[Footnote 22: As Sir John Lubbock well says, "Different races in similar stages of development often present more features of resemblance to one another than the same race does to itself in different stages of its history." (Origin of Civilization, p. 11.) If every student of history and ethnology would begin by learning this lesson, the world would be spared a vast amount of unprofitable theorizing.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Grades of culture.]

At this point, in order to prepare ourselves the more clearly to understand sundry facts with which we shall hereafter be obliged to deal, especially the wonderful experiences of the Spanish conquerors, it will be well to pause for a moment and do something toward defining the different grades of culture through which men have passed in attaining to the grade which can properly be called civilization. Unless we begin with clear ideas upon this head we cannot go far toward understanding the ancient America that was first visited and described for us by Spaniards. The various grades of culture need to be classified, and that most original and suggestive scholar, the late Lewis Morgan of Rochester, made a brilliant attempt in this direction, to which the reader's attention is now invited.

[Sidenote: Distinction between Savagery and Barbarism.]

[Sidenote: Origin of pottery.]

Below Civilization Mr. Morgan[23] distinguishes two principal grades or stages of culture, namely Savagery and Barbarism. There is much looseness and confusion in the popular use of these terms, and this is liable to become a fruitful source of misapprehension in the case of any statement involving either of them. When popular usage discriminates between them it discriminates in the right direction; there is a vague but not uncertain feeling that savagery is a lower stage than barbarism. But ordinarily the discrimination is not made and the two terms are carelessly employed as if interchangeable. Scientific writers long since recognized a general difference between savagery and barbarism, but Mr. Morgan was the first to suggest a really useful criterion for distinguishing between them. His criterion is the making of pottery; and his reason for selecting it is that the making of pottery is something that presupposes village life and more or less progress in the simpler arts. The earlier methods of boiling food were either putting it into holes in the ground lined with skins and then using heated stones, or else putting it into baskets coated with clay to be supported over a fire. The clay served the double purpose of preventing liquids from escaping and protecting the basket against the flame. It was probably observed that the clay was hardened by the fire, and thus in course of time it was found that the clay would answer the purpose without the basket.[24] Whoever first made this ingenious discovery led the way from savagery to barbarism. Throughout the present work we shall apply the name "savages" only to uncivilized people who do not make pottery.

[Footnote 23: See his great work on Ancient Society, New York, 1877.]

[Footnote 24: See the evidence in Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind, pp. 269-272; cf. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, p. 573; and see Cushing's masterly "Study of Pueblo Pottery," etc., Reports of Bureau of Ethnology, iv., 473-521.]

[Sidenote: Lower status of savagery.]

But within each of these two stages Mr. Morgan distinguishes three subordinate stages, or Ethnic Periods, which may be called either lower, middle, and upper status, or older, middle, and later periods. The lower status of savagery was that wholly prehistoric stage when men lived in their original restricted habitat and subsisted on fruit and nuts. To this period must be assigned the beginning of articulate speech. All existing races of men had passed beyond it at an unknown antiquity.

[Sidenote: Middle status of savagery.]

Men began to pass beyond it when they discovered how to catch fish and how to use fire. They could then begin (following coasts and rivers) to spread over the earth. The middle status of savagery, thus introduced, ends with the invention of that compound weapon, the bow and arrow. The natives of Australia, who do not know this weapon, are still in the middle status of savagery.[25]

[Footnote 25: Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, London, 1889, gives a vivid picture of aboriginal life in Australia.]

[Sidenote: Upper status of savagery.]

The invention of the bow and arrow, which marks the upper status of savagery, was not only a great advance in military art, but it also vastly increased men's supply of food by increasing their power of killing wild game. The lowest tribes in America, such as those upon the Columbia river, the Athabaskans of Hudson's Bay, the Fuegians and some other South American tribes, are in the upper status of savagery.

[Sidenote: Lower status of barbarism: it ended differently in the two hemispheres.]

The transition from this status to the lower status of barbarism was marked, as before observed, by the invention of pottery. The end of the lower status of barbarism was marked in the Old World by the domestication of animals other than the dog, which was probably domesticated at a much earlier period as an aid to the hunter. The domestication of horses and asses, oxen and sheep, goats and pigs, marks of course an immense advance. Along with it goes considerable development of agriculture, thus enabling a small territory to support many people. It takes a wide range of country to support hunters. In the New World, except in Peru, the only domesticated animal was the dog. Horses, oxen, and the other animals mentioned did not exist in America, during the historic period, until they were brought over from Europe by the Spaniards. In ancient American society there was no such thing as a pastoral stage of development,[26] and the absence of domesticable animals from the western hemisphere may well be reckoned as very important among the causes which retarded the progress of mankind in this part of the world.

[Footnote 26: The case of Peru, which forms an apparent but not real exception to this general statement, will be considered below in chap. ix.]

[Sidenote: Importance of Indian corn.]

On the other hand the ancient Americans had a cereal plant peculiar to the New World, which made comparatively small demands upon the intelligence and industry of the cultivator. Maize or "Indian corn" has played a most important part in the history of the New World, as regards both the red men and the white men. It could be planted without clearing or ploughing the soil. It was only necessary to girdle the trees with a stone hatchet, so as to destroy their leaves and let in the sunshine. A few scratches and digs were made in the ground with a stone digger, and the seed once dropped in took care of itself. The ears could hang for weeks after ripening, and could be picked off without meddling with the stalk; there was no need of threshing and winnowing. None of the Old World cereals can be cultivated without much more industry and intelligence. At the same time, when Indian corn is sown in tilled land it yields with little labour more than twice as much food per acre as any other kind of grain. This was of incalculable advantage to the English settlers of New England, who would have found it much harder to gain a secure foothold upon the soil if they had had to begin by preparing it for wheat and rye without the aid of the beautiful and beneficent American plant.[27] The Indians of the Atlantic coast of North America for the most part lived in stockaded villages, and cultivated their corn along with beans, pumpkins, squashes, and tobacco; but their cultivation was of the rudest sort,[28] and population was too sparse for much progress toward civilization. But Indian corn, when sown in carefully tilled and irrigated land, had much to do with the denser population, the increasing organization of labour, and the higher development in the arts, which characterized the confederacies of Mexico and Central America and all the pueblo Indians of the southwest. The potato played a somewhat similar part in Peru. Hence it seems proper to take the regular employment of tillage with irrigation as marking the end of the lower period of barbarism in the New World. To this Mr. Morgan adds the use of adobe-brick and stone in architecture, which also distinguished the Mexicans and their neighbours from the ruder tribes of North and South America. All these ruder tribes, except the few already mentioned as in the upper period of savagery, were somewhere within the lower period of barbarism. Thus the Algonquins and Iroquois, the Creeks, the Dakotas, etc., when first seen by white men, were within this period; but some had made much further progress within it than others. For example, the Algonquin tribe of Ojibwas had little more than emerged from savagery, while the Creeks and Cherokees had made considerable advance toward the middle status of barbarism.

[Footnote 27: See Shaler, "Physiography of North America," in Winsor's Narr. and Crit. Hist. vol. iv. p. xiii.]

[Footnote 28: "No manure was used," says Mr. Parkman, speaking of the Hurons, "but at intervals of from ten to twenty years, when the soil was exhausted and firewood distant, the village was abandoned and a new one built." Jesuits in North America, p. xxx.]

[Sidenote: Middle status of barbarism.]

Let us now observe some characteristics of this extremely interesting middle period. It began, we see, in the eastern hemisphere with the domestication of other animals than the dog, and in the western hemisphere with cultivation by irrigation and the use of adobe-brick and stone for building. It also possessed another feature which distinguished it from earlier periods, in the materials of which its tools were made. In the periods of savagery hatchets and spear-heads were made of rudely chipped stones. In the lower period of barbarism the chipping became more and more skilful until it gave place to polishing. In the middle period tools were greatly multiplied, improved polishing gave sharp and accurate points and edges, and at last metals began to be used as materials preferable to stone. In America the metal used was copper, and in some spots where it was very accessible there were instances of its use by tribes not in other respects above the lower status of barbarism,—as for example, the "mound-builders." In the Old World the metal used was the alloy of copper and tin familiarly known as bronze, and in its working it called for a higher degree of intelligence than copper.

[Sidenote: Working of metals.]

Toward the close of the middle period of barbarism the working of metals became the most important element of progress, and the period may be regarded as ending with the invention of the process of smelting iron ore. According to this principle of division, the inhabitants of the lake villages of ancient Switzerland, who kept horses and oxen, pigs and sheep, raised wheat and ground it into flour, and spun and wove linen garments, but knew nothing of iron, were in the middle status of barbarism. The same was true of the ancient Britons before they learned the use of iron from their neighbours in Gaul. In the New World the representatives of the middle status of barbarism were such peoples as the Zunis, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Peruvians.

[Sidenote: Upper status of barbarism.]

[Sidenote: Beginning of civilization.]

