some of the elements of progress in civilisation ascribed to them, they
might have proved the regenerators of the continent, and reserved it for
permanent occupation by races of native origin. “Wherever they went,”
says Schoolcraft, “they carried proofs of their energy, courage, and
enterprise. At one period we hear the sound of their war-cry along the
Straits of the St. Mary’s, and at the foot of Lake Superior; at another,
under the walls of Quebec, where they finally defeated the Hurons under
the eyes of the French.”[132] And after glancing at the long history of
their triumphs, he adds: “Nations trembled when they heard the name of
the Konoshioni.”
In older centuries, while the Huron-Iroquois still constituted one
united people in their ancestral home to the north of the St. Lawrence,
they must have been liable to contact with the Eskimo, both on the north
and the east; and greatly as the two races differ, the dolichocephalic
type of head common to both is not only suggestive of possible
intermixture, but also of encroachments on the Eskimo in early centuries
by this aggressive race. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as
probably at a much earlier date, when the Iroquois had parted from the
Hurons, they became unquestionably _the_ aggressive race of the northern
continent; and were an object of dread to widely severed nations. Their
earliest foes were probably the Algonkins, whose original home appears
to have been between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay. Nevertheless, there
was a time, according to the traditions of both, apparently in some old
pre-Columbian century, when Iroquois and Algonkins combined their forces
against the long-extinct stock whose name survives in that of the
Alleghany Mountains and river. But if so, their numbers must have then
vastly exceeded that of their whole combined nations at any period
subsequent to their first intercourse with Europeans. For if the growing
opinion is correct that the Alligéwi were the so-called “Mound-Builders”
of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, they must have been a numerous
people, occupying a territory of great extent, and carrying on
agriculture on a large scale. So far as metallurgy—that crucial test of
civilisation,—is concerned, they had not advanced beyond the stage of
Iroquois progress. Their pottery and ingenious carvings in stone have
already been noted, along with their singular geometrical earthworks
which still puzzle the American archæologist, from the evidence they
show of skill in a people still practically in their Stone period. The
only conceivable solution of the mystery, as already suggested, seems to
me the assumption of some “Druidic” or Brahminical caste, distinct from
the native Alligéwi stock, who ruled in those great northern
river-valleys, as in Peru; and, like the mythic Quetzalcoatl of the
Aztecs, taught them agriculture, and directed the construction of the
marvellous works to which they owe their later distinctive name. But for
some unknown reason they provoked the united fury of Iroquois and
Algonkins; and after long-protracted strife were driven out, if not
wholly exterminated. A curious phase of incipient native civilisation
thus perished; and, notwithstanding all the romance attached to the
league of the Iroquois, it is impossible to credit them at any stage of
their own history with the achievement of such a progress in agriculture
or primitive arts as we must ascribe to this ancient people of the Ohio
valley. To the triumph of the Iroquois in this long-protracted warfare
may have been due the haughty spirit which thenceforth demanded a
recognition of their supremacy from all surrounding nations. Their
partial historians ascribe to them a spirit of magnanimity in the use of
their power, and a mediatorial interposition among the weaker nations
that acknowledged their supremacy. They appear, indeed, to have again
entered into alliance with an Algonkin nation. Their annalists have
transmitted the memory of a treaty effected with the Ojibways, when the
latter dwelt on the shores of Lake Superior; and the meeting-place of
the two powerful races was at the great fishing-ground of the Sault Ste.
Marie rapids, within reach of the copper-bearing rocks of the Keweenaw
peninsula. The league then established is believed to have been
faithfully maintained on both sides for upwards of two hundred years.
But if so, it had been displaced by bitter feud in the interval between
the visits of Cartier and Champlain to the St. Lawrence.
The historical significance given to the legend of Hiawatha by the
coherent narrative so ingeniously deduced by Mr. Horatio Hales from _The
Iroquois Book of Rites_, points to a long-past era of beneficent rule
and social progress among the Huron-Iroquois. But the era is
pre-Columbian, if not mythic. The pipe of peace had been long
extinguished, and the buried tomahawk recovered, when the early French
explorers were brought into contact with the Iroquois and Hurons. The
history of their deeds, as recorded by the Jesuit Fathers from personal
observation, is replete with the relentless ferocity of the savage. War
was their pastime; and they were ever ready to welcome the call to arms.
