The above is peculiarly true of the student of language. He who studies only one Indian language and learns its manifold curious grammatic devices, its wealth of words, its capacity of expression, is speedily convinced of its superiority to all other Indian tongues, and not infrequently to all languages by whomsoever spoken.If like admirable characteristics are asserted for other tongues he is apt to view them but as derivatives from one original. Thus he is led to overlook the great truth that the mind of man is everywhere practically the same, and that the innumerable differences of its products are indices merely of different stages of growth or are the results of different conditions of environment. In its development the human mind is limited by no boundaries of tribe or race.Again, a long acquaintance with many tribes in their homes leads to the belief that savage people do not lack industry so much as wisdom. They are capable of performing, and often do perform, great and continuous labor. The men and women alike toil from day to day and from year to year, engaged in those tasks that arepresented with the recurring seasons. In civilization, hunting and fishing are often considered sports, but in savagery they are labors, and call for endurance, patience, and sagacity. And these are exercised to a reasonable degree among all savage peoples.It is probable that the real difficulty of purchasing quantities of food from Indians has, in most cases, not been properly understood. Unless the alien is present at a time of great abundance, when there is more on hand or easily obtainable than sufficient to supply the wants of the people, food can not be bought of the Indians. This arises from the fact that the tribal tenure is communal, and to get food by purchase requires a treaty at which all the leading members of the tribe are present and give consent.As an illustration of the improvidence of the Indians generally, the habits of the tribes along the Columbia River may be cited. The Columbia River has often been pointed to as the probable source of a great part of the Indian population of this country, because of the enormous supply of salmon furnished by it and its tributaries. If an abundant and readily obtained supply of food was all that was necessary to insure a large population, and if population always increased up to the limit of food supply, unquestionably the theory of repeated migratory waves of surplus population from the Columbia Valley would be plausible enough. It is only necessary, however, to turn to the accounts of the earlier explorers of this region, Lewis and Clarke, for example, to refute the idea, so far at least as the Columbia Valley is concerned, although a study of the many diverse languages spread over the United States would seem sufficiently to prove that the tribes speaking them could not have originated at a common center, unless, indeed, at a period anterior to the formation of organized language.The Indians inhabiting the Columbia Valley were divided into many tribes, belonging to several distinct linguistic families. They all were in the same culture status, however, and differed in habits and arts only in minor particulars. All of them had recourse to the salmon of the Columbia for the main part of their subsistence, and all practiced similar crude methods of curing fish and storing it away for the winter. Without exception, judging from the accounts of the above mentioned and of more recent authors, all the tribes suffered periodically more or less from insufficient food supply, although, with the exercise of due forethought and economy, even with their rude methods of catching and curing salmon, enough might here have been cured annually to suffice for the wants of the Indian population of the entire Northwest for several years.In their ascent of the river in spring, before the salmon run, it was only with great difficulty that Lewis and Clarke were able to provide themselves by purchase with enough food to keep themselves from starving. Several parties of Indians from the vicinity of theDalles, the best fishing station on the river, were met on their way down in quest of food, their supply of dried salmon having been entirely exhausted.Nor is there anything in the accounts of any of the early visitors to the Columbia Valley to authorize the belief that the population there was a very large one. As was the case with all fish-stocked streams, the Columbia was resorted to in the fishing season by many tribes living at considerable distance from it; but there is no evidence tending to show that the settled population of its banks or of any part of its drainage basin was or ever had been by any means excessive.The Dalles, as stated above, was the best fishing station on the river, and the settled population there may be taken as a fair index of that of other favorable locations. The Dalles was visited by Ross in July, 1811, and the following is his statement in regard to the population:The main camp of the Indians is situated at the head of the narrows, and may contain, during the salmon season, 3,000 souls, or more; but the constant inhabitants of the place do not exceed 100 persons, and are called Wy-am-pams; the rest are all foreigners from different tribes throughout the country, who resort hither, not for the purpose of catching salmon, but chiefly for gambling and speculation.2And as it was on the Columbia with its enormous supply of fish, so was it elsewhere in the United States.Even the practice of agriculture, with its result of providing a more certain and bountiful food supply, seems not to have had the effect of materially augmenting the Indian population. At all events, it is in California and Oregon, a region where agriculture was scarcely practiced at all, that the most dense aboriginal population lived. There is no reason to believe that there ever existed within the limits of the region included in the map, with the possible exception of certain areas in California, a population equal to the natural food supply. On the contrary, there is every reason for believing that the population at the time of the discovery might have been many times more than what it actually was had a wise economy been practised.The effect of wars in decimating the people has often been greatly exaggerated. Since the advent of the white man on the continent, wars have prevailed to a degree far beyond that existing at an earlier time. From the contest which necessarily arose between the native tribes and invading nations many wars resulted, and their history is well known. Again, tribes driven from their ancestral homes often retreated to lands previously occupied by other tribes, and intertribal wars resulted therefrom. The acquisition of firearms and horses, through the agency of white men, also had its influence, and when a commercial value was given to furs and skins, the Indian abandonedagriculture to pursue hunting and traffic, and sought new fields for such enterprises, and many new contests arose from this cause. Altogether the character of the Indian since the discovery of Columbus has been greatly changed, and he has become far more warlike and predatory. Prior to that time, and far away in the wilderness beyond such influence since that time, Indian tribes seem to have lived together in comparative peace and to have settled their difficulties by treaty methods. A few of the tribes had distinct organizations for purposes of war; all recognized it to a greater or less extent in their tribal organization; but from such study as has been given the subject, and from the many facts collected from time to time relating to the intercourse existing between tribes, it appears that the Indians lived in comparative peace. Their accumulations were not so great as to be tempting, and their modes of warfare were not excessively destructive. Armed with clubs and spears and bows and arrows, war could be prosecuted only by hand-to-hand conflict, and depended largely upon individual prowess, while battle for plunder, tribute, and conquest was almost unknown. Such intertribal wars as occurred originated from other causes, such as infraction of rights relating to hunting grounds and fisheries, and still oftener prejudices growing out of their superstitions.That which kept the Indian population down sprang from another source, which has sometimes been neglected. The Indians had no reasonable or efficacious system of medicine. They believed that diseases were caused by unseen evil beings and by witchcraft, and every cough, every toothache, every headache, every chill, every fever, every boil, and every wound, in fact, all their ailments, were attributed to such cause. Their so-called medicine practice was a horrible system of sorcery, and to such superstition human life was sacrificed on an enormous scale. The sufferers were given over to priest doctors to be tormented, bedeviled, and destroyed; and a universal and profound belief in witchcraft made them suspicious, and led to the killing of all suspected and obnoxious people, and engendered blood feuds on a gigantic scale. It may be safely said that while famine, pestilence, disease, and war may have killed many, superstition killed more; in fact, a natural death in a savage tent is a comparatively rare phenomenon; but death by sorcery, medicine, and blood feud arising from a belief in witchcraft is exceedingly common.Scanty as was the population compared with the vast area teeming with natural products capable of supporting human life, it may be safely said that at the time of the discovery, and long prior thereto, practically the whole of the area included in the present map was claimed and to some extent occupied by Indian tribes; but the possession of land by the Indian by no means implies occupancy in the modern or civilized sense of the term. In the latter sense occupation means to a great extent individual control andownership. Very different was it with the Indians. Individual ownership of land was, as a rule, a thing entirely foreign to the Indian mind, and quite unknown in the culture stage to which he belonged. All land, of whatever character or however utilized, was held in common by the tribe, or in a few instances by the clan. Apparently an exception to this broad statement is to be made in the case of the Haida of the northwest coast, who have been studied by Dawson. According to him3the land is divided among the different families and is held as strictly personal property, with hereditary rights or possessions descending from one generation to another. “The lands may be bartered or given away. The larger salmon streams are, however, often the property jointly of a number of families.” The tendency in this case is toward personal right in land.TRIBAL LAND.For convenience of discussion, Indian tribal land may be divided into three classes: First, the land occupied by the villages; second, the land actually employed in agriculture; third, the land claimed by the tribe but not occupied, except as a hunting ground.Village sites.—The amount of land taken up as village sites varied considerably in different parts of the country. It varied also in the same tribe at different times. As a rule, the North American Indians lived in communal houses of sufficient size to accommodate several families. In such cases the village consisted of a few large structures closely grouped together, so that it covered very little ground. When territory was occupied by warlike tribes, the construction of rude palisades around the villages and the necessities of defense generally tended to compel the grouping of houses, and the permanent village sites of even the more populous tribes covered only a very small area. In the case of confederated tribes and in the time of peace the tendency was for one or more families to establish more or less permanent settlements away from the main village, where a livelihood was more readily obtainable. Hence, in territory which had enjoyed a considerable interval of peace the settlements were in the nature of small agricultural communities, established at short distances from each other and extending in the aggregate over a considerable extent of country. In the case of populous tribes the villages were probably of the character of the Choctaw towns described by Adair.4“The barrier towns, which are next to the Muskohge and Chikkasah countries, are compactly settled for social defense, according to the general method of other savage nations; but the rest, both in the center and toward the Mississippi, are only scattered plantations, as best suits a separate easyway of living. A stranger might be in the middle of one of their populous, extensive towns without seeing half a dozen houses in the direct course of his path.” More closely grouped settlements are described by Wayne in American State Papers, 1793, in his account of an expedition down the Maumee Valley, where he states that “The margins of the Miamis of the Lake and the Au Glaize appear like one continuous village for a number of miles, nor have I ever beheld such immense fields of corn in any part of America from Canada to Florida.” Such a chain of villages as this was probably highly exceptional; but even under such circumstances the village sites proper formed but a very small part of the total area occupied.From the foregoing considerations it will be seen that the amount of land occupied as village sites under any circumstances was inconsiderable.Agricultural land.