The upper status of barbarism, in so far as it implies a knowledge of smelting iron, was never reached in aboriginal America. In the Old World it is the stage which had been reached by the Greeks of the Homeric poems[29] and the Germans in the time of Caesar. The end of this period and the beginning of true civilization is marked by the invention of a phonetic alphabet and the production of written records. This brings within the pale of civilization such people as the ancient Phoenicians, the Hebrews after the exodus, the ruling classes at Nineveh and Babylon, the Aryans of Persia and India, and the Japanese. But clearly it will not do to insist too narrowly upon the phonetic character of the alphabet. Where people acquainted with iron have enshrined in hieroglyphics so much matter of historic record and literary interest as the Chinese and the ancient Egyptians, they too must be classed as civilized; and this Mr. Morgan by implication admits.

[Footnote 29: In the interesting architectural remains unearthed by Dr. Schliemann at Mycenae and Tiryns, there have been found at the former place a few iron keys and knives, at the latter one iron lance-head; but the form and workmanship of these objects mark them as not older than the beginning of the fifth century B. C., or the time of the Persian wars. With these exceptions the weapons and tools found in these cities, as also in Troy, were of bronze and stone. Bronze was in common use, but obsidian knives and arrow-heads of fine workmanship abound in the ruins. According to Professor Sayce, these ruins must date from 2000 to 1700 B. C. The Greeks of that time would accordingly be placed in the middle status of barbarism. (See Schliemann's Mycenae, pp. 75, 364; Tiryns, p. 171.) In the state of society described in the Homeric poems the smelting of iron was well known, but the process seems to have been costly, so that bronze weapons were still commonly used. (Tylor, Anthropology, p. 279.) The Romans of the regal period were ignorant of iron. (Lanciani, Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries, Boston, 1888, pp. 39-48.) The upper period of barbarism was shortened for Greece and Rome through the circumstance that they learned the working of iron from Egypt and the use of the alphabet from Phoenicia. Such copying, of course, affects the symmetry of such schemes as Mr. Morgan's, and allowances have to be made for it. It is curious that both Greeks and Romans seem to have preserved some tradition of the Bronze Age:—

[Greek: tois d' en chalkea men teuchea, chalkeoi de te oikoi, chalko d' eirgazonto; melas d' ouk eske sideros.] Hesiod, Opp. Di. 134.

Arma antiqua manus ungues dentesque fuerunt Et lapides et item silvarum fragmina rami, Et flamma atque ignes, postquam sunt cognita primum. Posterius ferri vis est, aerisque reperta. Et prior aeris erat, quam ferri cognitus usus, etc. Lucretius, v. 1283.

Perhaps, as Munro suggests, Lucretius was thinking of Hesiod; but it does not seem improbable that in both cases there may have been a genuine tradition that their ancestors used bronze tools and weapons before iron, since the change was comparatively recent, and sundry religious observances tended to perpetuate the memory of it.]

[Sidenote: "Civilizations" of Mexico and Peru.]

This brilliant classification of the stages of early culture will be found very helpful if we only keep in mind the fact that in all wide generalizations of this sort the case is liable to be somewhat unduly simplified. The story of human progress is really not quite so easy to decipher as such descriptions would make it appear, and when we have laid down rules of this sort we need not be surprised if we now and then come upon facts that will not exactly fit into them. In such an event it is best not to try to squeeze or distort the unruly facts, but to look and see if our rules will not bear some little qualification. The faculty for generalizing is a good servant but a bad master. If we observe this caution we shall find Mr. Morgan's work to be of great value. It will be observed that, with one exception, his restrictions leave the area of civilization as wide as that which we are accustomed to assign to it in our ordinary speaking and thinking. That exception is the case of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. We have so long been accustomed to gorgeous accounts of the civilization of these countries at the time of their discovery by the Spaniards that it may at first shock our preconceived notions to see them set down as in the "middle status of barbarism," one stage higher than Mohawks, and one stage lower than the warriors of the Iliad. This does indeed mark a change since Dr. Draper expressed the opinion that the Mexicans and Peruvians were morally and intellectually superior to the Europeans of the sixteenth century.[30] The reaction from the state of opinion in which such an extravagant remark was even possible has been attended with some controversy; but on the whole Mr. Morgan's main position has been steadily and rapidly gaining ground, and it is becoming more and more clear that if we are to use language correctly when we speak of the civilizations of Mexico and Peru we really mean civilizations of an extremely archaic type, considerably more archaic than that of Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs. A "civilization" like that of the Aztecs, without domestic animals or iron tools, with trade still in the primitive stage of barter, with human sacrifices, and with cannibalism, has certainly some of the most vivid features of barbarism. Along with these primitive features, however, there seem to have been—after making all due allowances—some features of luxury and splendour such as we are wont to associate with civilization. The Aztecs, moreover, though doubtless a full ethnical period behind the ancient Egyptians in general advancement, had worked out a system of hieroglyphic writing, and had begun to put it to some literary use. It would seem that a people may in certain special points reach a level of attainment higher than the level which they occupy in other points. The Cave men of the Glacial period were ignorant of pottery, and thus had not risen above the upper status of savagery; but their artistic talent, upon which we have remarked, was not such as we are wont to associate with savagery. Other instances will occur to us in the proper place.

[Footnote 30: See his Intellectual Development of Europe, New York, 1863, pp. 448, 464.]

[Sidenote: Loose use of the words "savagery" and "civilization".]

The difficulty which people usually find in realizing the true position of the ancient Mexican culture arises partly from the misconceptions which have until recently distorted the facts, and partly from the loose employment of terms above noticed. It is quite correct to speak of the Australian blackfellows as "savages," but nothing is more common than to hear the same epithet employed to characterize Shawnees and Mohawks; and to call those Indians "savages" is quite misleading. So on the other hand the term "civilization" is often so loosely used as to cover a large territory belonging to "barbarism." One does not look for scientific precision in newspapers, but they are apt to reflect popular habits of thought quite faithfully, and for that reason it is proper here to quote from one. In a newspaper account of Mr. Cushing's recent discoveries of buried towns, works of irrigation, etc., in Arizona, we are first told that these are the remains of a "splendid prehistoric civilization," and the next moment we are told, in entire unconsciousness of the contradiction, that the people who constructed these works had only stone tools. Now to call a people "civilized" who have only stone tools is utterly misleading. Nothing but confusion of ideas and darkening of counsel can come from such a misuse of words. Such a people may be in a high degree interesting and entitled to credit for what they have achieved, but the grade of culture which they have reached is not "civilization."

[Sidenote: Value and importance of the term "barbarism."]

With "savagery" thus encroaching upon its area of meaning on the one side, and "civilization" encroaching on the other, the word "barbarism," as popularly apprehended, is left in a vague and unsatisfactory plight. If we speak of Montezuma's people as barbarians one stage further advanced than Mohawks, we are liable to be charged with calling them "savages." Yet the term "barbarism" is a very useful one; indispensable, indeed, in the history of human progress. There is no other word which can serve in its stead as a designation of the enormous interval which begins with the invention of pottery and ends with the invention of the alphabet. The popular usage of the word is likely to become more definite as it comes to be more generally realized how prodigious that interval has been. When we think what a considerable portion of man's past existence has been comprised within it, and what a marvellous transformation in human knowledge and human faculty has been gradually wrought between its beginning and its end, the period of barbarism becomes invested with most thrilling interest, and its name ceases to appear otherwise than respectable. It is Mr. Morgan's chief title to fame that he has so thoroughly explored this period and described its features with such masterly skill.

[Sidenote: The status of barbarism is most completely exemplified in ancient America.]

[Sidenote: Survivals of bygone epochs of culture.]

It is worth while to observe that Mr. Morgan's view of the successive stages of culture is one which could not well have been marked out in all its parts except by a student of American archaeology. Aboriginal America is the richest field in the world for the study of barbarism. Its people present every gradation in social life during three ethnical periods—the upper period of savagery and the lower and middle periods of barbarism—so that the process of development may be most systematically and instructively studied. Until we have become familiar with ancient American society, and so long as our view is confined to the phases of progress in the Old World, the demarcation between civilized and uncivilized life seems too abrupt and sudden; we do not get a correct measure of it. The oldest European tradition reaches back only through the upper period of barbarism.[31] The middle and lower periods have lapsed into utter oblivion, and it is only modern archaeological research that is beginning to recover the traces of them. But among the red men of America the social life of ages more remote than that of the lake villages of Switzerland is in many particulars preserved for us to-day, and when we study it we begin to realize as never before the continuity of human development, its enormous duration, and the almost infinite accumulation of slow efforts by which progress has been achieved. Ancient America is further instructive in presenting the middle status of barbarism in a different form from that which it assumed in the eastern hemisphere. Its most conspicuous outward manifestations, instead of tents and herds, were strange and imposing edifices of stone, so that it was quite natural that observers interpreting it from a basis of European experience should mistake it for civilization. Certain aspects of that middle period may be studied to-day in New Mexico and Arizona, as phases of the older periods may still be found among the wilder tribes, even after all the contact they have had with white men. These survivals from antiquity will not permanently outlive that contact, and it is important that no time should be lost in gathering and putting on record all that can be learned of the speech and arts, the customs and beliefs, everything that goes to constitute the philology and anthropology of the red men. For the intelligent and vigorous work of this sort now conducted by the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, under the direction of Major Powell, no praise can be too strong and no encouragement too hearty.