La Salle came in contact with them on the discovery of the Illinois; and
Captain John Smith, the founder of Virginia, encountered their canoes on
the Chesapeake Bay bearing a band of Iroquois warriors to the
territories of the Powhattan confederacy. They were then, as ever, the
same fierce marauders, intolerant of equality with any neighbouring
tribe. The Susquehannocks experienced at their hands the same fate as
the Alligéwi. The Lenapes, Shawnees, Nanticokes, Unamis, Delawares,
Munsees, and Manhattans, were successively reduced to the condition of
dependent tribes. Even the Canarse Indians of Long Island were not safe
from their vengeance; and their power seems to have been dreaded
throughout the whole region from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.
It thus appears probable that in remote centuries, before the discovery
of America by European voyagers, the region extending westward from the
Labrador coast to Lake Ontario, if not, indeed, to Lake Huron, had been
in occupation by those who claimed to be autochthones, and who were
known and feared far beyond their own frontiers. But though thus
maintaining a haughty predominancy; so far as their arts afford any
evidence, they were in their infancy. The country occupied by them,
except in so far as it was overgrown with the forest, was well adapted
for agriculture; and the Iroquois and Hurons alike compared favourably
with the Algonkins in their agricultural industry. A confirmatory
evidence of exceptional superiority among this remarkable race is that
their women were held in unwonted respect. They had their own
representatives in the council of the tribe; and exercised considerable
influence in the choice of a chief. But on them devolved all domestic
labour, including the cultivation of their fields. This work was
entirely carried on by the women, while the share of the men in the
joint provision of food was the product of the chase. The beautiful
region was still so largely under forest that it must have afforded
abundant resources for the hunter; but it furnished no facilities for
the inauguration of a copper or bronze age, such as the shores of Lake
Superior in vain offered to its Algonkin nomads. Of metallic ores they
had no knowledge; and while they doubtless prized the copper brought
occasionally from Lake Superior, copper implements are rare in the
region which they occupied. Their old alliance with the Algonkins of the
great copper region had long come to an end; and when brought under the
notice of the French and English colonists, the Algonkins had joined
with the Hurons as the implacable foes of the Iroquois confederacy.
In the ancient warfare in which Algonkins and Huron-Iroquois are found
united against the nation of the great river valleys, we see evidences
of a conflict between widely distinct stocks of northern and southern
origin. It is an antagonism between well-defined dolichocephalic and
brachycephalic races. In the dolichocephalic Iroquois or Huron, we have
the highest type of the forest savage; maintaining as his own the
territory of his fathers, and building palisaded towns for the secure
shelter of his people. The brachycephalic Mound-Builder, on the other
hand, may still survive in one or other of the members of the
semi-civilised village communities of New Mexico or Arizona. But if the
interpretation of native traditions have any value, they carry us back
to pre-Columbian centuries, and tell of long-protracted strife, until
what may at first have been no more than the aggressions of wild
northern races, tempted by the resources of an industrious agricultural
community, became a war of extermination. The elaborately constructed
forts of the Mound-Builders, no less abundant throughout the Ohio valley
than their curious geometrical earthworks, prove the dangers to which
they were exposed, no less than the skill and determination with which
the aggressors were withstood, it may be through successive generations,
before their final overthrow.
The palisaded Indian town of Hochelaga, one of the chief urban centres
of the Huron-Iroquois tribes in the older home of the race, and a sample
of the later Huron defences on the Georgian Bay, stood, in the sixteenth
century, at the foot of Mount Royal, whence the city of Montreal takes
its name; and some of the typical skulls of its old occupants, as well
as flint implements and pottery from its site, are now preserved in the
Museum of M’Gill University. The latter relics reveal no more than had
long been familiar in the remains which abound within the area of the
Iroquois confederacy, and elsewhere throughout the eastern states of
North America. Their earthenware vessels were decorated with
herring-bone and other incised patterns; and their tobacco pipes and the
handles of their clay bowls were, at times, rudely modelled into human
and animal forms. Their implements of flint and stone were equally rude.
They had inherited little more than the most infantile savage arts; and
when those were at length superseded, in some degree, by implements and
weapons of European manufacture, they prized the more effective weapons,
but manifested no desire for mastering the arts to which they were due.
To all appearance, through unnumbered centuries, the tide of human life
has ebbed and flowed in the valley of the St. Lawrence as
unprogressively as on the great steppes of Asia. Such footprints as the
wanderers have left on the sands of time tell only of the unchanging
recurrence of generations of men as years and centuries came and passed
away. Illustrations of native art are now very familiar to us. The
ancient flint pits have been explored; and the flint cores and
rough-hewn nodules recovered. The implements of war and the chase were
the work of the Indian brave. His spears and arrow heads, his knives,
chisels, celts, and hammers, in flint and stone, abound. Fish-hooks,
lances or spears, awls, bodkins, and other implements of bone and deer’s
horn, are little less common. The highest efforts of artistic skill were
expended on the carving of his stone pipe, and fashioning the pipe-stem.