—It is practically impossible to make an accurate estimate of the relative amount of land devoted to agricultural purposes by any one tribe or by any family of tribes. None of the factors which enter into the problem are known to us with sufficient accuracy to enable reliable estimates to be made of the amount of land tilled or of the products derived from the tillage; and only in few cases have we trustworthy estimates of the population of the tribe or tribes practicing agriculture. Only a rough approximation of the truth can be reached from the scanty data available and from a general knowledge of Indian methods of subsistence.The practice of agriculture was chiefly limited to the region south of the St. Lawrence and east of the Mississippi. In this region it was far more general and its results were far more important than is commonly supposed. To the west of the Mississippi only comparatively small areas were occupied by agricultural tribes and these lay chiefly in New Mexico and Arizona and along the Arkansas, Platte, and Missouri Rivers. The rest of that region was tenanted by non-agricultural tribes—unless indeed the slight attention paid to the cultivation of tobacco by a few of the west coast tribes, notably the Haida, may be considered agriculture. Within the first mentioned area most of the tribes, perhaps all, practiced agriculture to a greater or less extent, though unquestionably the degree of reliance placed upon it as a means of support differed much with different tribes and localities.Among many tribes agriculture was relied upon to supply an important—and perhaps in the case of a few tribes, the most important—part of the food supply. The accounts of some of the early explorers in the southern United States, where probably agriculture was more systematized than elsewhere, mention corn fields of great extent, and later knowledge of some northern tribes, as the Iroquois and some of the Ohio Valley tribes, shows that they also raised corn in great quantities.The practice of agriculture to a point where it shall prove the main and constant supply of a people, however, implies a degree of sedentariness to which our Indians as a rule had not attained and an amount of steady labor without immediate return which was peculiarly irksome to them. Moreover, the imperfect methods pursued in clearing, planting, and cultivating sufficiently prove that the Indians, though agriculturists, were in the early stages of development as such—a fact also attested by the imperfect and one-sided division of labor between the sexes, the men as a rule taking but small share of the burdensome tasks of clearing land, planting, and harvesting.It is certain that by no tribe of the United States was agriculture pursued to such an extent as to free its members from the practice of the hunter’s or fisher’s art. Admitting the most that can be claimed for the Indian as an agriculturist, it may be stated that, whether because of the small population or because of the crude manner in which his operations were carried on, the amount of land devoted to agriculture within the area in question was infinitesimally small as compared with the total. Upon a map colored to show only the village sites and agricultural land, the colors would appear in small spots, while by far the greater part of the map would remain uncolored.Hunting claims.—The great body of the land within the area mapped which was occupied by agricultural tribes, and all the land outside it, was held as a common hunting ground, and the tribal claim to territory, independent of village sites and corn fields, amounted practically to little else than hunting claims. The community of possession in the tribe to the hunting ground was established and practically enforced by hunting laws, which dealt with the divisions of game among the village, or among the families of the hunters actually taking part in any particular hunt. As a rule, such natural landmarks as rivers, lakes, hills, and mountain chains served to mark with sufficient accuracy the territorial tribal limits. In California, and among the Haida and perhaps other tribes of the northwest coast, the value of certain hunting and fishing claims led to their definition by artificial boundaries, as by sticks or stones.5Such precautions imply a large population, and in such regions as California the killing of game upon the land of adjoining tribes was rigidly prohibited and sternly punished.As stated above, every part of the vast area included in the present map is to be regarded as belonging, according to Indian ideas of land title, to one or another of the Indian tribes. To determine the several tribal possessions and to indicate the proper boundary lines between individual tribes and linguistic families is a work of greatdifficulty. This is due more to the imperfection and scantiness of available data concerning tribal claims than to the absence of claimants or to any ambiguity in the minds of the Indians as to the boundaries of their several possessions.Not only is precise data wanting respecting the limits of land actually held or claimed by many tribes, but there are other tribes, which disappeared early in the history of our country, the boundaries to whose habitat is to be determined only in the most general way. Concerning some of these, our information is so vague that the very linguistic family they belonged to is in doubt. In the case of probably no one family are the data sufficient in amount and accuracy to determine positively the exact areas definitely claimed or actually held by the tribes. Even in respect of the territory of many of the tribes of the eastern United States, much of whose land was ceded by actual treaty with the Government, doubt exists. The fixation of the boundary points, when these are specifically mentioned in the treaty, as was the rule, is often extremely difficult, owing to the frequent changes of geographic names and the consequent disagreement of present with ancient maps. Moreover, when the Indian’s claim to his land had been admitted by Government, and the latter sought to acquire a title through voluntary cession by actual purchase, land assumed a value to the Indian never attaching to it before.Under these circumstances, either under plea of immemorial occupancy or of possession by right of conquest, the land was often claimed, and the claims urged with more or less plausibility by several tribes, sometimes of the same linguistic family, sometimes of different families.It was often found by the Government to be utterly impracticable to decide between conflicting claims, and not infrequently the only way out of the difficulty lay in admitting the claim of both parties, and in paying for the land twice or thrice. It was customary for a number of different tribes to take part in such treaties, and not infrequently several linguistic families were represented. It was the rule for each tribe, through its representatives, to cede its share of a certain territory, the natural boundaries of which as a whole are usually recorded with sufficient accuracy. The main purpose of the Government in treaty-making being to obtain possession of the land, comparatively little attention was bestowed to defining the exact areas occupied by the several tribes taking part in a treaty, except in so far as the matter was pressed upon attention by disputing claimants. Hence the territory claimed by each tribe taking part in the treaty is rarely described, and occasionally not all the tribes interested in the proposed cession are even mentioned categorically. The latter statement applies more particularly to the territory west of the Mississippi, the data for determining ownershipto which is much less precise, and the doubt and confusion respecting tribal boundary lines correspondingly greater than in the country east of that river. Under the above circumstances, it will be readily understood that to determine tribal boundaries within accurately drawn lines is in the vast majority of cases quite impossible.Imperfect and defective as the terms of the treaties frequently are as regards the definition of tribal boundaries, they are by far the most accurate and important of the means at our command for fixing boundary lines upon the present map. By their aid the territorial possessions of a considerable number of tribes have been determined with desirable precision, and such areas definitely established have served as checks upon the boundaries of other tribes, concerning the location and extent of whose possessions little is known.For establishing the boundaries of such tribes as are not mentioned in treaties, and of those whose territorial possessions are not given with sufficient minuteness, early historical accounts are all important. Such accounts, of course, rarely indicate the territorial possessions of the tribes with great precision. In many cases, however, the sites of villages are accurately given. In others the source of information concerning a tribe is contained in a general statement of the occupancy of certain valleys or mountain ranges or areas at the heads of certain rivers, no limiting lines whatever being assigned. In others, still, the notice of a tribe is limited to a brief mention of the presence in a certain locality of hunting or war parties.Data of this loose character would of course be worthless in an attempt to fix boundary lines in accordance with the ideas of the modern surveyor. The relative positions of the families and the relative size of the areas occupied by them, however, and not their exact boundaries, are the chief concern in a linguistic map, and for the purpose of establishing these, and, in a rough way, the boundaries of the territory held by the tribes composing them, these data are very important, and when compared with one another and corrected by more definite data, when such are at hand, they have usually been found to be sufficient for the purpose.SUMMARY OF DEDUCTIONS.In conclusion, the more important deductions derivable from the data upon which the linguistic map is based, or that are suggested by it, may be summarized as follows:First, the North American Indian tribes, instead of speaking related dialects, originating in a single parent language, in reality speak many languages belonging to distinct families, which have no apparent unity of origin.Second, the Indian population of North America was greatly exaggerated by early writers, and instead of being large was in reality small as compared with the vast territory occupied and theabundant food supply; and furthermore, the population had nowhere augmented sufficiently, except possibly in California, to press upon the food supply.Third, although representing a small population, the numerous tribes had overspread North America and had possessed themselves of all the territory, which, in the case of a great majority of tribes, was owned in common by the tribe.Fourth, prior to the advent of the European, the tribes were probably nearly in a state of equilibrium, and were in the main sedentary, and those tribes which can be said with propriety to have been nomadic became so only after the advent of the European, and largely as the direct result of the acquisition of the horse and the introduction of firearms.Fifth, while agriculture was general among the tribes of the eastern United States, and while it was spreading among western tribes, its products were nowhere sufficient wholly to emancipate the Indian from the hunter state.LINGUISTIC FAMILIES.Within the area covered by the map there are recognized fifty-eight distinct linguistic families.These are enumerated in alphabetical order and each is accompanied by a table of the synonyms of the family name, together with a brief statement of the geographical area occupied by each family, so far as it is known. A list of the principal tribes of each family also is given.ADAIZAN FAMILY.