[Footnote 31: Now and then, perhaps, but very rarely, it just touches the close of the middle period, as, e. g., in the lines from Hesiod and Lucretius above quoted.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Tribal society and multiplicity of languages in aboriginal America.]

A brief enumeration of the principal groups of Indians will be helpful in enabling us to comprehend the social condition of ancient America. The groups are in great part defined by differences of language, which are perhaps a better criterion of racial affinity in the New World than in the Old, because there seems to have been little or nothing of that peculiar kind of conquest with incorporation resulting in complete change of speech which we sometimes find in the Old World; as, for example, when we see the Celto-Iberian population of Spain and the Belgic, Celtic, and Aquitanian populations of Gaul forgetting their native tongues, and adopting that of a confederacy of tribes in Latium. Except in the case of Peru there is no indication that anything of this sort went on, or that there was anything even superficially analogous to "empire," in ancient America. What strikes one most forcibly at first is the vast number of American languages. Adelung, in his "Mithridates," put the number at 1,264, and Ludewig, in his "Literature of the American Languages," put it roundly at 1,100. Squier, on the other hand, was content with 400.[32] The discrepancy arises from the fact that where one scholar sees two or three distinct languages another sees two or three dialects of one language and counts them as one; it is like the difficulty which naturalists find in agreeing as to what are species and what are only varieties. The great number of languages and dialects spoken by a sparse population is one mark of the universal prevalence of a rude and primitive form of tribal society.[33]

[Footnote 32: Winsor, "Bibliographical Notes on American Linguistics," in his Narr. and Crit. Hist., vol. i. pp. 420-428, gives an admirable survey of the subject. See also Pilling's bibliographical bulletins of Iroquoian, Siouan, and Muskhogean languages, published by the Bureau of Ethnology.]

[Footnote 33: Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp. 147-174.]

[Sidenote: Tribes in the upper status of savagery.]

The lowest tribes in North America were those that are still to be found in California, in the valley of the Columbia river, and on the shores of Puget Sound. The Athabaskans of Hudson's Bay were on about the same level of savagery. They made no pottery, knew nothing of horticulture, depended for subsistence entirely upon bread-roots, fish, and game, and thus had no village life. They were mere prowlers in the upper status of savagery.[34] The Apaches of Arizona, preeminent even among red men for atrocious cruelty, are an offshoot from the Athabaskan stock. Very little better are the Shoshones and Bannocks that still wander among the lonely bare mountains and over the weird sage-brush plains of Idaho. The region west of the Rocky Mountains and north of New Mexico is thus the region of savagery.

[Footnote 34: For a good account of Indians in the upper status of savagery until modified by contact with civilization, see Myron Eells, "The Twana, Chemakum, and Klallam Indians of Washington Territory," Smithsonian Report, 1887, pp. 605-681.]

[Sidenote: The Dakota family of tribes.]

Between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic coast the aborigines, at the time of the Discovery, might have been divided into six or seven groups, of which three were situated mainly to the east of the Mississippi river, the others mainly to the west of it. All were in the lower period of barbarism. Of the western groups, by far the most numerous were the Dakotas, comprising the Sioux, Poncas, Omahas, Iowas, Kaws, Otoes, and Missouris. From the headwaters of the Mississippi their territory extended westward on both sides of the Missouri for a thousand miles. One of their tribes, the Winnebagos, had crossed the Mississippi and pressed into the region between that river and Lake Michigan.

[Sidenote: The Minnitarees and Mandans.]

A second group, very small in numbers but extremely interesting to the student of ethnology, comprises the Minnitarees and Mandans on the upper Missouri.[35] The remnants of these tribes now live together in the same village, and in personal appearance, as well as in intelligence, they are described as superior to any other red men north of New Mexico. From their first discovery, by the brothers La Verendrye in 1742, down to Mr. Catlin's visit nearly a century later, there was no change in their condition,[36] but shortly afterward, in 1838, the greater part of them were swept away by small-pox. The excellence of their horticulture, the framework of their houses, and their peculiar religious ceremonies early attracted attention. Upon Mr. Catlin they made such an impression that he fancied there must be an infusion of white blood in them; and after the fashion of those days he sought to account for it by a reference to the legend of Madoc, a Welsh prince who was dimly imagined to have sailed to America about 1170. He thought that Madoc's party might have sailed to the Mississippi and founded a colony which ascended that river and the Ohio, built the famous mounds of the Ohio valley, and finally migrated to the upper Missouri.[37] To this speculation was appended the inevitable list of words which happen to sound somewhat alike in Mandan and in Welsh. In the realm of free fancy everything is easy. That there was a Madoc who went somewhere in 1170 is quite possible, but as shrewd old John Smith said about it, "where this place was no history can show."[38] But one part of Mr. Catlin's speculation may have hit somewhat nearer the truth. It is possible that the Minnitarees or the Mandans, or both, may be a remnant of some of those Mound-builders in the Mississippi valley concerning whom something will presently be said.

[Footnote 35: An excellent description of them, profusely illustrated with coloured pictures, may be found in Catlin's North American Indians, vol. i. pp. 66-207, 7th ed., London, 1848; the author was an accurate and trustworthy observer. Some writers have placed these tribes in the Dakota group because of the large number of Dakota words in their language; but these are probably borrowed words, like the numerous French words in English.]

[Footnote 36: See Francis Parkman's paper, "The Discovery of the Rocky Mountains," Atlantic Monthly, June, 1888. I hope the appearance of this article, two years ago, indicates that we have not much longer to wait for the next of that magnificent series of volumes on the history of the French in North America.]

[Footnote 37: North American Indians, vol. ii., Appendix A.]

[Footnote 38: Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles, p. 1, London, 1626.]

[Sidenote: Pawnees, etc.]

The third group in this western region consists of the Pawnees and Arickarees,[39] of the Platte valley in Nebraska, with a few kindred tribes farther to the south.

[Footnote 39: For the history and ethnology of these interesting tribes, see three learned papers by J. B. Dunbar, in Magazine of American History, vol. iv. pp. 241-281; vol. v. pp. 321-342; vol. viii. pp. 734-756; also Grinnell's Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales, New York, 1889.]

[Sidenote: Maskoki family.]

Of the three groups eastward of the Mississippi we may first mention the Maskoki, or Muskhogees, consisting of the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and others, with the Creek confederacy.[40] These tribes were intelligent and powerful, with a culture well advanced toward the end of the lower period of barbarism.

[Footnote 40: These tribes of the Gulf region were formerly grouped, along with others not akin to them, as "Mobilians." The Cherokees were supposed to belong to the Maskoki family, but they have lately been declared an intrusive offshoot from the Iroquois stock. The remnants of another alien tribe, the once famous Natchez, were adopted into the Creek confederacy. For a full account of these tribes, see Gatschet, A Migration Legend of the Creek Indians, vol. i., Philadelphia, 1884.]

[Sidenote: Algonquin family of tribes.]

The Algonquin family, bordering at its southern limits upon the Maskoki, had a vast range northeasterly along the Atlantic coast until it reached the confines of Labrador, and northwesterly through the region of the Great Lakes and as far as the Churchill river[41] to the west of Hudson's Bay. In other words, the Algonquins were bounded on the south by the Maskoki,[42] on the west by the Dakotas, on the northwest by the Athabaskans, on the northeast by Eskimos, and on the east by the ocean. Between Lake Superior and the Red River of the North the Crees had their hunting grounds, and closely related to them were the Pottawatomies, Ojibwas, and Ottawas. One offshoot, including the Blackfeet, Cheyennes, and Arrapahos, roamed as far west as the Rocky Mountains. The great triangle between the upper Mississippi and the Ohio was occupied by the Menomonees and Kickapoos, the Sacs and Foxes, the Miamis and Illinois, and the Shawnees. Along the coast region the principal Algonquin tribes were the Powhatans of Virginia, the Lenape or Delawares, the Munsees or Minisinks of the mountains about the Susquehanna, the Mohegans on the Hudson, the Adirondacks between that river and the St. Lawrence, the Narragansetts and their congeners in New England, and finally the Micmacs and Wabenaki far down East, as the last name implies. There is a tradition, supported to some extent by linguistic evidence,[43] that the Mohegans, with their cousins the Pequots, were more closely related to the Shawnees than to the Delaware or coast group. While all the Algonquin tribes were in the lower period of barbarism, there was a noticeable gradation among them, the Crees and Ojibwas of the far North standing lowest in culture, and the Shawnees, at their southernmost limits, standing highest.

[Footnote 41: Howse, Grammar of the Cree Language, London, 1865, p. vii.]

[Footnote 42: Except in so far as the Cherokees and Tuscaroras, presently to be mentioned, were interposed.]

[Footnote 43: Brinton, The Lenape and their Legends, p. 30.]

[Sidenote: Huron-Iroquois family of tribes.]