The pottery, the work of female hands, is usually in the simplest stage
of coarse, handmade, fictile ware. The patterns, incised on the soft
clay, are the conventional reproductions of the grass or straw-plaiting;
or, at times, the actual impressions of the cordage or wicker-work by
which the larger clay vessels were held in shape, to be dried in the sun
before they were imperfectly burned in the primitive kiln. But the
potter also indulged her fancy at times in modelling artistic devices of
men and animals, as the handles of the smaller ware, or the forms in
which the clay tobacco pipe was wrought. Nevertheless the northern
continent lingered to the last in its primitive stage of neolithic art;
and its most northern were its rudest tribes, until we pass within the
Arctic circle and come in contact with the ingenious handiwork of the
Eskimo. Southward beyond the great lakes, and especially within the area
of the Mound-Builders, a manifest improvement is noticeable. Alike in
their stone carvings and their modelling in clay, the more artistic
design and better finish of industrious settled communities are
apparent. Still further to the south, the diversified ingenuity of
fancy, especially in the pottery, is suggestive of an influence derived
from Mexican and Peruvian art. The carved work of some western tribes
was also of a higher character. But taking such work at its best, it
cannot compare in skill or practical utility with the industrial arts of
Europe’s Neolithic age. This region has now been visited and explored by
Europeans for four centuries, during a large portion of which time they
have been permanent settlers. Its soil has been turned up over areas of
such wide extent that the results may be accepted, with little
hesitation, as illustrations of the arts and social life subsequent to
the occupation of the continent by its aboriginal races. But we look in
vain for evidence of an extinct native civilisation. However far back
the presence of man in the New World may be traced, throughout the
northern continent, at least, he seems never to have attained to any
higher stage than what is indicated by such evidences of settled
occupation as were shown in the palisaded Indian town of Hochelaga; or
at most, in the ancient settlements of the Ohio valley. Everywhere the
agriculturist only disturbs the graves of the savage hunter. The
earthworks of the Mound-Builders, and still more their configuration,
are indeed suggestive of a people in a condition analogous to that of
the ancient populace of Egypt or Assyria, toiling under the direction of
an overruling caste, and working out intellectual conceptions of which
they themselves were incapable. Yet, even in their case, this inference
finds no confirmation from the contents of their mounds or earthworks.
They disclose only implements of bone, flint, and stone, with some rare
examples of equally rude copper tools, hammered into shape without the
use of fire. Working in the metals appears to have been confined to the
southern continent; or, at least, never to have found its way northward
of the Mexican plateau. Nothing but the ingeniously sculptured tobacco
pipe, or the better-fashioned pottery, gives the slightest hint of
progress beyond the first infantile stage of the tool-maker.
Whatever may have been the source of special skill among the old
agricultural occupants of the Ohio valley, their Iroquois supplanters
borrowed from them no artistic aptitude. No remains of its primitive
occupants give the slightest hint that the aborigines of Canada, or of
the country immediately to the south of the St. Lawrence, derived any
knowledge from the old race so curiously skilled in the construction of
geometrical earthworks. Any native burial mounds or embankments are on a
small scale, betraying no more than the simplest operations of a people
whose tools were flint hoes, and horn or wooden picks and shovels.
Wherever evidence is found of true working in metals, as distinct from
the cold-hammered native copper, as in the iron tomahawk, the copper
kettles, and silver crosses, recovered from time to time from Indian
graves, their European origin is indisputable. Small silver buckles, or
brooches, of native workmanship are indeed common in their graves; for a
metallic currency was so unintelligible to them that this was the use to
which they most frequently turned French or English silver coinage.
But notwithstanding the general correspondence in arts, habits, and
conditions of life, among the forest and prairie tribes of North
America, their distinctive classification into various dolichocephalic
and brachycephalic types points to diversity of origin and a mingling of
several races. So far as the native races of Canada are considered, it
has been shown that they belong to the dolichocephalic type. The
Alligéwi, or Mound-Builders, on the contrary, appear to have been a
strongly marked brachycephalic race; and the bitter antagonism between
the two, which ended in the utter ruin of the latter, may have been
originally due to race distinctions such as have frequently been the
source of implacable strife.
The short globular head-form, which, in the famous Scioto-mound skull,
is shown in a strongly marked typical example with the longitudinal and
parietal diameters nearly equal, appears to have been common among the
southern tribes, such as the Osages, Ottoes, Missouries, Shawnees,
Cherokees, Seminoles, Uchees, Savannahs, Catawbas, Yamasees, Creeks, and
many others. This seems to point to such a convergence, of two distinct
ethnical lines of migration from opposite centres, as is borne out by
much other evidence. In noting this aspect of the question anew, the
further significant fact may also be once more repeated, that the Eskimo
cranium, along with certain specialties of its own, is pre-eminently
distinctive as the northern type.