= Adaize, Gallatin in Trans. and Coll. Am. Antiq. Soc.,II, 116, 306, 1836. Latham in Proc. Philolog. Soc., Lond.,II, 31-59, 1846. Latham, Opuscula, 293, 1860. Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, xcix, 1848. Gallatin in Schoolcraft Ind. Tribes,III, 402, 1853. Latham, Elements Comp. Phil., 477, 1862 (referred to as one of the most isolated languages of N.A.). Keane, App. to Stanford’s Comp. (Cent. and So. Am.), 478, 1878 (or Adees).= Adaizi, Prichard, Phys. Hist. Mankind,V, 406, 1847.= Adaise, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, pt. 1, 77, 1848.= Adahi, Latham, Nat. Hist. Man, 342, 1850. Latham in Trans. Philolog. Soc., Lond., 103, 1856. Latham, Opuscula, 366, 368, 1860. Latham, Elements Comp., Phil., 473, 477, 1863 (same as his Adaize above).= Adaes, Buschmann, Spuren der aztekischen Sprache, 424, 1859.= Adees. Keane, App. to Stanford’s Comp. (Cent. and So. Am.) 478, 1878 (same as his Adaize).= Adái, Gatschet, Creek Mig. Leg., 41, 1884.Derivation: From a Caddo word hadai, sig. “brush wood.”This family was based upon the language spoken by a single tribe who, according to Dr. Sibley, lived about the year 1800 near the oldSpanish fort or mission of Adaize, “about 40 miles from Natchitoches, below the Yattassees, on a lake called Lac Macdon, which communicates with the division of Red River that passes by Bayau Pierre.”6A vocabulary of about two hundred and fifty words is all that remains to us of their language, which according to the collector, Dr. Sibley, “differs from all others, and is so difficult to speak or understand that no nation can speak ten words of it.”It was from an examination of Sibley’s vocabulary that Gallatin reached the conclusion of the distinctness of this language from any other known, an opinion accepted by most later authorities. A recent comparison of this vocabulary by Mr. Gatschet, with several Caddoan dialects, has led to the discovery that a considerable percentage of the Adái words have a more or less remote affinity with Caddoan, and he regards it as a Caddoan dialect. The amount of material, however, necessary to establish its relationship to Caddoan is not at present forthcoming, and it may be doubted if it ever will be, as recent inquiry has failed to reveal the existence of a single member of the tribe, or of any individual of the tribes once surrounding the Adái who remembers a word of the language.Mr. Gatschet found that some of the older Caddo in the Indian Territory remembered the Adái as one of the tribes formerly belonging to the Caddo Confederacy. More than this he was unable to learn from them.Owing to their small numbers, their remoteness from lines of travel, and their unwarlike character the Adái have cut but a small figure in history, and accordingly the known facts regarding them are very meager. The first historical mention of them appears to be by Cabeça de Vaca, who in his “Naufragios,” referring to his stay in Texas, about 1530, calls them Atayos. Mention is also made of them by several of the early French explorers of the Mississippi, as d’Iberville and Joutel.The Mission of Adayes, so called from its proximity to the home of the tribe, was established in 1715. In 1792 there was a partial emigration of the Adái to the number of fourteen families to a site south of San Antonio de Bejar, southwest Texas, where apparently they amalgamated with the surrounding Indian population and were lost sight of. (From documents preserved at the City Hall, San Antonio, and examined by Mr. Gatschet in December, 1886.) The Adái who were left in their old homes numbered one hundred in 1802, according to Baudry de Lozieres. According to Sibley, in 1809 there were only “twenty men of them remaining, but more women.” In 1820 Morse mentions only thirty survivors.ALGONQUIAN FAMILY.> Algonkin-Lenape, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Antiq. Soc.,II, 23, 305, 1836. Berghaus (1845), Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1848. Ibid, 1852.> Algonquin, Bancroft, Hist. U. S.,III, 337, 1840. Prichard Phys. Hist. Mankind,V, 381, 1847 (follows Gallatin).> Algonkins, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, pt. 1, xcix, 77, 1848. Gallatin in Schoolcraft Ind. Tribes,III, 401, 1853.> Algonkin, Turner in Pac. R. R. Rept.,III, pt. 3, 55, 1856 (gives Delaware and Shawnee vocabs.). Hayden, Cont. Eth. and Phil. Missouri Inds., 232, 1862 (treats only of Crees, Blackfeet, Shyennes). Hale in Am. Antiq., 112, April, 1883 (treated with reference to migration).< Algonkin, Latham in Trans. Philolog. Soc., Lond., 1856 (adds to Gallatin’s list of 1836 the Bethuck, Shyenne, Blackfoot, and Arrapaho). Latham, Opuscula, 327, 1860 (as in preceding). Latham, Elements Comp. Phil, 447, 1862.< Algonquin, Keane, App. Stanford’s Comp., (Cent. and S. Am.), 460, 465, 1878 (list includes the Maquas, an Iroquois tribe).> Saskatschawiner, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1848 (probably designates the Arapaho).> Arapahoes, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1852.X Algonkin und Beothuk, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 72, 1887.Derivation: Contracted from Algomequin, an Algonkin word, signifying “those on the other side of the river,” i.e., the St. Lawrence River.ALGONQUIAN AREA.The area formerly occupied by the Algonquian family was more extensive than that of any other linguistic stock in North America, their territory reaching from Labrador to the Rocky Mountains, and from Churchill River of Hudson Bay as far south at least as Pamlico Sound of North Carolina. In the eastern part of this territory was an area occupied by Iroquoian tribes, surrounded on almost all sides by their Algonquian neighbors. On the south the Algonquian tribes were bordered by those of Iroquoian and Siouan (Catawba) stock, on the southwest and west by the Muskhogean and Siouan tribes, and on the northwest by the Kitunahan and the great Athapascan families, while along the coast of Labrador and the eastern shore of Hudson Bay they came in contact with the Eskimo, who were gradually retreating before them to the north. In Newfoundland they encountered the Beothukan family, consisting of but a single tribe. A portion of the Shawnee at some early period had separated from the main body of the tribe in central Tennessee and pushed their way down to the Savannah River in South Carolina, where, known as Savannahs, they carried on destructive wars with the surrounding tribes until about the beginning of the eighteenth century they were finally driven out and joined the Delaware in the north. Soon afterwards the rest of the tribe was expelled by the Cherokee and Chicasa, who thenceforward claimed all the country stretching north to the Ohio River.The Cheyenne and Arapaho, two allied tribes of this stock, had become separated from their kindred on the north and had forced their way through hostile tribes across the Missouri to the Black Hills country of South Dakota, and more recently into Wyoming and Colorado, thus forming the advance guard of the Algonquian stock in that direction, having the Siouan tribes behind them and those of the Shoshonean family in front.PRINCIPAL ALGONQUINIAN TRIBES.Abnaki.Algonquin.Arapaho.Cheyenne.Conoy.Cree.Delaware.Fox.Illinois.Kickapoo.Mahican.Massachuset.Menominee.Miami.Micmac.Mohegan.Montagnais.Montauk.Munsee.Nanticoke.Narraganset.Nauset.Nipmuc.Ojibwa.Ottawa.Pamlico.Pennacook.Pequot.Piankishaw.Pottawotomi.Powhatan.Sac.Shawnee.Siksika.Wampanoag.Wappinger.Population.—The present number of the Algonquian stock is about 95,600, of whom about 60,000 are in Canada and the remainder in the United States. Below is given the population of the tribes officially recognized, compiled chiefly from the United States Indian Commissioner’s report for 1889 and the Canadian Indian report for 1888. It is impossible to give exact figures, owing to the fact that in many instances two or more tribes are enumerated together, while many individuals are living with other tribes or amongst the whites:Abnaki:“Oldtown Indians,” Maine410Passamaquoddy Indians, Maine215?Abenakis of St. Francis and Bécancour, Quebec369“Amalecites” of Témiscouata and Viger, Quebec198“Amalecites” of Madawaska, etc., New Brunswick6831,874?Algonquin:Of Renfrew, Golden Lake and Carleton, Ontario797With Iroquois (total 131) at Gibson, Ontario31?With Iroquois at Lake of Two Mountains, Quebec30Quebec Province3,9094,767?Arapaho:Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency, Indian Territory1,272Shoshone Agency, Wyoming (Northern Arapaho)885Carlisle school, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence school, Kansas552,212Cheyenne:Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota (Northern Cheyenne)517Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency, Indian Territory2,091Carlisle school, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence school, Kansas153Tongue River Agency, Montana (Northern Cheyenne)8653,626Cree:With Salteau in Manitoba, etc., British America (treaties Nos. 1, 2, and 5: total, 6,066)3,066?Plain and Wood Cree, treaty No. 6, Manitoba, etc.5,790Cree (with Salteau, etc.), treaty No. 4, Manitoba, etc.8,53017,386?Delaware, etc.:Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Agency, Indian Territory95Incorporated with Cherokee, Indian Territory1,000?Delaware with the Seneca in New York3Hampton and Lawrence schools3Muncie in New York, principally with Onondaga and Seneca36Munsee with Stockbridge (total 133), Green Bay Agency, Wis.23?Munsee with Chippewa at Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas (total 75)37?Munsee with Chippewa on the Thames, Ontario131“Moravians” of the Thames, Ontario288Delaware with Six Nations on Grand River, Ontario1341,750?Kickapoo:Sac and Fox Agency, Indian Territory325Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas237In Mexico200?762?Menominee:Green Bay Agency, Wisconsin1,311Carlisle school11,312Miami:Quapaw Agency, Indian Territory67Indiana, no agency300?Lawrence and Carlisle schools7374?Micmac:Restigouche, Maria, and Gaspé, Quebec732In Nova Scotia2,145New Brunswick912Prince Edward Island3194,108Misisauga:Alnwick, New Credit, etc., Ontario774Monsoni, Maskegon, etc.:Eastern Rupert’s Land, British America4,016Montagnais:Betsiamits, Lake St. John, Grand Romaine, etc., Quebec1,607Seven Islands, Quebec3121,919Nascapee:Lower St. Lawrence, Quebec2,860Ojibwa:White Earth Agency, Minnesota6,263La Pointe Agency, Wisconsin4,778Mackinac Agency, Michigan (about one-third of 5,563 Ottawa and Chippewa)1,854?Mackinac Agency, Michigan (Chippewa alone)1,351Devil’s Lake Agency, North Dakota (Turtle Mountain Chippewa)1,340Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas (one-half of 75 Chippewa and Muncie)38?Lawrence and Carlisle schools15“Ojibbewas” of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, Ontario5,201“Chippewas” of Sarnia, etc., Ontario1,956“Chippewas” with Munsees on Thames, Ontario454“Chippewas” with Pottawatomies on Walpole Island, Ontario658“Ojibbewas” with Ottawas (total 1,856) on Manitoulin and Cockburn Islands, Ontario928?“Salteaux” of treaty Nos. 3 and 4, etc., Manitoba, etc.4,092“Chippewas” with Crees in Manitoba, etc., treaties Nos. 1, 2, and 5 (total Chippewa and Cree, 6,066)3,000?31,928?Ottawa:Quapaw Agency, Indian Territory137Mackinac Agency, Michigan (5,563 Ottawa and Chippewa)3,709?Lawrence and Carlisle schools20With “Ojibbewas” on Manitoulin and Cockburn Islands, Ontario9284,794?Peoria, etc.:Quapaw Agency, Indian Territory160Lawrence and Carlisle schools5165Pottawatomie:Sac and Fox Agency, Indian Territory480Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas462Mackinac Agency, Michigan77Prairie band, Wisconsin280Carlisle, Lawrence and Hampton schools117With Chippewa on Walpole Island, Ontario1661,582Sac and Fox:Sac and Fox Agency, Indian Territory515Sac and Fox Agency, Iowa381Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas77Lawrence, Hampton, and Carlisle schools8981Shawnee:Quapaw Agency, Indian Territory79Sac and Fox Agency, Indian Territory640Incorporated with Cherokee, Indian Territory800?Lawrence, Carlisle, and Hampton schools401,559?Siksika:Blackfoot Agency, Montana. (Blackfoot, Blood, Piegan)1,811Blackfoot reserves in Alberta, British America (with Sarcee and Assiniboine)4,9326,743Stockbridge (Mahican):Green Bay Agency, Wisconsin110In New York (with Tuscarora and Seneca)7Carlisle school4121ATHAPASCAN FAMILY.