We have observed the Dakota tribes pressing eastward against their neighbours and sending out an offshoot, the Winnebagos, across the Mississippi river. It has been supposed that the Huron-Iroquois group of tribes was a more remote offshoot from the Dakotas. This is very doubtful; but in the thirteenth or fourteenth century the general trend of the Huron-Iroquois movement seems to have been eastward, either in successive swarms, or in a single swarm, which became divided and scattered by segmentation, as was common with all Indian tribes. They seem early to have proved their superiority over the Algonquins in bravery and intelligence. Their line of invasion seems to have run eastward to Niagara, and thereabouts to have bifurcated, one line following the valley of the St. Lawrence, and the other that of the Susquehanna. The Hurons established themselves in the peninsula between the lake that bears their name and Lake Ontario. South of them and along the northern shore of Lake Erie were settled their kindred, afterward called the "Neutral Nation."[44] On the southern shore the Eries planted themselves, while the Susquehannocks pushed on in a direction sufficiently described by their name. Farthest of all penetrated the Tuscaroras, even into the pine forests of North Carolina, where they maintained themselves in isolation from their kindred until 1715. These invasions resulted in some displacement of Algonquin tribes, and began to sap the strength of the confederacy or alliance in which the Delawares had held a foremost place.

[Footnote 44: Because they refused to take part in the strife between the Hurons and the Five Nations. Their Indian name was Attiwandarons. They were unsurpassed for ferocity. See Parkman, Jesuits in North America, p. xliv.]

[Sidenote: The Five Nations.]

But by far the most famous and important of the Huron-Iroquois were those that followed the northern shore of Lake Ontario into the valley of the St. Lawrence. In that direction their progress was checked by the Algonquin tribe of Adirondacks, but they succeeded in retaining a foothold in the country for a long time; for in 1535 Jacques Cartier found on the site which he named Montreal an Iroquois village which had vanished before Champlain's arrival seventy years later. Those Iroquois who were thrust back in the struggle for the St. Lawrence valley, early in the fifteenth century, made their way across Lake Ontario and established themselves at the mouth of the Oswego river. They were then in three small tribes,—the Mohawks, Onondagas, and Senecas,—but as they grew in numbers and spread eastward to the Hudson and westward to the Genesee, the intermediate tribes of Oneidas and Cayugas were formed by segmentation.[45] About 1450 the five tribes—afterwards known as the Five Nations—were joined in a confederacy in pursuance of the wise counsel which Hayowentha, or Hiawatha,[46] according to the legend, whispered into the ears of the Onondaga sachem, Daganoweda. This union of their resources combined, with their native bravery and cunning, and their occupation of the most commanding military position in eastern North America, to render them invincible among red men. They exterminated their old enemies the Adirondacks, and pushed the Mohegans over the mountains from the Hudson river to the Connecticut. When they first encountered white men in 1609 their name had become a terror in New England, insomuch that as soon as a single Mohawk was caught sight of by the Indians in that country, they would raise the cry from hill to hill, "A Mohawk! a Mohawk!" and forthwith would flee like sheep before wolves, never dreaming of resistance.[47]

[Footnote 45: Morgan, Ancient Society, p. 125.]

[Footnote 46: Whether there was ever such a person as Hiawatha is, to say the least, doubtful. As a traditional culture-hero his attributes are those of Ioskeha, Michabo, Quetzalcoatl, Viracocha, and all that class of sky-gods to which I shall again have occasion to refer. See Brinton's Myths of the New World, p. 172. When the Indian speaks of Hiawatha whispering advice to Daganoweda, his meaning is probably the same as that of the ancient Greek when he attributed the wisdom of some mortal hero to whispered advice from Zeus or his messenger Hermes. Longfellow's famous poem is based upon Schoolcraft's book entitled The Hiawatha Legends, which is really a misnomer, for the book consists chiefly of Ojibwa stories about Manabozho, son of the West Wind. There was really no such legend of Hiawatha as that which the poet has immortalized. See Hale, The Iroquois Book of Rites, pp. 36, 180-183.]

[Footnote 47: Cadwallader Colden, History of the Five Nations, New York, 1727.]

After the Five Nations had been supplied with firearms by the Dutch their power increased with portentous rapidity.[48] At first they sought to persuade their neighbours of kindred blood and speech, the Eries and others, to join their confederacy; and failing in this they went to war and exterminated them.[49] Then they overthrew one Algonquin tribe after another until in 1690 their career was checked by the French. By that time they had reduced to a tributary condition most of the Algonquin tribes, even to the Mississippi river. Some writers have spoken of the empire of the Iroquois, and it has been surmised that, if they had not been interfered with by white men, they might have played a part analogous to that of the Romans in the Old World; but there is no real similarity between the two cases. The Romans acquired their mighty strength by incorporating vanquished peoples into their own body politic.[50] No American aborigines ever had a glimmering of the process of state-building after the Roman fashion. No incorporation resulted from the victories of the Iroquois. Where their burnings and massacres stopped short of extermination, they simply took tribute, which was as far as state-craft had got in the lower period of barbarism. General Walker has summed up their military career in a single sentence: "They were the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the continent."[51]

[Footnote 48: Morgan, League of the Iroquois, p. 12.]

[Footnote 49: All except the distant Tuscaroras, who in 1715 migrated from North Carolina to New York, and joining the Iroquois league made it the Six Nations. All the rest of the outlying Huron-Iroquois stock was wiped out of existence before the end of the seventeenth century, except the remnant of Hurons since known as Wyandots.]

[Footnote 50: See my Beginnings of New England, chap. i.]

[Footnote 51: F. A. Walker, "The Indian Question," North American Review, April, 1873, p. 370.]

[Sidenote: Horticulture must be distinguished from field agriculture.]

[Sidenote: Perpetual warfare.]

The six groups here enumerated—Dakota, Mandan, Pawnee, Maskoki, Algonquin, Iroquois—made up the great body of the aborigines of North America who at the time of the Discovery lived in the lower status of barbarism. All made pottery of various degrees of rudeness. Their tools and weapons were of the Neolithic type,—stone either polished or accurately and artistically chipped. For the most part they lived in stockaded villages, and cultivated maize, beans, pumpkins, squashes, sunflowers, and tobacco. They depended for subsistence partly upon such vegetable products, partly upon hunting and fishing, the women generally attending to the horticulture, the men to the chase. Horticulture is an appropriate designation for this stage in which the ground is merely scratched with stone spades and hoes. It is incipient agriculture, but should be carefully distinguished from the field agriculture in which extensive pieces of land are subdued by the plough. The assistance of domestic animals is needed before such work can be carried far, and it does not appear that there was an approach to field agriculture in any part of pre-Columbian America except Peru, where men were harnessed to the plough, and perhaps occasionally llamas were used in the same way.[52] Where subsistence depended upon rude horticulture eked out by game and fish, it required a large territory to support a sparse population. The great diversity of languages contributed to maintain the isolation of tribes and prevent extensive confederation. Intertribal warfare was perpetual, save now and then for truces of brief duration. Warfare was attended by wholesale massacre. As many prisoners as could be managed were taken home by their captors; in some cases they were adopted into the tribe of the latter as a means of increasing its fighting strength, otherwise they were put to death with lingering torments.[53] There was nothing which afforded the red men such exquisite delight as the spectacle of live human flesh lacerated with stone knives or hissing under the touch of firebrands, and for elaborate ingenuity in devising tortures they have never been equalled.[54] Cannibalism was quite commonly practised.[55] The scalps of slain enemies were always taken, and until they had attained such trophies the young men were not likely to find favour in the eyes of women. The Indian's notions of morality were those that belong to that state of society in which the tribe is the largest well-established political aggregate. Murder without the tribe was meritorious unless it entailed risk of war at an obvious disadvantage; murder within the tribe was either revenged by blood-feud or compounded by a present given to the victim's kinsmen. Such rudimentary wergild was often reckoned in wampum, or strings of beads made of a kind of mussel shell, and put to divers uses, as personal ornament, mnemonic record, and finally money. Religious thought was in the fetishistic or animistic stage,[56] while many tribes had risen to a vague conception of tutelar deities embodied in human or animal forms. Myth-tales abounded, and the folk-lore of the red men is found to be extremely interesting and instructive.[57] Their religion consisted mainly in a devout belief in witchcraft. No well-defined priestly class had been evolved; the so-called "medicine men" were mere conjurers, though possessed of considerable influence.

[Footnote 52: See Humboldt, Ansichten der Natur, 3d ed., Stuttgart, 1849, vol. i. p. 203.]

[Footnote 53: "Women and children joined in these fiendish atrocities, and when at length the victim yielded up his life, his heart, if he were brave, was ripped from his body, cut in pieces, broiled, and given to the young men, under the belief that it would increase their courage; they drank his blood, thinking it would make them more wary; and finally his body was divided limb from limb, roasted or thrown into the seething pot, and hands and feet, arms and legs, head and trunk, were all stewed into a horrid mess and eaten amidst yells, songs, and dances." Jeffries Wyman, in Seventh Report of Peabody Museum, p. 37. For details of the most appalling character, see Butterfield's History of the Girtys, pp. 176-182; Stone's Life of Joseph Brant, vol. ii. pp. 31, 32; Dodge's Plains of the Great West, p. 418, and Our Wild Indians, pp. 525-529; Parkman's Jesuits in North America, pp. 387-391; and many other places in Parkman's writings.]

