcraft in like manner refers to “their
advancement in the economy of living, in arms, in diplomacy, and in
civil polity,” as evidence of a remote date for their confederacy.[130]
But while thus contrasting the “power and sovereignty” of the Iroquois
with the “dependent nations” to the south, Schoolcraft leaves it
manifest that, whatever may have been the extent of the ancient
confederacy, in the seventeenth century their whole numbers fell short
of 12,000; and in 1677 their warriors or fighting men were carefully
estimated at 2150. The diversity of dialects of the different members of
the league is a source of curious interest to the philologist; but the
fact that, among a people numerically so small, local dialects were thus
perpetuated, is a proof of the very partial influence of the league as a
bond of union. It serves to illustrate the general defect of native
American polity. “Nothing,” says Max Müller, “surprised the Jesuit
missionaries so much as the immense number of languages spoken by the
natives of America. But this, far from being a proof of a high state of
civilisation, rather showed that the various races of America had never
submitted for any length of time to a powerful political
concentration.[131] The Iroquois were undoubtedly pre-eminent in the
highest virtues of the savage; and could they have been isolated in the
critical transitional stage, like the ancient Egyptians in their Nile
valley, the Greeks in their Hellenic peninsula, or the Anglo-Saxons in
their insular stronghold—
. . . . set in the silver sea
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive—