The American Race

Ottawas, on the Ottawa river and S. of L. Huron.

Pampticokes, near Cape Hatteras.

Passamaquoddies, on Schoodic river.

Piankishaws, on middle Ohio river.

Piegans, see Blackfeet.

Pottawattomies, S. of Lake Michigan.

Sauteux, see Crees.

Sacs and Foxes, on Sac river.

Secoffies, in Labrador. S

hawnees, on Tennessee river.

Weas, near the Piankishaws.

5. THE IROQUOIS

When the French first explored the St. Lawrence River, they found both its banks, in the vicinity where the cities of Montreal and Quebec now stand, peopled by the Iroquois. This tribe also occupied all the area of New York state (except the valley of the lower Hudson), where it was known as the Five Nations. West of these were the Hurons and Neutral Nation in Canada, and the Eries south of Lake Erie, while to the south of the Five Nations, in the valley of the Susquehanna and pushing their outposts along the western shore of Chesapeake Bay to the Potomac, were the Andastes and Conestogas, called also Susquehannocks. Still further south, about the head-waters of the Roanoke River, dwelt the Tuscaroras, who afterwards returned north and formed the sixth nation in the league. West of the Apalachians, on the upper waters of the Tennessee River, lived the Cherokees who, by their tradition, had moved down from the upper Ohio, and who, if they were not a branch of the same family, were affiliated to it by many ancient ties of blood and language. The latest investigations of the Bureau of Ethnology result in favor of considering them a branch, though a distant one, of the Iroquois line.

The stock was wholly an inland one, at no point reaching the ocean. According to its most ancient traditions we are justified in locating its priscan home in the district between the lower St. Lawrence and Hudson Bay. If we may judge from its cranial forms, its purest representatives were toward the east. The skulls of the Five Nations, as well as those of the Tuscaroras and Cherokees, are distinctly dolichocephalic, and much alike in other respects, while those of the Hurons are brachycephalic.[95 - J. Aitken Meigs, “Cranial Forms of the American Aborigines,” in Proceedings of the Acad. of Nat. Sciences of Philadelphia, May, 1866.] Physically the stock is most superior, unsurpassed by any other on the continent, and I may even say by any other people in the world; for it stands on record that the five companies (500 men) recruited from the Iroquois of New York and Canada during our civil war stood first on the list among all the recruits of our army for height, vigor and corporeal symmetry.

In intelligence also their position must be placed among the highest. It was manifested less in their culture than in their system of government. About the middle of the fifteenth century the Onondaga chief, Hiawatha, succeeded in completing the famous league which bound together his nation with the Mohawks, Oneidas, Senecas, and Cayugas into one federation of offence and defence. “The system he devised was to be not a loose and transitory league, but a permanent government. While each nation was to retain its own council and management of local affairs, the general control was to be lodged in a federal senate, composed of representatives to be elected by each nation, holding office during good behavior and acknowledged as ruling chiefs throughout the whole confederacy. Still further, and more remarkably, the federation was not to be a limited one. It was to be indefinitely expansible. The avowed design of its proposer was to abolish war altogether.”[96 - Horatio Hale, The Iroquois Book of Rites, pp. 21, 22. (Philadelphia, 1883. Vol. II. of Brinton’s Library of Aboriginal American Literature.)]

Certainly this scheme was one of the most far-sighted, and in its aim beneficent, which any statesman has ever designed for man. With the Iroquois it worked well. They included in the league portions of the Neutral Nation and the Tuscaroras, and for centuries it gave them the supremacy among all their neighbors. The league was primarily based upon or at least drew much of its strength from the system of gentes; this prevailed both among the Iroquois and Cherokees, descent being traced in the female line. Indeed, it was from a study of the Iroquois system that the late Mr. Morgan formed his theory that ancient society everywhere passed through a similar stage in attaining civilization.

It is consonant with their advanced sentiments that among the Iroquois women had more than ordinary respect. They were represented by a special speaker in the councils of the tribe, and were authorized to conduct negotiations looking towards making peace with an enemy. Among the Conestogas we have the instance of a woman being the recognized “Queen” of the tribe. With the Wyandots, the council of each gens was composed exclusively of women. They alone elected the chief of the gens, who represented its interests in the council of the tribe.[97 - J. W. Powell, First Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, p. 61. (Washington, 1881.)]

In sundry other respects they displayed an intelligent activity. In many localities they were agricultural, cultivating maize, beans and tobacco, building large communal houses of logs, fortifying their villages with palisades, and making excellent large canoes of birch bark. According to traditions, which are supported by recent archæological researches, the Cherokees when they were upon the Kanawha and Ohio had large fields under cultivation, and erected mounds as sites for their houses and for burial purposes. When first encountered in East Tennessee they constructed long communal houses like the Five Nations, had large fields of corn, built excellent canoes and manufactured pottery of superior style and finish. Although no method of recording thought had acquired any development among the Iroquois, they had many legends, myths and formal harangues which they handed down with great minuteness from generation to generation. In remembering them they were aided by the wampum belts and strings, which served by the arrangement and design of the beads to fix certain facts and expressions in their minds. One of the most remarkable of these ancient chants has been edited with a translation and copious notes by Horatio Hale.[98 - The Iroquois Book of Rites, referred to above.] The Cherokees had a similar national song which was repeated solemnly each year at the period of the green corn dance. Fragments of it have been obtained quite recently.

The Iroquois myths refer to the struggle of the first two brothers, the dark twin and the white, a familiar symbolism in which we see the personification of the light and darkness, and the struggle of day and night.