[Footnote 54: One often hears it said that the cruelty of the Indians was not greater than that of mediaeval Europeans, as exemplified in judicial torture and in the horrors of the Inquisition. But in such a judgment there is lack of due discrimination. In the practice of torture by civil and ecclesiastical tribunals in the Middle Ages, there was a definite moral purpose which, however lamentably mistaken or perverted, gave it a very different character from torture wantonly inflicted for amusement. The atrocities formerly attendant upon the sack of towns, as e. g. Beziers, Magdeburg, etc., might more properly be regarded as an illustration of the survival of a spirit fit only for the lowest barbarism: and the Spanish conquerors of the New World themselves often exhibited cruelty such as even Indians seldom surpass. See below, vol. ii. p. 444. In spite of such cases, however, it must be held that for artistic skill in inflicting the greatest possible intensity of excruciating pain upon every nerve in the body, the Spaniard was a bungler and a novice as compared with the Indian. See Dodge's Our Wild Indians, pp. 536-538. Colonel Dodge was in familiar contact with Indians for more than thirty years, and writes with fairness and discrimination.

In truth the question as to comparative cruelty is not so much one of race as of occupation, except in so far as race is moulded by long occupation. The "old Adam," i. e. the inheritance from our brute ancestors, is very strong in the human race. Callousness to the suffering of others than self is part of this brute-inheritance, and under the influence of certain habits and occupations this germ of callousness may be developed to almost any height of devilish cruelty. In the lower stages of culture the lack of political aggregation on a large scale is attended with incessant warfare in the shape in which it comes home to everybody's door. This state of things keeps alive the passion of revenge and stimulates cruelty to the highest degree. As long as such a state of things endures, as it did in Europe to a limited extent throughout the Middle Ages, there is sure to be a dreadful amount of cruelty. The change in the conditions of modern warfare has been a very important factor in the rapidly increasing mildness and humanity of modern times. See my Beginnings of New England, pp. 226-229. Something more will be said hereafter with reference to the special causes concerned in the cruelty and brutality of the Spaniards in America. Meanwhile it may be observed in the present connection, that the Spanish taskmasters who mutilated and burned their slaves were not representative types of their own race to anything like the same extent as the Indians who tortured Brebeuf or Crawford. If the fiendish Pedrarias was a Spaniard, so too was the saintly Las Casas. The latter type would be as impossible among barbarians as an Aristotle or a Beethoven. Indeed, though there are writers who would like to prove the contrary, it may be doubted whether that type has ever attained to perfection except under the influence of Christianity.]

[Footnote 55: See the evidence collected by Jeffries Wyman, in Seventh Report of Peabody Museum, pp. 27-37; cf. Wake, Evolution of Morality, vol. i. p. 243. Many illustrations are given by Mr. Parkman. In this connection it may be observed that the name "Mohawk" means "Cannibal." It is an Algonquin word, applied to this Iroquois tribe by their enemies in the Connecticut valley and about the lower Hudson. The name by which the Mohawks called themselves was "Caniengas," or "People-at-the-Flint." See Hale, The Iroquois Book of Rites, p. 173.]

[Footnote 56: For accounts and explanations of animism see Tylor's Primitive Culture, London, 1871, 2 vols.; Caspari, Urgeschichte der Menschheit, Leipsic, 1877, 2 vols.; Spencer's Principles of Sociology, part i.; and my Myths and Mythmakers, chap. vii.]

[Footnote 57: No time should be lost in gathering and recording every scrap of this folk-lore that can be found. The American Folk-Lore Society, founded chiefly through the exertions of my friend Mr. W. W. Newell, and organized January 4, 1888, is already doing excellent work and promises to become a valuable aid, within its field, to the work of the Bureau of Ethnology. Of the Journal of American Folk-Lore, published for the society by Messrs. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., nine numbers have appeared, and the reader will find them full of valuable information. One may also profitably consult Knortz's Maerchen und Sagen der nordamerikanischen Indianer, Jena, 1871; Brinton's Myths of the New World, N. Y., 1868, and his American Hero-Myths, Phila., 1882; Leland's Algonquin Legends of New England, Boston, 1884; Mrs. Emerson's Indian Myths, Boston, 1884. Some brief reflections and criticisms of much value, in relation to aboriginal American folk-lore, may be found in Curtin's Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland, pp. 12-27.]

But none of the characteristics of barbarous society above specified will carry us so far toward realizing the gulf which divides it from civilized society as the imperfect development of its domestic relations. The importance of this subject is such as to call for a few words of special elucidation.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Ancient Law.]

Thirty years ago, when Sir Henry Maine published that magnificent treatise on Ancient Law, which, when considered in all its potency of suggestiveness, has perhaps done more than any other single book of our century toward placing the study of history upon a scientific basis, he began by showing that in primitive society the individual is nothing and the state nothing, while the family-group is everything, and that the progress of civilization politically has consisted on the one hand in the aggregation and building up of family-groups through intermediate tribal organizations into states, and on the other hand in the disentanglement of individuals from the family thraldom. In other words, we began by having no political communities larger than clans, and no bond of political union except blood relationship, and in this state of things the individual, as to his rights and obligations, was submerged in the clan. We at length come to have great nations like the English or the French, in which blood-relationship as a bond of political union is no longer indispensable or even much thought of, and in which the individual citizen is the possessor of legal rights and subject to legal obligations. No one in our time can forget how beautifully Sir Henry Maine, with his profound knowledge of early Aryan law and custom, from Ireland to Hindustan, delineated the slow growth of individual ownership of property and individual responsibility for delict and crime out of an earlier stage in which ownership and responsibility belonged only to family-groups or clans.

[Sidenote: The patriarchal family not primitive.]

[Sidenote: "Mother-right."]

[Sidenote: Primitive marriage.]

[Sidenote: The system of reckoning kinship through females only.]

In all these brilliant studies Sir Henry Maine started with the patriarchal family as we find it at the dawn of history among all peoples of Aryan and Semitic speech,—the patriarchal family of the ancient Roman and the ancient Jew, the family in which kinship is reckoned through males, and in which all authority centres in the eldest male, and descends to his eldest son. Maine treated this patriarchal family as primitive; but his great book had hardly appeared when other scholars, more familiar than he with races in savagery or in the lower status of barbarism, showed that his view was too restricted. We do not get back to primitive society by studying Greeks, Romans, and Jews, peoples who had nearly emerged from the later period of barbarism when we first know them.[58] Their patriarchal family was perfected in shape during the later period of barbarism, and it was preceded by a much ruder and less definite form of family-group in which kinship was reckoned only through the mother, and the headship never descended from father to son. As so often happens, this discovery was made almost simultaneously by two investigators, each working in ignorance of what the other was doing. In 1861, the same year in which "Ancient Law" was published, Professor Bachofen, of Basel, published his famous book, "Das Mutterrecht," of which his co-discoverer and rival, after taking exception to some of his statements, thus cordially writes: "It remains, however, after all qualifications and deductions, that Bachofen, before any one else, discovered the fact that a system of kinship through mothers only, had anciently everywhere prevailed before the tie of blood between father and child had found a place in systems of relationships. And the honour of that discovery, the importance of which, as affording a new starting-point for all history, cannot be overestimated, must without stint or qualification be assigned to him."[59] Such are the generous words of the late John Ferguson McLennan, who had no knowledge of Bachofen's work when his own treatise on "Primitive Marriage" was published in 1865. Since he was so modest in urging his own claims, it is due to the Scotch lawyer's memory to say that, while he was inferior in point of erudition to the Swiss professor, his book is characterized by greater sagacity, goes more directly to the mark, and is less encumbered by visionary speculations of doubtful value.[60] Mr. McLennan proved, from evidence collected chiefly from Australians and South Sea Islanders, and sundry non-Aryan tribes of Hindustan and Thibet, that systems of kinship in which the father is ignored exist to-day, and he furthermore discovered unmistakable and very significant traces of the former existence of such a state of things among the Mongols, the Greeks and Phoenicians, and the ancient Hebrews. By those who were inclined to regard Sir Henry Maine's views as final, it was argued that Mr. McLennan's facts were of a sporadic and exceptional character. But when the evidence from this vast archaic world of America began to be gathered in and interpreted by Mr. Morgan, this argument fell to the ground, and as to the point chiefly in contention, Mr. McLennan was proved to be right. Throughout aboriginal America, with one or two exceptions, kinship was reckoned through females only, and in the exceptional instances the vestiges of that system were so prominent as to make it clear that the change had been but recently effected. During the past fifteen years, evidence has accumulated from various parts of the world, until it is beginning to appear as if it were the patriarchal system that is exceptional, having been reached only by the highest races.[61] Sir Henry Maine's work has lost none of its value, only, like all human work, it is not final; it needs to be supplemented by the further study of savagery as best exemplified in Australia and some parts of Polynesia, and of barbarism as best exemplified in America. The subject is, moreover, one of great and complicated difficulty, and leads incidentally to many questions for solving which the data at our command are still inadequate. It is enough for us now to observe in general that while there are plenty of instances of change from the system of reckoning kinship only through females, to the system of reckoning through males, there do not appear to have been any instances of change in the reverse direction; and that in ancient America the earlier system was prevalent.