The above is peculiarly true of the student of language. He who studies only one Indian language and learns its manifold curious grammatic devices, its wealth of words, its capacity of expression, is speedily convinced of its superiority to all other Indian tongues, and not infrequently to all languages by whomsoever spoken.If like admirable characteristics are asserted for other tongues he is apt to view them but as derivatives from one original. Thus he is led to overlook the great truth that the mind of man is everywhere practically the same, and that the innumerable differences of its products are indices merely of different stages of growth or are the results of different conditions of environment. In its development the human mind is limited by no boundaries of tribe or race.Again, a long acquaintance with many tribes in their homes leads to the belief that savage people do not lack industry so much as wisdom. They are capable of performing, and often do perform, great and continuous labor. The men and women alike toil from day to day and from year to year, engaged in those tasks that arepresented with the recurring seasons. In civilization, hunting and fishing are often considered sports, but in savagery they are labors, and call for endurance, patience, and sagacity. And these are exercised to a reasonable degree among all savage peoples.It is probable that the real difficulty of purchasing quantities of food from Indians has, in most cases, not been properly understood. Unless the alien is present at a time of great abundance, when there is more on hand or easily obtainable than sufficient to supply the wants of the people, food can not be bought of the Indians. This arises from the fact that the tribal tenure is communal, and to get food by purchase requires a treaty at which all the leading members of the tribe are present and give consent.As an illustration of the improvidence of the Indians generally, the habits of the tribes along the Columbia River may be cited. The Columbia River has often been pointed to as the probable source of a great part of the Indian population of this country, because of the enormous supply of salmon furnished by it and its tributaries. If an abundant and readily obtained supply of food was all that was necessary to insure a large population, and if population always increased up to the limit of food supply, unquestionably the theory of repeated migratory waves of surplus population from the Columbia Valley would be plausible enough. It is only necessary, however, to turn to the accounts of the earlier explorers of this region, Lewis and Clarke, for example, to refute the idea, so far at least as the Columbia Valley is concerned, although a study of the many diverse languages spread over the United States would seem sufficiently to prove that the tribes speaking them could not have originated at a common center, unless, indeed, at a period anterior to the formation of organized language.The Indians inhabiting the Columbia Valley were divided into many tribes, belonging to several distinct linguistic families. They all were in the same culture status, however, and differed in habits and arts only in minor particulars. All of them had recourse to the salmon of the Columbia for the main part of their subsistence, and all practiced similar crude methods of curing fish and storing it away for the winter. Without exception, judging from the accounts of the above mentioned and of more recent authors, all the tribes suffered periodically more or less from insufficient food supply, although, with the exercise of due forethought and economy, even with their rude methods of catching and curing salmon, enough might here have been cured annually to suffice for the wants of the Indian population of the entire Northwest for several years.In their ascent of the river in spring, before the salmon run, it was only with great difficulty that Lewis and Clarke were able to provide themselves by purchase with enough food to keep themselves from starving. Several parties of Indians from the vicinity of theDalles, the best fishing station on the river, were met on their way down in quest of food, their supply of dried salmon having been entirely exhausted.Nor is there anything in the accounts of any of the early visitors to the Columbia Valley to authorize the belief that the population there was a very large one. As was the case with all fish-stocked streams, the Columbia was resorted to in the fishing season by many tribes living at considerable distance from it; but there is no evidence tending to show that the settled population of its banks or of any part of its drainage basin was or ever had been by any means excessive.The Dalles, as stated above, was the best fishing station on the river, and the settled population there may be taken as a fair index of that of other favorable locations. The Dalles was visited by Ross in July, 1811, and the following is his statement in regard to the population:The main camp of the Indians is situated at the head of the narrows, and may contain, during the salmon season, 3,000 souls, or more; but the constant inhabitants of the place do not exceed 100 persons, and are called Wy-am-pams; the rest are all foreigners from different tribes throughout the country, who resort hither, not for the purpose of catching salmon, but chiefly for gambling and speculation.2And as it was on the Columbia with its enormous supply of fish, so was it elsewhere in the United States.Even the practice of agriculture, with its result of providing a more certain and bountiful food supply, seems not to have had the effect of materially augmenting the Indian population. At all events, it is in California and Oregon, a region where agriculture was scarcely practiced at all, that the most dense aboriginal population lived. There is no reason to believe that there ever existed within the limits of the region included in the map, with the possible exception of certain areas in California, a population equal to the natural food supply. On the contrary, there is every reason for believing that the population at the time of the discovery might have been many times more than what it actually was had a wise economy been practised.The effect of wars in decimating the people has often been greatly exaggerated. Since the advent of the white man on the continent, wars have prevailed to a degree far beyond that existing at an earlier time. From the contest which necessarily arose between the native tribes and invading nations many wars resulted, and their history is well known. Again, tribes driven from their ancestral homes often retreated to lands previously occupied by other tribes, and intertribal wars resulted therefrom. The acquisition of firearms and horses, through the agency of white men, also had its influence, and when a commercial value was given to furs and skins, the Indian abandonedagriculture to pursue hunting and traffic, and sought new fields for such enterprises, and many new contests arose from this cause. Altogether the character of the Indian since the discovery of Columbus has been greatly changed, and he has become far more warlike and predatory. Prior to that time, and far away in the wilderness beyond such influence since that time, Indian tribes seem to have lived together in comparative peace and to have settled their difficulties by treaty methods. A few of the tribes had distinct organizations for purposes of war; all recognized it to a greater or less extent in their tribal organization; but from such study as has been given the subject, and from the many facts collected from time to time relating to the intercourse existing between tribes, it appears that the Indians lived in comparative peace. Their accumulations were not so great as to be tempting, and their modes of warfare were not excessively destructive. Armed with clubs and spears and bows and arrows, war could be prosecuted only by hand-to-hand conflict, and depended largely upon individual prowess, while battle for plunder, tribute, and conquest was almost unknown. Such intertribal wars as occurred originated from other causes, such as infraction of rights relating to hunting grounds and fisheries, and still oftener prejudices growing out of their superstitions.That which kept the Indian population down sprang from another source, which has sometimes been neglected. The Indians had no reasonable or efficacious system of medicine. They believed that diseases were caused by unseen evil beings and by witchcraft, and every cough, every toothache, every headache, every chill, every fever, every boil, and every wound, in fact, all their ailments, were attributed to such cause. Their so-called medicine practice was a horrible system of sorcery, and to such superstition human life was sacrificed on an enormous scale. The sufferers were given over to priest doctors to be tormented, bedeviled, and destroyed; and a universal and profound belief in witchcraft made them suspicious, and led to the killing of all suspected and obnoxious people, and engendered blood feuds on a gigantic scale. It may be safely said that while famine, pestilence, disease, and war may have killed many, superstition killed more; in fact, a natural death in a savage tent is a comparatively rare phenomenon; but death by sorcery, medicine, and blood feud arising from a belief in witchcraft is exceedingly common.Scanty as was the population compared with the vast area teeming with natural products capable of supporting human life, it may be safely said that at the time of the discovery, and long prior thereto, practically the whole of the area included in the present map was claimed and to some extent occupied by Indian tribes; but the possession of land by the Indian by no means implies occupancy in the modern or civilized sense of the term. In the latter sense occupation means to a great extent individual control andownership. Very different was it with the Indians. Individual ownership of land was, as a rule, a thing entirely foreign to the Indian mind, and quite unknown in the culture stage to which he belonged. All land, of whatever character or however utilized, was held in common by the tribe, or in a few instances by the clan. Apparently an exception to this broad statement is to be made in the case of the Haida of the northwest coast, who have been studied by Dawson. According to him3the land is divided among the different families and is held as strictly personal property, with hereditary rights or possessions descending from one generation to another. “The lands may be bartered or given away. The larger salmon streams are, however, often the property jointly of a number of families.” The tendency in this case is toward personal right in land.TRIBAL LAND.For convenience of discussion, Indian tribal land may be divided into three classes: First, the land occupied by the villages; second, the land actually employed in agriculture; third, the land claimed by the tribe but not occupied, except as a hunting ground.Village sites.—The amount of land taken up as village sites varied considerably in different parts of the country. It varied also in the same tribe at different times. As a rule, the North American Indians lived in communal houses of sufficient size to accommodate several families. In such cases the village consisted of a few large structures closely grouped together, so that it covered very little ground. When territory was occupied by warlike tribes, the construction of rude palisades around the villages and the necessities of defense generally tended to compel the grouping of houses, and the permanent village sites of even the more populous tribes covered only a very small area. In the case of confederated tribes and in the time of peace the tendency was for one or more families to establish more or less permanent settlements away from the main village, where a livelihood was more readily obtainable. Hence, in territory which had enjoyed a considerable interval of peace the settlements were in the nature of small agricultural communities, established at short distances from each other and extending in the aggregate over a considerable extent of country. In the case of populous tribes the villages were probably of the character of the Choctaw towns described by Adair.4“The barrier towns, which are next to the Muskohge and Chikkasah countries, are compactly settled for social defense, according to the general method of other savage nations; but the rest, both in the center and toward the Mississippi, are only scattered plantations, as best suits a separate easyway of living. A stranger might be in the middle of one of their populous, extensive towns without seeing half a dozen houses in the direct course of his path.” More closely grouped settlements are described by Wayne in American State Papers, 1793, in his account of an expedition down the Maumee Valley, where he states that “The margins of the Miamis of the Lake and the Au Glaize appear like one continuous village for a number of miles, nor have I ever beheld such immense fields of corn in any part of America from Canada to Florida.” Such a chain of villages as this was probably highly exceptional; but even under such circumstances the village sites proper formed but a very small part of the total area occupied.From the foregoing considerations it will be seen that the amount of land occupied as village sites under any circumstances was inconsiderable.Agricultural land.—It is practically impossible to make an accurate estimate of the relative amount of land devoted to agricultural purposes by any one tribe or by any family of tribes. None of the factors which enter into the problem are known to us with sufficient accuracy to enable reliable estimates to be made of the amount of land tilled or of the products derived from the tillage; and only in few cases have we trustworthy estimates of the population of the tribe or tribes practicing agriculture. Only a rough approximation of the truth can be reached from the scanty data available and from a general knowledge of Indian methods of subsistence.The practice of agriculture was chiefly limited to the region south of the St. Lawrence and east of the Mississippi. In this region it was far more general and its results were far more important than is commonly supposed. To the west of the Mississippi only comparatively small areas were occupied by agricultural tribes and these lay chiefly in New Mexico and Arizona and along the Arkansas, Platte, and Missouri Rivers. The rest of that region was tenanted by non-agricultural tribes—unless indeed the slight attention paid to the cultivation of tobacco by a few of the west coast tribes, notably the Haida, may be considered agriculture. Within the first mentioned area most of the tribes, perhaps all, practiced agriculture to a greater or less extent, though unquestionably the degree of reliance placed upon it as a means of support differed much with different tribes and localities.Among many tribes agriculture was relied upon to supply an important—and perhaps in the case of a few tribes, the most important—part of the food supply. The accounts of some of the early explorers in the southern United States, where probably agriculture was more systematized than elsewhere, mention corn fields of great extent, and later knowledge of some northern tribes, as the Iroquois and some of the Ohio Valley tribes, shows that they also raised corn in great quantities.The practice of agriculture to a point where it shall prove the main and constant supply of a people, however, implies a degree of sedentariness to which our Indians as a rule had not attained and an amount of steady labor without immediate return which was peculiarly irksome to them. Moreover, the imperfect methods pursued in clearing, planting, and cultivating sufficiently prove that the Indians, though agriculturists, were in the early stages of development as such—a fact also attested by the imperfect and one-sided division of labor between the sexes, the men as a rule taking but small share of the burdensome tasks of clearing land, planting, and harvesting.It is certain that by no tribe of the United States was agriculture pursued to such an extent as to free its members from the practice of the hunter’s or fisher’s art. Admitting the most that can be claimed for the Indian as an agriculturist, it may be stated that, whether because of the small population or because of the crude manner in which his operations were carried on, the amount of land devoted to agriculture within the area in question was infinitesimally small as compared with the total. Upon a map colored to show only the village sites and agricultural land, the colors would appear in small spots, while by far the greater part of the map would remain uncolored.Hunting claims.—The great body of the land within the area mapped which was occupied by agricultural tribes, and all the land outside it, was held as a common hunting ground, and the tribal claim to territory, independent of village sites and corn fields, amounted practically to little else than hunting claims. The community of possession in the tribe to the hunting ground was established and practically enforced by hunting laws, which dealt with the divisions of game among the village, or among the families of the hunters actually taking part in any particular hunt. As a rule, such natural landmarks as rivers, lakes, hills, and mountain chains served to mark with sufficient accuracy the territorial tribal limits. In California, and among the Haida and perhaps other tribes of the northwest coast, the value of certain hunting and fishing claims led to their definition by artificial boundaries, as by sticks or stones.5Such precautions imply a large population, and in such regions as California the killing of game upon the land of adjoining tribes was rigidly prohibited and sternly punished.As stated above, every part of the vast area included in the present map is to be regarded as belonging, according to Indian ideas of land title, to one or another of the Indian tribes. To determine the several tribal possessions and to indicate the proper boundary lines between individual tribes and linguistic families is a work of greatdifficulty. This is due more to the imperfection and scantiness of available data concerning tribal claims than to the absence of claimants or to any ambiguity in the minds of the Indians as to the boundaries of their several possessions.Not only is precise data wanting respecting the limits of land actually held or claimed by many tribes, but there are other tribes, which disappeared early in the history of our country, the boundaries to whose habitat is to be determined only in the most general way. Concerning some of these, our information is so vague that the very linguistic family they belonged to is in doubt. In the case of probably no one family are the data sufficient in amount and accuracy to determine positively the exact areas definitely claimed or actually held by the tribes. Even in respect of the territory of many of the tribes of the eastern United States, much of whose land was ceded by actual treaty with the Government, doubt exists. The fixation of the boundary points, when these are specifically mentioned in the treaty, as was the rule, is often extremely difficult, owing to the frequent changes of geographic names and the consequent disagreement of present with ancient maps. Moreover, when the Indian’s claim to his land had been admitted by Government, and the latter sought to acquire a title through voluntary cession by actual purchase, land assumed a value to the Indian never attaching to it before.Under these circumstances, either under plea of immemorial occupancy or of possession by right of conquest, the land was often claimed, and the claims urged with more or less plausibility by several tribes, sometimes of the same linguistic family, sometimes of different families.It was often found by the Government to be utterly impracticable to decide between conflicting claims, and not infrequently the only way out of the difficulty lay in admitting the claim of both parties, and in paying for the land twice or thrice. It was customary for a number of different tribes to take part in such treaties, and not infrequently several linguistic families were represented. It was the rule for each tribe, through its representatives, to cede its share of a certain territory, the natural boundaries of which as a whole are usually recorded with sufficient accuracy. The main purpose of the Government in treaty-making being to obtain possession of the land, comparatively little attention was bestowed to defining the exact areas occupied by the several tribes taking part in a treaty, except in so far as the matter was pressed upon attention by disputing claimants. Hence the territory claimed by each tribe taking part in the treaty is rarely described, and occasionally not all the tribes interested in the proposed cession are even mentioned categorically. The latter statement applies more particularly to the territory west of the Mississippi, the data for determining ownershipto which is much less precise, and the doubt and confusion respecting tribal boundary lines correspondingly greater than in the country east of that river. Under the above circumstances, it will be readily understood that to determine tribal boundaries within accurately drawn lines is in the vast majority of cases quite impossible.Imperfect and defective as the terms of the treaties frequently are as regards the definition of tribal boundaries, they are by far the most accurate and important of the means at our command for fixing boundary lines upon the present map. By their aid the territorial possessions of a considerable number of tribes have been determined with desirable precision, and such areas definitely established have served as checks upon the boundaries of other tribes, concerning the location and extent of whose possessions little is known.For establishing the boundaries of such tribes as are not mentioned in treaties, and of those whose territorial possessions are not given with sufficient minuteness, early historical accounts are all important. Such accounts, of course, rarely indicate the territorial possessions of the tribes with great precision. In many cases, however, the sites of villages are accurately given. In others the source of information concerning a tribe is contained in a general statement of the occupancy of certain valleys or mountain ranges or areas at the heads of certain rivers, no limiting lines whatever being assigned. In others, still, the notice of a tribe is limited to a brief mention of the presence in a certain locality of hunting or war parties.Data of this loose character would of course be worthless in an attempt to fix boundary lines in accordance with the ideas of the modern surveyor. The relative positions of the families and the relative size of the areas occupied by them, however, and not their exact boundaries, are the chief concern in a linguistic map, and for the purpose of establishing these, and, in a rough way, the boundaries of the territory held by the tribes composing them, these data are very important, and when compared with one another and corrected by more definite data, when such are at hand, they have usually been found to be sufficient for the purpose.SUMMARY OF DEDUCTIONS.In conclusion, the more important deductions derivable from the data upon which the linguistic map is based, or that are suggested by it, may be summarized as follows:First, the North American Indian tribes, instead of speaking related dialects, originating in a single parent language, in reality speak many languages belonging to distinct families, which have no apparent unity of origin.Second, the Indian population of North America was greatly exaggerated by early writers, and instead of being large was in reality small as compared with the vast territory occupied and theabundant food supply; and furthermore, the population had nowhere augmented sufficiently, except possibly in California, to press upon the food supply.Third, although representing a small population, the numerous tribes had overspread North America and had possessed themselves of all the territory, which, in the case of a great majority of tribes, was owned in common by the tribe.Fourth, prior to the advent of the European, the tribes were probably nearly in a state of equilibrium, and were in the main sedentary, and those tribes which can be said with propriety to have been nomadic became so only after the advent of the European, and largely as the direct result of the acquisition of the horse and the introduction of firearms.Fifth, while agriculture was general among the tribes of the eastern United States, and while it was spreading among western tribes, its products were nowhere sufficient wholly to emancipate the Indian from the hunter state.LINGUISTIC FAMILIES.Within the area covered by the map there are recognized fifty-eight distinct linguistic families.These are enumerated in alphabetical order and each is accompanied by a table of the synonyms of the family name, together with a brief statement of the geographical area occupied by each family, so far as it is known. A list of the principal tribes of each family also is given.ADAIZAN FAMILY.