Among what may be accepted as typical Canadian skulls, those recovered
from the old site of Hochelaga, and from the Huron ossuaries around Lake
Simcoe, have a special value. They represent the native race which,
under various names, extended from the Lower St. Lawrence westward to
Lake St. Clair. The people encountered by Cartier and the first French
explorers of 1535, and those whom Champlain found settled around the
Georgian Bay sixty-eight years later, appear to have been of the same
stock. Such primitive local names, as Stadaconé and Hochelaga, are not
Algonkin, but Huron-Iroquois. Native traditions, as well as the
allusions of the earliest French writers, confirm this idea of the
occupation by a Huron-Iroquois or Wyandot population of the “region
north-eastward from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, at or somewhere along
the Gulf coast, before they ever met with the French, or any European
adventurers,” as reaffirmed in the narrative of their own native
historian, Peter Dooyentate.[133] But whatever confirmation may be found
for this native tradition, it is certain that the European adventurers
bore no part in their expulsion from their ancient home. The aborigines,
whom Jacques Cartier found a prosperous people, safe in the shelter of
their palisaded towns, had all vanished before the return of the French
under Champlain; and they were found by him in new settlements, which
they had formed far to the westward on Lake Simcoe and the Georgian Bay.
Questions of considerable interest are involved in the consideration of
this migration of the Hurons; and the circumstances under which they
deserted their earlier home. They were visited by Champlain in 1615, and
subsequently by the missionary Fathers, who, in 1639, found them
occupying thirty-two palisaded villages, fortified in the same fashion
as those described by the first French explorers at Stadaconé and
Hochelaga. Their numbers are variously estimated. Brebeuf reckoned them
at 30,000; and described them as living together in towns sometimes of
fifty, sixty, or a hundred dwellings,—that is, of three or four hundred
householders,—and diligently cultivating their fields, from which they
derived food for the whole year. Whatever higher qualities distinguished
the Iroquois from Algonkin or other native races, were fully shared in
by the Hurons; and they are even spoken of with a natural partiality by
their French allies, like Sagard, as a patrician order of savages, in
comparison with those of the Five Nations. When first visited by French
explorers, after their protracted journey through the desolate forests
between the Ottawa and Lake Huron, their palisaded towns and cultivated
fields must have seemed like an oasis in the desert. “To the eye of
Champlain,” says Mr. Parkman, “accustomed to the desolation he had left
behind, it seemed a land of beauty and abundance. There was a broad
opening in the forest, fields of maize with pumpkins ripening in the
sun, patches of sun-flowers, from the seeds of which the Indians made
hair-oil, and in the midst the Huron town of Otouacha. In all essential
points it resembled that which Cartier, eighty years before, had seen at
Montreal; the same triple palisade of crossed and intersecting trunks,
and the same long lodges of bark, each containing many households. Here,
within an area of sixty or seventy miles, was the seat of one of the
most remarkable savage communities of the continent.”[134] The Hurons,
thus settled in their latter home, consisted of several “nations,”
including their kinsmen to the south, as far as Lake Erie and the
Niagara river. They had their own tribal divisions, still perpetuated
among their descendants. The Rev. Prosper Vincent Sa∫∫atannen, a native
Huron, and the first of his race admitted to the priesthood, informs me
that the Hurons of Lorette still perpetuate their ancient classification
into four _grandes compagnies_, each of which has its five tribal
divisions or clans, by which of old all intermarriage was regulated. The
members of the same clan regarded themselves as brothers and sisters,
and so were precluded from marriage with one another. The small number
of the whole band at La Jeune Lorette renders the literal enforcement of
this rule impossible; but the children are still regarded as belonging
to the mother’s clan. The five clans into which each of the four
companies is divided are:—1. The Deer, _Oskanonton_; 2. The Bear,
_Anniolen_; 3. The Wolf, _Annenarisk∫∫a_; 4. The Tortoise, _Andia∫∫ik_;
5. The Beaver, _Tsotai_. There were two, if not more dialects spoken by
the old Hurons, or Wyandots; and that of Hochelaga probably varied from
any form of the language now surviving. This has to be kept in view in
estimating the value of the lists of words furnished by Jacques Cartier
of “le langage des pays et Royaulmes de Hochelaga et Canada, aultrement
appellée par nous la nouvelle France.”