[Footnote 58: Until lately our acquaintance with human history was derived almost exclusively from literary memorials, among which the Bible, the Homeric poems, and the Vedas, carried us back about as far as literature could take us. It was natural, therefore, to suppose that the society of the times of Abraham or Agamemnon was "primitive," and the wisest scholars reasoned upon such an assumption. With vision thus restricted to civilized man and his ideas and works, people felt free to speculate about uncivilized races (generally grouped together indiscriminately as "savages") according to any a priori whim that might happen to captivate their fancy. But the discoveries of the last half-century have opened such stupendous vistas of the past that the age of Abraham seems but as yesterday. The state of society described in the book of Genesis had five entire ethnical periods, and the greater part of a sixth, behind it; and its institutions were, comparatively speaking, modern.]

[Footnote 59: McLennan's Studies in Ancient History, comprising a reprint of Primitive Marriage, etc. London, 1876, p. 421.]

[Footnote 60: There is much that is unsound in it, however, as is often inevitably the case with books that strike boldly into a new field of inquiry.]

[Footnote 61: A general view of the subject may be obtained from the following works: Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, Stuttgart, 1871, and Die Sage von Tanaquil, Heidelberg, 1870; McLennan's Studies in Ancient History, London, 1876, and The Patriarchal Theory, London, 1884; Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity (Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, vol. xvii.), Washington, 1871, and Ancient Society, New York, 1877; Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, Cambridge, Eng., 1885; Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, 5th ed., London, 1889; Giraud-Teulon, La Mere chez certains peuples de l'antiquite, Paris, 1867, and Les Origines de la Famille, Geneva, 1874; Starcke (of Copenhagen), The Primitive Family, London, 1889. Some criticisms upon McLennan and Morgan may be found in Maine's later works, Early History of Institutions, London, 1875, and Early Law and Custom, London, 1883. By far the ablest critical survey of the whole field is that in Spencer's Principles of Sociology, vol. i. pp. 621-797.]

[Sidenote: Original reason for the system.]

[Sidenote: The primeval human horde.]

[Sidenote: Earliest family-group: the clan.]

[Sidenote: "Exogamy."]

If now we ask the reason for such a system of reckoning kinship and inheritance, so strange according to all our modern notions, the true answer doubtless is that which was given by prudent ([Greek: Pepnymenos]) Telemachus to the goddess Athene when she asked him to tell her truly if he was the son of Odysseus:—"My mother says I am his son, for my part, I don't know; one never knows of one's self who one's father is."[62] Already, no doubt, in Homer's time there was a gleam of satire about this answer, such as it would show on a modern page; but in more primitive times it was a very serious affair. From what we know of the ideas and practices of uncivilized tribes all over the world, it is evident that the sacredness of the family based upon indissoluble marriage is a thing of comparatively modern growth. If the sexual relations of the Australians, as observed to-day,[63] are an improvement upon an antecedent state of things, that antecedent state must have been sheer promiscuity. There is ample warrant for supposing, with Mr. McLennan, that at the beginning of the lower status of savagery, long since everywhere extinct, the family had not made itself distinctly visible, but men lived in a horde very much like gregarious brutes.[64] I have shown that the essential difference between this primeval human horde and a mere herd of brutes consisted in the fact that the gradual but very great prolongation of infancy had produced two effects: the lengthening of the care of children tended to differentiate the horde into family-groups, and the lengthening of the period of youthful mental plasticity made it more possible for a new generation to improve upon the ideas and customs of its predecessors.[65] In these two concomitant processes—the development of the family and the increase of mental plasticity, or ability to adopt new methods and strike out into new paths of thought—lies the whole explanation of the moral and intellectual superiority of men over dumb animals. But in each case the change was very gradual.[66] The true savage is only a little less unteachable than the beasts of the field. The savage family is at first barely discernible amid the primitive social chaos in which it had its origin. Along with polyandry and polygyny in various degrees and forms, instances of exclusive pairing, of at least a temporary character, are to be found among the lowest existing savages, and there are reasons for supposing that such may have been the case even in primeval times. But it was impossible for strict monogamy to flourish in the ruder stages of social development; and the kind of family-group that was first clearly and permanently differentiated from the primeval horde was not at all like what civilized people would recognize as a family. It was the gens or clan, as we find it exemplified in all stages from the middle period of savagery to the middle period of barbarism. The gens or clan was simply—to define it by a third synonym—the kin; it was originally a group of males and females who were traditionally aware of their common descent reckoned in the female line. At this stage of development there was quite generally though not universally prevalent the custom of "exogamy," by which a man was forbidden to marry a woman of his own clan. Among such Australian tribes as have been studied, this primitive restriction upon promiscuity seems to be about the only one.

[Footnote 62: [Greek: All' age moi tode eipe kai atrekeos katalexon, ei de ex autoio tosos pais eis Odyseos. ainos gar kephalen te kai ommata kala eoikas keino, epei thama toion emisgometh' alleloisin, prin ge ton es Troien anabemenai, entha per alloi Argeion hoi aristoi eban koiles epi neusin ek tou d' out' Odysea egon idon out' eme keinos.

Ten d' au Telemachos pepnymenos antion euda toigar ego toi, xeine, mal' atrekeos agoreuso. meter men t' eme phesi tou emmenai, autar egoge ouk oid'; ou gar po tis heon gonon autos anegno.] Odyssey, i. 206.]

[Footnote 63: Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, p. 213; Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, p. 107; Morgan, Ancient Society, part iii., chap. iii. "After battle it frequently happens among the native tribes of Australia that the wives of the conquered, of their own free-will, go over to the victors; reminding us of the lioness which, quietly watching the fight between two lions, goes off with the conqueror." Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. i. p. 632.]

[Footnote 64: The notion of the descent of the human race from a single "pair," or of different races from different "pairs," is a curious instance of transferring modern institutions into times primeval. Of course the idea is absurd. When the elder Agassiz so emphatically declared that "pines have originated in forests, heaths in heaths, grasses in prairies, bees in hives, herrings in shoals, buffaloes in herds, men in nations" (Essay on Classification, London, 1859, p. 58), he made, indeed, a mistake of the same sort, so far as concerns the origin of Man, for the nation is a still more modern institution than the family; but in the other items of his statement he was right, and as regards the human race he was thinking in the right direction when he placed multitude instead of duality at the beginning. If instead of that extremely complex and highly organized multitude called "nation" (in the plural), he had started with the extremely simple and almost unorganized multitude called "horde" (in the singular), the statement for Man would have been correct. Such views were hardly within the reach of science thirty years ago.]

[Footnote 65: Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, part ii., chaps. xvi., xxi., xxii.; Excursions of an Evolutionist, pp. 306-319; Darwinism, and other Essays, pp. 40-49; The Destiny of Man, Sec.Sec. iii.-ix.]

[Footnote 66: The slowness of the development has apparently been such as befits the transcendent value of the result. Though the question is confessedly beyond the reach of science, may we not hold that civilized man, the creature of an infinite past, is the child of eternity, maturing for an inheritance of immortal life?]

[Sidenote: Phratry and tribe.]

Throughout all the earlier stages of culture, and even into the civilized period, we find society organized with the clan for its ultimate unit, although in course of time its character becomes greatly altered by the substitution of kinship in the paternal, for that in the maternal line. By long-continued growth and repeated segmentation the primitive clan was developed into a more complex structure, in which a group of clans constituted a phratry or brotherhood, and a group of phratries constituted a tribe. This threefold grouping is found so commonly in all parts of the world as to afford good ground for the belief that it has been universal. It was long ago familiar to historians in the case of Greece and Rome, and of our Teutonic forefathers,[67] but it also existed generally in ancient America, and many obscure points connected with the history of the Greek and Roman groups have been elucidated through the study of Iroquois and Algonquin institutions. Along with the likenesses, however, there are numerous unlikenesses, due to the change of kinship, among the European groups, from the female line to the male.

[Footnote 67: The Teutonic hundred and Roman curia answered to the Greek phratry.]

[Sidenote: Effect of pastoral life upon property and upon the family.]