= Adaize, Gallatin in Trans. and Coll. Am. Antiq. Soc.,II, 116, 306, 1836. Latham in Proc. Philolog. Soc., Lond.,II, 31-59, 1846. Latham, Opuscula, 293, 1860. Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, xcix, 1848. Gallatin in Schoolcraft Ind. Tribes,III, 402, 1853. Latham, Elements Comp. Phil., 477, 1862 (referred to as one of the most isolated languages of N.A.). Keane, App. to Stanford’s Comp. (Cent. and So. Am.), 478, 1878 (or Adees).= Adaizi, Prichard, Phys. Hist. Mankind,V, 406, 1847.= Adaise, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, pt. 1, 77, 1848.= Adahi, Latham, Nat. Hist. Man, 342, 1850. Latham in Trans. Philolog. Soc., Lond., 103, 1856. Latham, Opuscula, 366, 368, 1860. Latham, Elements Comp., Phil., 473, 477, 1863 (same as his Adaize above).= Adaes, Buschmann, Spuren der aztekischen Sprache, 424, 1859.= Adees. Keane, App. to Stanford’s Comp. (Cent. and So. Am.) 478, 1878 (same as his Adaize).= Adái, Gatschet, Creek Mig. Leg., 41, 1884.Derivation: From a Caddo word hadai, sig. “brush wood.”This family was based upon the language spoken by a single tribe who, according to Dr. Sibley, lived about the year 1800 near the oldSpanish fort or mission of Adaize, “about 40 miles from Natchitoches, below the Yattassees, on a lake called Lac Macdon, which communicates with the division of Red River that passes by Bayau Pierre.”6A vocabulary of about two hundred and fifty words is all that remains to us of their language, which according to the collector, Dr. Sibley, “differs from all others, and is so difficult to speak or understand that no nation can speak ten words of it.”It was from an examination of Sibley’s vocabulary that Gallatin reached the conclusion of the distinctness of this language from any other known, an opinion accepted by most later authorities. A recent comparison of this vocabulary by Mr. Gatschet, with several Caddoan dialects, has led to the discovery that a considerable percentage of the Adái words have a more or less remote affinity with Caddoan, and he regards it as a Caddoan dialect. The amount of material, however, necessary to establish its relationship to Caddoan is not at present forthcoming, and it may be doubted if it ever will be, as recent inquiry has failed to reveal the existence of a single member of the tribe, or of any individual of the tribes once surrounding the Adái who remembers a word of the language.Mr. Gatschet found that some of the older Caddo in the Indian Territory remembered the Adái as one of the tribes formerly belonging to the Caddo Confederacy. More than this he was unable to learn from them.Owing to their small numbers, their remoteness from lines of travel, and their unwarlike character the Adái have cut but a small figure in history, and accordingly the known facts regarding them are very meager. The first historical mention of them appears to be by Cabeça de Vaca, who in his “Naufragios,” referring to his stay in Texas, about 1530, calls them Atayos. Mention is also made of them by several of the early French explorers of the Mississippi, as d’Iberville and Joutel.The Mission of Adayes, so called from its proximity to the home of the tribe, was established in 1715. In 1792 there was a partial emigration of the Adái to the number of fourteen families to a site south of San Antonio de Bejar, southwest Texas, where apparently they amalgamated with the surrounding Indian population and were lost sight of. (From documents preserved at the City Hall, San Antonio, and examined by Mr. Gatschet in December, 1886.) The Adái who were left in their old homes numbered one hundred in 1802, according to Baudry de Lozieres. According to Sibley, in 1809 there were only “twenty men of them remaining, but more women.” In 1820 Morse mentions only thirty survivors.ALGONQUIAN FAMILY.> Algonkin-Lenape, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Antiq. Soc.,II, 23, 305, 1836. Berghaus (1845), Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1848. Ibid, 1852.> Algonquin, Bancroft, Hist. U. S.,III, 337, 1840. Prichard Phys. Hist. Mankind,V, 381, 1847 (follows Gallatin).> Algonkins, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, pt. 1, xcix, 77, 1848. Gallatin in Schoolcraft Ind. Tribes,III, 401, 1853.> Algonkin, Turner in Pac. R. R. Rept.,III, pt. 3, 55, 1856 (gives Delaware and Shawnee vocabs.). Hayden, Cont. Eth. and Phil. Missouri Inds., 232, 1862 (treats only of Crees, Blackfeet, Shyennes). Hale in Am. Antiq., 112, April, 1883 (treated with reference to migration).< Algonkin, Latham in Trans. Philolog. Soc., Lond., 1856 (adds to Gallatin’s list of 1836 the Bethuck, Shyenne, Blackfoot, and Arrapaho). Latham, Opuscula, 327, 1860 (as in preceding). Latham, Elements Comp. Phil, 447, 1862.< Algonquin, Keane, App. Stanford’s Comp., (Cent. and S. Am.), 460, 465, 1878 (list includes the Maquas, an Iroquois tribe).> Saskatschawiner, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1848 (probably designates the Arapaho).> Arapahoes, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1852.X Algonkin und Beothuk, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 72, 1887.Derivation: Contracted from Algomequin, an Algonkin word, signifying “those on the other side of the river,” i.e., the St. Lawrence River.ALGONQUIAN AREA.The area formerly occupied by the Algonquian family was more extensive than that of any other linguistic stock in North America, their territory reaching from Labrador to the Rocky Mountains, and from Churchill River of Hudson Bay as far south at least as Pamlico Sound of North Carolina. In the eastern part of this territory was an area occupied by Iroquoian tribes, surrounded on almost all sides by their Algonquian neighbors. On the south the Algonquian tribes were bordered by those of Iroquoian and Siouan (Catawba) stock, on the southwest and west by the Muskhogean and Siouan tribes, and on the northwest by the Kitunahan and the great Athapascan families, while along the coast of Labrador and the eastern shore of Hudson Bay they came in contact with the Eskimo, who were gradually retreating before them to the north. In Newfoundland they encountered the Beothukan family, consisting of but a single tribe. A portion of the Shawnee at some early period had separated from the main body of the tribe in central Tennessee and pushed their way down to the Savannah River in South Carolina, where, known as Savannahs, they carried on destructive wars with the surrounding tribes until about the beginning of the eighteenth century they were finally driven out and joined the Delaware in the north. Soon afterwards the rest of the tribe was expelled by the Cherokee and Chicasa, who thenceforward claimed all the country stretching north to the Ohio River.The Cheyenne and Arapaho, two allied tribes of this stock, had become separated from their kindred on the north and had forced their way through hostile tribes across the Missouri to the Black Hills country of South Dakota, and more recently into Wyoming and Colorado, thus forming the advance guard of the Algonquian stock in that direction, having the Siouan tribes behind them and those of the Shoshonean family in front.PRINCIPAL ALGONQUINIAN TRIBES.Abnaki.Algonquin.Arapaho.Cheyenne.Conoy.Cree.Delaware.Fox.Illinois.Kickapoo.Mahican.Massachuset.Menominee.Miami.Micmac.Mohegan.Montagnais.Montauk.Munsee.Nanticoke.Narraganset.Nauset.Nipmuc.Ojibwa.Ottawa.Pamlico.Pennacook.Pequot.Piankishaw.Pottawotomi.Powhatan.Sac.Shawnee.Siksika.Wampanoag.Wappinger.Population.—The present number of the Algonquian stock is about 95,600, of whom about 60,000 are in Canada and the remainder in the United States. Below is given the population of the tribes officially recognized, compiled chiefly from the United States Indian Commissioner’s report for 1889 and the Canadian Indian report for 1888. It is impossible to give exact figures, owing to the fact that in many instances two or more tribes are enumerated together, while many individuals are living with other tribes or amongst the whites:Abnaki:“Oldtown Indians,” Maine410Passamaquoddy Indians, Maine215?Abenakis of St. Francis and Bécancour, Quebec369“Amalecites” of Témiscouata and Viger, Quebec198“Amalecites” of Madawaska, etc., New Brunswick6831,874?Algonquin:Of Renfrew, Golden Lake and Carleton, Ontario797With Iroquois (total 131) at Gibson, Ontario31?With Iroquois at Lake of Two Mountains, Quebec30Quebec Province3,9094,767?Arapaho:Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency, Indian Territory1,272Shoshone Agency, Wyoming (Northern Arapaho)885Carlisle school, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence school, Kansas552,212Cheyenne:Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota (Northern Cheyenne)517Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency, Indian Territory2,091Carlisle school, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence school, Kansas153Tongue River Agency, Montana (Northern Cheyenne)8653,626Cree:With Salteau in Manitoba, etc., British America (treaties Nos. 1, 2, and 5: total, 6,066)3,066?Plain and Wood Cree, treaty No. 6, Manitoba, etc.5,790Cree (with Salteau, etc.), treaty No. 4, Manitoba, etc.8,53017,386?Delaware, etc.:Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Agency, Indian Territory95Incorporated with Cherokee, Indian Territory1,000?Delaware with the Seneca in New York3Hampton and Lawrence schools3Muncie in New York, principally with Onondaga and Seneca36Munsee with Stockbridge (total 133), Green Bay Agency, Wis.23?Munsee with Chippewa at Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas (total 75)37?Munsee with Chippewa on the Thames, Ontario131“Moravians” of the Thames, Ontario288Delaware with Six Nations on Grand River, Ontario1341,750?Kickapoo:Sac and Fox Agency, Indian Territory325Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas237In Mexico200?762?Menominee:Green Bay Agency, Wisconsin1,311Carlisle school11,312Miami:Quapaw Agency, Indian Territory67Indiana, no agency300?Lawrence and Carlisle schools7374?Micmac:Restigouche, Maria, and Gaspé, Quebec732In Nova Scotia2,145New Brunswick912Prince Edward Island3194,108Misisauga:Alnwick, New Credit, etc., Ontario774Monsoni, Maskegon, etc.:Eastern Rupert’s Land, British America4,016Montagnais:Betsiamits, Lake St. John, Grand Romaine, etc., Quebec1,607Seven Islands, Quebec3121,919Nascapee:Lower St. Lawrence, Quebec2,860Ojibwa:White Earth Agency, Minnesota6,263La Pointe Agency, Wisconsin4,778Mackinac Agency, Michigan (about one-third of 5,563 Ottawa and Chippewa)1,854?Mackinac Agency, Michigan (Chippewa alone)1,351Devil’s Lake Agency, North Dakota (Turtle Mountain Chippewa)1,340Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas (one-half of 75 Chippewa and Muncie)38?Lawrence and Carlisle schools15“Ojibbewas” of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, Ontario5,201“Chippewas” of Sarnia, etc., Ontario1,956“Chippewas” with Munsees on Thames, Ontario454“Chippewas” with Pottawatomies on Walpole Island, Ontario658“Ojibbewas” with Ottawas (total 1,856) on Manitoulin and Cockburn Islands, Ontario928?“Salteaux” of treaty Nos. 3 and 4, etc., Manitoba, etc.4,092“Chippewas” with Crees in Manitoba, etc., treaties Nos. 1, 2, and 5 (total Chippewa and Cree, 6,066)3,000?31,928?Ottawa:Quapaw Agency, Indian Territory137Mackinac Agency, Michigan (5,563 Ottawa and Chippewa)3,709?Lawrence and Carlisle schools20With “Ojibbewas” on Manitoulin and Cockburn Islands, Ontario9284,794?Peoria, etc.:Quapaw Agency, Indian Territory160Lawrence and Carlisle schools5165Pottawatomie:Sac and Fox Agency, Indian Territory480Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas462Mackinac Agency, Michigan77Prairie band, Wisconsin280Carlisle, Lawrence and Hampton schools117With Chippewa on Walpole Island, Ontario1661,582Sac and Fox:Sac and Fox Agency, Indian Territory515Sac and Fox Agency, Iowa381Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas77Lawrence, Hampton, and Carlisle schools8981Shawnee:Quapaw Agency, Indian Territory79Sac and Fox Agency, Indian Territory640Incorporated with Cherokee, Indian Territory800?Lawrence, Carlisle, and Hampton schools401,559?Siksika:Blackfoot Agency, Montana. (Blackfoot, Blood, Piegan)1,811Blackfoot reserves in Alberta, British America (with Sarcee and Assiniboine)4,9326,743Stockbridge (Mahican):Green Bay Agency, Wisconsin110In New York (with Tuscarora and Seneca)7Carlisle school4121ATHAPASCAN FAMILY.