IROQUOIS LINGUISTIC STOCK

Andastes, see Conestogas.

Cayugas, south of Lake Ontario.

Cherokees, on upper Tennessee river.

Conestogas, on lower Susquehanna.

Eries, south of Lake Erie.

Hurons, see Wyandots.

Mohawks, on Lakes George and Champlain.

Neutral Nation, west of the Niagara river.

Oneidas, south of Lake Ontario.

Onondagas, south of Lake Ontario.

Senecas, south of Lake Ontario.

Susquehannocks, on lower Susquehanna.

Tuscaroras, in Virginia.

Wyandots, between Lakes Ontario and Huron.

6. THE CHAHTA-MUSKOKIS

The various nations who are classed under the Muskoki stock occupied the broad and pleasant lowlands stretching from the terminal hills of the Apalachian Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and even beyond that mighty barrier. The remains of a few other stocks in the eastern portion of this area indicate that the Muskokis were not its original occupants, and this was also their own opinion. Their legends referred to the west and the northwest as the direction whence their ancestors had wandered; and the Choctaw legend which speaks of Nani Waya, the Bending Mount, a large artificial mound in Winston county, Mississippi, as the locality where their first parents saw the light, is explained by another which describes it as the scene of their separation from the Chickasaws.

Of the main division of the stock, the Choctaws lived furthest west, bordering upon the Mississippi, the Chickasaws in the centre, and the Creeks on the Atlantic slope. The Seminoles were a branch of the latter, who, in the last century, moved into Florida; but it is probable that the whole of the west coast of that peninsula was under the control of the Creeks from the earliest period of which we have any knowledge of it.

The various members of this stock presented much diversity in appearance. The Creeks were tall and slender, the Chickasaws short and heavy; the skulls of both have a tendency to dolichocephaly, but with marked exceptions, and the custom among many of them to deform the head artificially in various ways adds to the difficulties of the craniologist.[99 - There are twenty-one skulls alleged to be of Muskoki origin in the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, of which fifteen have a cephalic index below 80.] The color of all is called a dark cinnamon.

The gentile system with descent in the female line prevailed everywhere. The Creeks counted more than twenty gentes, the Choctaws and Chickasaws about twelve, united in phratries of four. In the towns each gens lived in a quarter by itself, and marriage within the gens was strictly prohibited. Each had its own burying place and sepulchral mound where the bones of the deceased were deposited after they had been cleaned. The chief of each town was elected for life from a certain gens, but the office was virtually hereditary, as it passed to his nephew on his wife’s side unless there were cogent reasons against it. The chief, or miko, as he was called, ruled with the aid of a council, and together they appointed the “war chief,” who obtained the post solely on the ground of merit. Instances of a woman occupying the position of head chief were not unknown, and seem to have been recalled with pleasure by the tribe.[100 - Examples given by William Bartram in his MSS. in the Pennsylvania Historical Society.]

The early culture of these tribes is faithfully depicted in the records of the campaign of Hernando De Soto, who journeyed through their country in 1540. He found them cultivating extensive fields of maize, beans, squashes and tobacco; dwelling in permanent towns with well-constructed wooden edifices, many of which were situated on high mounds of artificial construction, and using for weapons and utensils stone implements of great beauty of workmanship. The descriptions of later travellers and the antiquities still existing prove that these accounts were not exaggerated. The early Muskokis were in the highest culture of the stone age; nor were they deficient wholly in metals. They obtained gold from the uriferous sands of the Nacoochee and other streams and many beautiful specimens of their ornaments in it are still to be seen.

Their artistic development was strikingly similar to that of the “mound-builders” who have left such interesting remains in the Ohio valley; and there is, to say the least, a strong probability that they are the descendants of the constructors of those ancient works, driven to the south by the irruptions of the wild tribes of the north.[101 - See on this subject an essay on “The Probable Nationality of the Mound-Builders,” in my Essays of an Americanist, p. 67. (Philadelphia, 1890.)] Even in the last century they built solid structures of beams fastened to upright supports, plastered on the outside, and in the interior divided into a number of rooms. The art of picture-writing was not unknown to them, and some years ago I published their remarkable “national legend,” read off from its hieroglyphics painted on a skin by their chief Chekilli in 1731.[102 - D. G. Brinton, “The National legend of the Chahta-Muskoki Tribes,” in The Historical Magazine, February, 1870. (Republished in Vol. IV. of Brinton’s Library of Aboriginal American Literature.)]

The religious rites of the Creeks were so elaborate that they attracted early attention, and we have quite full accounts of them. They were connected with the worship of the principle of fertility, the chief celebration, called the busk (puskita, fast), being solemnized when the young corn became edible. In connection with this was the use of the “black drink,” a decoction of the Iris versicolor, and the maintenance of the perpetual fire. Their chief divinity was referred to as the “master of breath” or of life, and there was a developed symbolism of colors, white representing peaceful and pleasant ideas; red, those of war and danger. The few Seminoles who still survive in the southern extremity of the peninsula of Florida continue the ceremonies of the green corn dance and black drink, though their mythology in general has become deeply tinged with half-understood Christian teachings.[103 - “The Seminole Indians of Florida,” by Clay MacCauley, in Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1883-4.]

THE MUSKOKI LINGUISTIC STOCK

Apalaches, on Apalache Bay.

Chickasaws, head waters of Mobile river.

Choctaws, between the Mobile and Mississippi rivers.

Coshattas, on the Red river.

Creeks, see Muskokis.

Hitchitees, sub-tribe of Creeks.

Muskokis, between Mobile and Savannah rivers.