This change, as it occurred among Aryan and Semitic peoples, marked one of the most momentous revolutions in the history of mankind. It probably occurred early in the upper period of barbarism, or late in the middle period, after the long-continued domestication of animals had resulted in the acquisition of private property (pecus, peculium, pecunia) in large amounts by individuals. In primitive society there was very little personal property except in weapons, clothing (such as it was), and trinkets. Real estate was unknown. Land was simply occupied by the tribe. There was general communism and social equality. In the Old World the earliest instance of extensive "adverse possession" on the part of individuals, as against other individuals in the clan-community, was the possession of flocks and herds. Distinctions in wealth and rank were thus inaugurated; slavery began to be profitable and personal retainers and adherents useful in new ways. As in earlier stages the community in marital relations had been part of the general community in possessions, so now the exclusive possession of a wife or wives was part of the system of private property that was coming into vogue. The man of many cattle, the man who could attach subordinates to him through motives of self-interest as well as personal deference, the man who could defend his property against robbers, could also have his separate household and maintain its sanctity. In this way, it is believed, indissoluble marriage, in its two forms of monogamy and polygamy, originated. That it had already existed sporadically is not denied, but it now acquired such stability and permanence that the older and looser forms of alliance, hitherto prevalent, fell into disfavour. A natural result of the growth of private wealth and the permanence of the marital relation was the change in reckoning kinship from the maternal to the paternal line. This change was probably favoured by the prevalence of polygamy among those who were coming to be distinguished as "upper classes," since a large family of children by different mothers could be held together only by reckoning the kinship through the father. Thus, we may suppose, originated the patriarchal family. Even in its rudest form it was an immense improvement upon what had gone before, and to the stronger and higher social organization thus acquired we must largely ascribe the rise of the Aryan and Semitic peoples to the foremost rank of civilization.[68]

[Footnote 68: Fenton's Early Hebrew Life, London, 1880, is an interesting study of the upper period of barbarism; see also Spencer, Princip. of Sociol., i. 724-737.]

It is not intended to imply that there is no other way in which the change to the male line may have been brought about among other peoples. The explanation just given applies very well to the Aryan and Semitic peoples, but it is inapplicable to the state of things which seems to have existed in Mexico at the time of the Discovery.[69] The subject is a difficult one, and sometimes confronts us with questions much easier to ask than to answer. The change has been observed among tribes in a lower stage than that just described.[70] On the other hand, as old customs die hard, no doubt inheritance has in many places continued in the maternal line long after paternity is fully known. Symmetrical regularity in the development of human institutions has by no means been the rule, and there is often much difficulty in explaining particular cases, even when the direction of the general drift can be discerned.

[Footnote 69: See below, p. 122.]

[Footnote 70: As among the Hervey Islanders; Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, p. 36. Sir John Lubbock would account for the curious and widely spread custom of the Couvade as a feature of this change. Origin of Civilization, pp. 14-17, 159; cf. Tylor, Early Hist. of Mankind, pp. 288, 297.]

[Sidenote: The exogamous clan in ancient America.]

In aboriginal America, as already observed, kinship through females only was the rule, and exogamy was strictly enforced,—the wife must be taken from a different clan. Indissoluble marriage, whether monogamous or polygamous, seems to have been unknown. The marriage relation was terminable at the will of either party.[71] The abiding unit upon which the social structure was founded was not the family but the exogamous clan.

[Footnote 71: "There is no embarrassment growing out of problems respecting the woman's future support, the division of property, or the adjustment of claims for the possession of the children. The independent self-support of every adult healthy Indian, male or female, and the gentile relationship, which is more wide-reaching and authoritative than that of marriage, have already disposed of these questions, which are usually so perplexing for the white man. So far as personal maintenance is concerned, a woman is, as a rule, just as well off without a husband as with one. What is hers, in the shape of property, remains her own whether she is married or not. In fact, marriage among these Indians seems to be but the natural mating of the sexes, to cease at the option of either of the interested parties." Clay MacCauley, "The Seminole Indians of Florida", in Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1887, p. 497. For a graphic account of the state of things among the Cheyennes and Arrapahos, see Dodge, Our Wild Indians, pp. 204-220.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Intimate connection of aboriginal architecture with social life.]

I have been at some pains to elucidate this point because the house-life of the American aborigines found visible, and in some instances very durable, expression in a remarkable style of house-architecture. The manner in which the Indians built their houses grew directly out of the requirements of their life. It was an unmistakably characteristic architecture, and while it exhibits manifold unlikenesses in detail, due to differences in intelligence as well as to the presence or absence of sundry materials, there is one underlying principle always manifest. That underlying principle is adaptation to a certain mode of communal living such as all American aborigines that have been carefully studied are known to have practised. Through many gradations, from the sty of the California savage up to the noble sculptured ruins of Uxmal and Chichen-Itza, the principle is always present. Taken in connection with evidence from other sources, it enables us to exhibit a gradation of stages of culture in aboriginal North America, with the savages of the Sacramento and Columbia valleys at the bottom, and the Mayas of Yucatan at the top; and while in going from one end to the other a very long interval was traversed, we feel that the progress of the aborigines in crossing that interval was made along similar lines.[72]

[Footnote 72: See Morgan's Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines, Washington, 1881, an epoch-making book of rare and absorbing interest.]



[Sidenote: The long houses of the Iroquois.]

The principle was first studied and explained by Mr. Morgan in the case of the famous "long houses" of the Iroquois. "The long house ... was from fifty to eighty and sometimes one hundred feet long. It consisted of a strong frame of upright poles set in the ground, which was strengthened with horizontal poles attached with withes, and surmounted with a triangular, and in some cases with a round roof. It was covered over, both sides and roof, with long strips of elm bark tied to the frame with strings or splints. An external frame of poles for the sides and of rafters for the roof were then adjusted to hold the bark shingles between them, the two frames being tied together. The interior of the house was comparted[73] at intervals of six or eight feet, leaving each chamber entirely open like a stall upon the passageway which passed through the centre of the house from end to end. At each end was a doorway covered with suspended skins. Between each four apartments, two on a side, was a fire-pit in the centre of the hall, used in common by their occupants. Thus a house with five fires would contain twenty apartments and accommodate twenty families, unless some apartments were reserved for storage. They were warm, roomy, and tidily-kept habitations. Raised bunks were constructed around the walls of each apartment for beds. From the roof-poles were suspended their strings of corn in the ear, braided by the husks, also strings of dried squashes and pumpkins. Spaces were contrived here and there to store away their accumulations of provisions. Each house, as a rule, was occupied by related families, the mothers and their children belonging to the same gens, while their husbands and the fathers of these children belonged to other gentes; consequently the gens or clan of the mother largely predominated in the household. Whatever was taken in the hunt or raised by cultivation by any member of the household ... was for the common benefit. Provisions were made a common stock within the household."[74]

[Footnote 73: This verb of Mr. Morgan's at first struck me as odd, but though rarely used, it is supported by good authority; see Century Dictionary, s. v.]

[Footnote 74: The Iroquois ceased to build such houses before the beginning of the present century. I quote Mr. Morgan's description at length, because his book is out of print and hard to obtain. It ought to be republished, and in octavo, like his Ancient Society, of which it is a continuation.]

"Over every such household a matron presided, whose duty it was to supervise its domestic economy. After the single daily meal had been cooked at the different fires within the house, it was her province to divide the food from the kettle to the several families according to their respective needs. What remained was placed in the custody of another person until she again required it."[75]

[Footnote 75: Lucien Carr, "On the Social and Political Position of Woman among the Huron-Iroquois Tribes," Reports of Peabody Museum, vol. iii. p. 215.]

[Sidenote: Summary divorce.]

Not only the food was common property, but many chattels, including the children, belonged to the gens or clan. When a young woman got married she brought her husband home with her. Though thenceforth an inmate of this household he remained an alien to her clan. "If he proved lazy and failed to do his share of the providing, woe be to him. No matter how many children, or whatever goods he might have in the house, he might at any time be ordered to pick up his blanket and budge; and after such orders it would not be healthful for him to disobey; the house would be too hot for him; and unless saved by the intercession of some aunt or grandmother [of his wife] he must retreat to his own clan, or, as was often done, go and start a new matrimonial alliance in some other.... The female portion ruled the house."[76]

[Footnote 76: This was not incompatible with the subjection of women to extreme drudgery and ill-treatment. For an instructive comparison with the case among the tribes of the Far West, see Dodge, Our Wild Indians, chap. xvi.]

[Sidenote: Hospitality.]

Though there was but one freshly-cooked meal, taken about the middle of the day, any member of the household when hungry could be helped from the common stock. Hospitality was universal. If a person from one of the other communal households, or a stranger from another tribe (in time of peace), were to visit the house, the women would immediately offer him food, and it was a breach of etiquette to decline to eat it. This custom was strictly observed all over the continent and in the West India Islands, and was often remarked upon by the early discoverers, in whose minds it was apt to implant idyllic notions that were afterward rudely disturbed. The prevalence of hospitality among uncivilized races has long been noted by travellers, and is probably in most cases, as it certainly was in ancient America, closely connected with communism in living.

[Sidenote: Structure of the clan.]