The above is peculiarly true of the student of language. He who studies only one Indian language and learns its manifold curious grammatic devices, its wealth of words, its capacity of expression, is speedily convinced of its superiority to all other Indian tongues, and not infrequently to all languages by whomsoever spoken.
If like admirable characteristics are asserted for other tongues he is apt to view them but as derivatives from one original. Thus he is led to overlook the great truth that the mind of man is everywhere practically the same, and that the innumerable differences of its products are indices merely of different stages of growth or are the results of different conditions of environment. In its development the human mind is limited by no boundaries of tribe or race.
Again, a long acquaintance with many tribes in their homes leads to the belief that savage people do not lack industry so much as wisdom. They are capable of performing, and often do perform, great and continuous labor. The men and women alike toil from day to day and from year to year, engaged in those tasks that arepresented with the recurring seasons. In civilization, hunting and fishing are often considered sports, but in savagery they are labors, and call for endurance, patience, and sagacity. And these are exercised to a reasonable degree among all savage peoples.
It is probable that the real difficulty of purchasing quantities of food from Indians has, in most cases, not been properly understood. Unless the alien is present at a time of great abundance, when there is more on hand or easily obtainable than sufficient to supply the wants of the people, food can not be bought of the Indians. This arises from the fact that the tribal tenure is communal, and to get food by purchase requires a treaty at which all the leading members of the tribe are present and give consent.
As an illustration of the improvidence of the Indians generally, the habits of the tribes along the Columbia River may be cited. The Columbia River has often been pointed to as the probable source of a great part of the Indian population of this country, because of the enormous supply of salmon furnished by it and its tributaries. If an abundant and readily obtained supply of food was all that was necessary to insure a large population, and if population always increased up to the limit of food supply, unquestionably the theory of repeated migratory waves of surplus population from the Columbia Valley would be plausible enough. It is only necessary, however, to turn to the accounts of the earlier explorers of this region, Lewis and Clarke, for example, to refute the idea, so far at least as the Columbia Valley is concerned, although a study of the many diverse languages spread over the United States would seem sufficiently to prove that the tribes speaking them could not have originated at a common center, unless, indeed, at a period anterior to the formation of organized language.
The Indians inhabiting the Columbia Valley were divided into many tribes, belonging to several distinct linguistic families. They all were in the same culture status, however, and differed in habits and arts only in minor particulars. All of them had recourse to the salmon of the Columbia for the main part of their subsistence, and all practiced similar crude methods of curing fish and storing it away for the winter. Without exception, judging from the accounts of the above mentioned and of more recent authors, all the tribes suffered periodically more or less from insufficient food supply, although, with the exercise of due forethought and economy, even with their rude methods of catching and curing salmon, enough might here have been cured annually to suffice for the wants of the Indian population of the entire Northwest for several years.
In their ascent of the river in spring, before the salmon run, it was only with great difficulty that Lewis and Clarke were able to provide themselves by purchase with enough food to keep themselves from starving. Several parties of Indians from the vicinity of theDalles, the best fishing station on the river, were met on their way down in quest of food, their supply of dried salmon having been entirely exhausted.
Nor is there anything in the accounts of any of the early visitors to the Columbia Valley to authorize the belief that the population there was a very large one. As was the case with all fish-stocked streams, the Columbia was resorted to in the fishing season by many tribes living at considerable distance from it; but there is no evidence tending to show that the settled population of its banks or of any part of its drainage basin was or ever had been by any means excessive.
The Dalles, as stated above, was the best fishing station on the river, and the settled population there may be taken as a fair index of that of other favorable locations. The Dalles was visited by Ross in July, 1811, and the following is his statement in regard to the population:
The main camp of the Indians is situated at the head of the narrows, and may contain, during the salmon season, 3,000 souls, or more; but the constant inhabitants of the place do not exceed 100 persons, and are called Wy-am-pams; the rest are all foreigners from different tribes throughout the country, who resort hither, not for the purpose of catching salmon, but chiefly for gambling and speculation.2
And as it was on the Columbia with its enormous supply of fish, so was it elsewhere in the United States.
Even the practice of agriculture, with its result of providing a more certain and bountiful food supply, seems not to have had the effect of materially augmenting the Indian population. At all events, it is in California and Oregon, a region where agriculture was scarcely practiced at all, that the most dense aboriginal population lived. There is no reason to believe that there ever existed within the limits of the region included in the map, with the possible exception of certain areas in California, a population equal to the natural food supply. On the contrary, there is every reason for believing that the population at the time of the discovery might have been many times more than what it actually was had a wise economy been practised.
The effect of wars in decimating the people has often been greatly exaggerated. Since the advent of the white man on the continent, wars have prevailed to a degree far beyond that existing at an earlier time. From the contest which necessarily arose between the native tribes and invading nations many wars resulted, and their history is well known. Again, tribes driven from their ancestral homes often retreated to lands previously occupied by other tribes, and intertribal wars resulted therefrom. The acquisition of firearms and horses, through the agency of white men, also had its influence, and when a commercial value was given to furs and skins, the Indian abandonedagriculture to pursue hunting and traffic, and sought new fields for such enterprises, and many new contests arose from this cause. Altogether the character of the Indian since the discovery of Columbus has been greatly changed, and he has become far more warlike and predatory. Prior to that time, and far away in the wilderness beyond such influence since that time, Indian tribes seem to have lived together in comparative peace and to have settled their difficulties by treaty methods. A few of the tribes had distinct organizations for purposes of war; all recognized it to a greater or less extent in their tribal organization; but from such study as has been given the subject, and from the many facts collected from time to time relating to the intercourse existing between tribes, it appears that the Indians lived in comparative peace. Their accumulations were not so great as to be tempting, and their modes of warfare were not excessively destructive. Armed with clubs and spears and bows and arrows, war could be prosecuted only by hand-to-hand conflict, and depended largely upon individual prowess, while battle for plunder, tribute, and conquest was almost unknown. Such intertribal wars as occurred originated from other causes, such as infraction of rights relating to hunting grounds and fisheries, and still oftener prejudices growing out of their superstitions.
That which kept the Indian population down sprang from another source, which has sometimes been neglected. The Indians had no reasonable or efficacious system of medicine. They believed that diseases were caused by unseen evil beings and by witchcraft, and every cough, every toothache, every headache, every chill, every fever, every boil, and every wound, in fact, all their ailments, were attributed to such cause. Their so-called medicine practice was a horrible system of sorcery, and to such superstition human life was sacrificed on an enormous scale. The sufferers were given over to priest doctors to be tormented, bedeviled, and destroyed; and a universal and profound belief in witchcraft made them suspicious, and led to the killing of all suspected and obnoxious people, and engendered blood feuds on a gigantic scale. It may be safely said that while famine, pestilence, disease, and war may have killed many, superstition killed more; in fact, a natural death in a savage tent is a comparatively rare phenomenon; but death by sorcery, medicine, and blood feud arising from a belief in witchcraft is exceedingly common.