The clan, which practised this communism, had its definite organization, officers, rights, and duties. Its official head was the "sachem," whose functions were of a civil nature. The sachem was elected by the clan and must be a member of it, so that a son could not be chosen to succeed his father, but a sachem could be succeeded by his uterine brother or by his sister's son, and in this way customary lines of succession could and often did tend to become established. The clan also elected its "chiefs," whose functions were military; the number of chiefs was proportionate to that of the people composing the clan, usually one chief to every fifty or sixty persons. The clan could depose its sachem or any of its chiefs. Personal property, such as weapons, or trophies, or rights of user in the garden-plots, was inheritable in the female line, and thus stayed within the clan. The members were reciprocally bound to help, defend, and avenge one another. The clan had the right of adopting strangers to strengthen itself. It had the right of naming its members, and these names were always obviously significant, like Little Turtle, Yellow Wolf, etc.; of names like our Richard or William, with the meaning lost, or obvious only to scholars, no trace is to be found in aboriginal America. The clan itself, too, always had a name, which was usually that of some animal,—as Wolf, Eagle, or Salmon, and a rude drawing or pictograph of the creature served as a "totem" or primitive heraldic device. A mythological meaning was attached to this emblem. The clan had its own common religious rites and common burial place. There was a clan-council, of which women might be members; there were instances, indeed, of its being composed entirely of women, whose position was one of much more dignity and influence than has commonly been supposed. Instances of squaw sachems were not so very rare.[77]

[Footnote 77: Among the Wyandots there is in each clan a council composed of four squaws, and this council elects the male sachem who is its head. Therefore the tribal council, which is the aggregate of the clan-councils, consists one fifth of men and four fifths of women. See Powell, "Wyandot Government: a Short Study of Tribal Society," in First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1881, pp. 59-69; and also Mr. Carr's interesting essay above cited.]

[Sidenote: Origin and structure of the phratry.]

The number of clans in a tribe naturally bore some proportion to the populousness of the tribe, varying from three, in the case of the Delawares, to twenty or more, as in the case of the Ojibwas and Creeks. There were usually eight or ten, and these were usually grouped into two or three phratries. The phratry seems to have originated in the segmentation of the overgrown clan, for in some cases exogamy was originally practised as between the phratries and afterward the custom died out while it was retained as between their constituent clans.[78] The system of naming often indicates this origin of the phratry, though seldom quite so forcibly as in the case of the Mohegan tribe, which was thus composed:[79]—

I. WOLF PHRATRY.

Clans: 1. Wolf, 2. Bear, 3. Dog, 4. Opossum.

II. TURTLE PHRATRY.

Clans: 5. Little Turtle, 6. Mud Turtle, 7. Great Turtle, 8. Yellow Eel.

III. TURKEY PHRATRY.

Clans: 9. Turkey, 10. Crane, 11. Chicken.

Here the senior clan in the phratry tends to keep the original clan-name, while the junior clans have been guided by a sense of kinship in choosing their new names. This origin of the phratry is further indicated by the fact that the phratry does not always occur; sometimes the clans are organized directly into the tribe. The phratry was not so much a governmental as a religious and social organization. Its most important function seems to have been supplementing or reinforcing the action of the single clan in exacting compensation for murder; and this point is full of interest because it helps us to understand how among our Teutonic forefathers the "hundred" (the equivalent of the phratry) became charged with the duty of prosecuting criminals. The Greek phratry had a precisely analogous function.[80]

[Footnote 78: H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, vol. i. p. 109.]

[Footnote 79: Morgan, Houses and House-Life, p. 16.]

[Footnote 80: See Freeman, Comparative Politics, p. 117; Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 98-104; Grote, History of Greece, vol. iii. pp. 74, 88. It is interesting to compare Grote's description with Morgan's (Anc. Soc., pp. 71, 94) and note both the closeness of the general parallelism and the character of the specific variations.]

[Sidenote: Structure of the tribe.]

The Indian tribe was a group of people distinguished by the exclusive possession of a dialect in common. It possessed a tribal name and occupied a more or less clearly defined territory; there were also tribal religious rites. Its supreme government was vested in the council of its clan-chiefs and sachems; and as these were thus officers of the tribe as well as of the clan, the tribe exercised the right of investing them with office, amid appropriate solemnities, after their election by their respective clans. The tribal-council had also the right to depose chiefs and sachems. In some instances, not always, there was a head chief or military commander for the tribes, elected by the tribal council. Such, was the origin of the office which, in most societies of the Old World, gradually multiplied its functions and accumulated power until it developed into true kingship. Nowhere in ancient North America did it quite reach such a stage.

[Sidenote: Cross-relationships between clans and tribes: the Iroquois Confederacy.]

Among the greater part of the aborigines no higher form of social structure was attained than the tribe. There were, however, several instances of permanent confederation, of which the two most interesting and most highly developed were the League of the Iroquois, mentioned above, and the Mexican Confederacy, presently to be considered. The principles upon which the Iroquois league was founded have been thoroughly and minutely explained by Mr. Morgan.[81] It originated in a union of five tribes composed of clans in common, and speaking five dialects of a common language. These tribes had themselves arisen through the segmentation of a single overgrown tribe, so that portions of the original clans survived in them all. The Wolf, Bear, and Turtle clan were common to all the five tribes; three other clans were common to three of the five. "All the members of the same gens [clan], whether Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, or Senecas, were brothers and sisters to each other in virtue of their descent from the same common [female] ancestor, and they recognized each other as such with the fullest cordiality. When they met, the first inquiry was the name of each other's gens, and next the immediate pedigree of each other's sachems; after which they were able to find, under their peculiar system of consanguinity, the relationship in which they stood to each other.... This cross-relationship between persons of the same gens in the different tribes is still preserved and recognized among them in all its original force. It explains the tenacity with which the fragments of the old confederacy still cling together."[82] Acknowledged consanguinity is to the barbarian a sound reason, and the only one conceivable, for permanent political union; and the very existence of such a confederacy as that of the Five Nations was rendered possible only through the permanence of the clans or communal households which were its ultimate units. We have here a clue to the policy of these Indians toward the kindred tribes who refused to join their league. These tribes, too, so far as is known, would seem to have contained the same clans. After a separation of at least four hundred years the Wyandots have still five of their eight clans in common with the Iroquois. When the Eries and other tribes would not join the league of their kindred, the refusal smacked of treason to the kin, and we can quite understand the deadly fury with which the latter turned upon them and butchered every man, woman, and child except such as they saw fit to adopt into their own clans.

[Footnote 81: In his League of the Iroquois, Rochester, 1851, a book now out of print and excessively rare. A brief summary is given in his Ancient Society, chap. v., and in his Houses and House-Life, pp. 23-41. Mr. Morgan was adopted into the Seneca tribe, and his life work was begun by a profound and exhaustive study of this interesting people.]

[Footnote 82: Houses and House-Life, p. 33. At the period of its greatest power, about 1675, the people of the confederacy were about 25,000 in number. In 1875, according to official statistics (see table appended to Dodge's Plains of the Great West, pp. 441-448), there were in the state of New York 198 Oneidas, 203 Onondagas, 165 Cayugas, 3,043 Senecas, and 448 Tuscaroras,—in all 4,057. Besides these there were 1,279 Oneidas on a reservation in Wisconsin, and 207 Senecas in the Indian Territory. The Mohawks are not mentioned in the list. During the Revolutionary War, and just afterward, the Mohawks migrated into Upper Canada (Ontario), for an account of which the reader may consult the second volume of Stone's Life of Brant. Portions of the other tribes also went to Canada. In New York the Oneidas and Tuscaroras were converted to Christianity by Samuel Kirkland and withheld from alliance with the British during the Revolution; the others still retain their ancient religion. They are for the most part farmers and are now increasing in numbers. Their treatment by the state of New York has been honourably distinguished for justice and humanity.]

[Sidenote: Structure of the confederacy.]

Each of the Five Tribes retained its local self-government. The supreme government of the confederacy was vested in a General Council of fifty sachems, "equal in rank and authority." The fifty sachemships were created in perpetuity in certain clans of the several tribes; whenever a vacancy occurred, it was filled by the clan electing one of its own members; a sachem once thus elected could be deposed by the clan-council for good cause; "but the right to invest these sachems with office was reserved to the General Council." These fifty sachems of the confederacy were likewise sachems in their respective tribes, "and with the chiefs of these tribes formed the council of each, which was supreme over all matters pertaining to the tribe exclusively." The General Council could not convene itself, but could be convened by any one of the five tribal councils. The regular meeting was once a year in the autumn, in the valley of Onondaga, but in stirring times extra sessions were frequent. The proceedings were opened by an address from one of the sachems, "in the course of which he thanked the Great Spirit [i. e. Ioskeha, the sky-god] for sparing their lives and permitting them to meet together;" after this they were ready for business. It was proper for any orator from among the people to address the Council with arguments, and the debates were sometimes very long and elaborate. When it came to voting, the fifty sachems voted by tribes, each tribe counting as a unit, and unanimity was as imperative as in an English jury, so that one tribe could block the proceedings. The confederacy had no head-sachem, or civil chief-magistrate; but a military commander was indispensable, and, curiously enough, without being taught by the experience of a Tarquin, the Iroquois made this a dual office, like the Roman consulship. There were two permanent chieftainships, one in the Wolf, the other in the Turtle clan, and both in the Seneca tribe, because the western border was the most exposed to attack.[83] The chiefs were elected by the clan, and inducted into office by the General Council; their tenure was during life or good behaviour. This office never encroached upon the others in its powers, but an able warrior in this position could wield great influence.