Scanty as was the population compared with the vast area teeming with natural products capable of supporting human life, it may be safely said that at the time of the discovery, and long prior thereto, practically the whole of the area included in the present map was claimed and to some extent occupied by Indian tribes; but the possession of land by the Indian by no means implies occupancy in the modern or civilized sense of the term. In the latter sense occupation means to a great extent individual control andownership. Very different was it with the Indians. Individual ownership of land was, as a rule, a thing entirely foreign to the Indian mind, and quite unknown in the culture stage to which he belonged. All land, of whatever character or however utilized, was held in common by the tribe, or in a few instances by the clan. Apparently an exception to this broad statement is to be made in the case of the Haida of the northwest coast, who have been studied by Dawson. According to him3the land is divided among the different families and is held as strictly personal property, with hereditary rights or possessions descending from one generation to another. “The lands may be bartered or given away. The larger salmon streams are, however, often the property jointly of a number of families.” The tendency in this case is toward personal right in land.
For convenience of discussion, Indian tribal land may be divided into three classes: First, the land occupied by the villages; second, the land actually employed in agriculture; third, the land claimed by the tribe but not occupied, except as a hunting ground.
Village sites.—The amount of land taken up as village sites varied considerably in different parts of the country. It varied also in the same tribe at different times. As a rule, the North American Indians lived in communal houses of sufficient size to accommodate several families. In such cases the village consisted of a few large structures closely grouped together, so that it covered very little ground. When territory was occupied by warlike tribes, the construction of rude palisades around the villages and the necessities of defense generally tended to compel the grouping of houses, and the permanent village sites of even the more populous tribes covered only a very small area. In the case of confederated tribes and in the time of peace the tendency was for one or more families to establish more or less permanent settlements away from the main village, where a livelihood was more readily obtainable. Hence, in territory which had enjoyed a considerable interval of peace the settlements were in the nature of small agricultural communities, established at short distances from each other and extending in the aggregate over a considerable extent of country. In the case of populous tribes the villages were probably of the character of the Choctaw towns described by Adair.4“The barrier towns, which are next to the Muskohge and Chikkasah countries, are compactly settled for social defense, according to the general method of other savage nations; but the rest, both in the center and toward the Mississippi, are only scattered plantations, as best suits a separate easyway of living. A stranger might be in the middle of one of their populous, extensive towns without seeing half a dozen houses in the direct course of his path.” More closely grouped settlements are described by Wayne in American State Papers, 1793, in his account of an expedition down the Maumee Valley, where he states that “The margins of the Miamis of the Lake and the Au Glaize appear like one continuous village for a number of miles, nor have I ever beheld such immense fields of corn in any part of America from Canada to Florida.” Such a chain of villages as this was probably highly exceptional; but even under such circumstances the village sites proper formed but a very small part of the total area occupied.
From the foregoing considerations it will be seen that the amount of land occupied as village sites under any circumstances was inconsiderable.
Agricultural land.—It is practically impossible to make an accurate estimate of the relative amount of land devoted to agricultural purposes by any one tribe or by any family of tribes. None of the factors which enter into the problem are known to us with sufficient accuracy to enable reliable estimates to be made of the amount of land tilled or of the products derived from the tillage; and only in few cases have we trustworthy estimates of the population of the tribe or tribes practicing agriculture. Only a rough approximation of the truth can be reached from the scanty data available and from a general knowledge of Indian methods of subsistence.
The practice of agriculture was chiefly limited to the region south of the St. Lawrence and east of the Mississippi. In this region it was far more general and its results were far more important than is commonly supposed. To the west of the Mississippi only comparatively small areas were occupied by agricultural tribes and these lay chiefly in New Mexico and Arizona and along the Arkansas, Platte, and Missouri Rivers. The rest of that region was tenanted by non-agricultural tribes—unless indeed the slight attention paid to the cultivation of tobacco by a few of the west coast tribes, notably the Haida, may be considered agriculture. Within the first mentioned area most of the tribes, perhaps all, practiced agriculture to a greater or less extent, though unquestionably the degree of reliance placed upon it as a means of support differed much with different tribes and localities.
Among many tribes agriculture was relied upon to supply an important—and perhaps in the case of a few tribes, the most important—part of the food supply. The accounts of some of the early explorers in the southern United States, where probably agriculture was more systematized than elsewhere, mention corn fields of great extent, and later knowledge of some northern tribes, as the Iroquois and some of the Ohio Valley tribes, shows that they also raised corn in great quantities.The practice of agriculture to a point where it shall prove the main and constant supply of a people, however, implies a degree of sedentariness to which our Indians as a rule had not attained and an amount of steady labor without immediate return which was peculiarly irksome to them. Moreover, the imperfect methods pursued in clearing, planting, and cultivating sufficiently prove that the Indians, though agriculturists, were in the early stages of development as such—a fact also attested by the imperfect and one-sided division of labor between the sexes, the men as a rule taking but small share of the burdensome tasks of clearing land, planting, and harvesting.
It is certain that by no tribe of the United States was agriculture pursued to such an extent as to free its members from the practice of the hunter’s or fisher’s art. Admitting the most that can be claimed for the Indian as an agriculturist, it may be stated that, whether because of the small population or because of the crude manner in which his operations were carried on, the amount of land devoted to agriculture within the area in question was infinitesimally small as compared with the total. Upon a map colored to show only the village sites and agricultural land, the colors would appear in small spots, while by far the greater part of the map would remain uncolored.
Hunting claims.—The great body of the land within the area mapped which was occupied by agricultural tribes, and all the land outside it, was held as a common hunting ground, and the tribal claim to territory, independent of village sites and corn fields, amounted practically to little else than hunting claims. The community of possession in the tribe to the hunting ground was established and practically enforced by hunting laws, which dealt with the divisions of game among the village, or among the families of the hunters actually taking part in any particular hunt. As a rule, such natural landmarks as rivers, lakes, hills, and mountain chains served to mark with sufficient accuracy the territorial tribal limits. In California, and among the Haida and perhaps other tribes of the northwest coast, the value of certain hunting and fishing claims led to their definition by artificial boundaries, as by sticks or stones.5
Such precautions imply a large population, and in such regions as California the killing of game upon the land of adjoining tribes was rigidly prohibited and sternly punished.
As stated above, every part of the vast area included in the present map is to be regarded as belonging, according to Indian ideas of land title, to one or another of the Indian tribes. To determine the several tribal possessions and to indicate the proper boundary lines between individual tribes and linguistic families is a work of greatdifficulty. This is due more to the imperfection and scantiness of available data concerning tribal claims than to the absence of claimants or to any ambiguity in the minds of the Indians as to the boundaries of their several possessions.
Not only is precise data wanting respecting the limits of land actually held or claimed by many tribes, but there are other tribes, which disappeared early in the history of our country, the boundaries to whose habitat is to be determined only in the most general way. Concerning some of these, our information is so vague that the very linguistic family they belonged to is in doubt. In the case of probably no one family are the data sufficient in amount and accuracy to determine positively the exact areas definitely claimed or actually held by the tribes. Even in respect of the territory of many of the tribes of the eastern United States, much of whose land was ceded by actual treaty with the Government, doubt exists. The fixation of the boundary points, when these are specifically mentioned in the treaty, as was the rule, is often extremely difficult, owing to the frequent changes of geographic names and the consequent disagreement of present with ancient maps. Moreover, when the Indian’s claim to his land had been admitted by Government, and the latter sought to acquire a title through voluntary cession by actual purchase, land assumed a value to the Indian never attaching to it before.
Under these circumstances, either under plea of immemorial occupancy or of possession by right of conquest, the land was often claimed, and the claims urged with more or less plausibility by several tribes, sometimes of the same linguistic family, sometimes of different families.
It was often found by the Government to be utterly impracticable to decide between conflicting claims, and not infrequently the only way out of the difficulty lay in admitting the claim of both parties, and in paying for the land twice or thrice. It was customary for a number of different tribes to take part in such treaties, and not infrequently several linguistic families were represented. It was the rule for each tribe, through its representatives, to cede its share of a certain territory, the natural boundaries of which as a whole are usually recorded with sufficient accuracy. The main purpose of the Government in treaty-making being to obtain possession of the land, comparatively little attention was bestowed to defining the exact areas occupied by the several tribes taking part in a treaty, except in so far as the matter was pressed upon attention by disputing claimants. Hence the territory claimed by each tribe taking part in the treaty is rarely described, and occasionally not all the tribes interested in the proposed cession are even mentioned categorically. The latter statement applies more particularly to the territory west of the Mississippi, the data for determining ownershipto which is much less precise, and the doubt and confusion respecting tribal boundary lines correspondingly greater than in the country east of that river. Under the above circumstances, it will be readily understood that to determine tribal boundaries within accurately drawn lines is in the vast majority of cases quite impossible.
Imperfect and defective as the terms of the treaties frequently are as regards the definition of tribal boundaries, they are by far the most accurate and important of the means at our command for fixing boundary lines upon the present map. By their aid the territorial possessions of a considerable number of tribes have been determined with desirable precision, and such areas definitely established have served as checks upon the boundaries of other tribes, concerning the location and extent of whose possessions little is known.
For establishing the boundaries of such tribes as are not mentioned in treaties, and of those whose territorial possessions are not given with sufficient minuteness, early historical accounts are all important. Such accounts, of course, rarely indicate the territorial possessions of the tribes with great precision. In many cases, however, the sites of villages are accurately given. In others the source of information concerning a tribe is contained in a general statement of the occupancy of certain valleys or mountain ranges or areas at the heads of certain rivers, no limiting lines whatever being assigned. In others, still, the notice of a tribe is limited to a brief mention of the presence in a certain locality of hunting or war parties.
Data of this loose character would of course be worthless in an attempt to fix boundary lines in accordance with the ideas of the modern surveyor. The relative positions of the families and the relative size of the areas occupied by them, however, and not their exact boundaries, are the chief concern in a linguistic map, and for the purpose of establishing these, and, in a rough way, the boundaries of the territory held by the tribes composing them, these data are very important, and when compared with one another and corrected by more definite data, when such are at hand, they have usually been found to be sufficient for the purpose.
In conclusion, the more important deductions derivable from the data upon which the linguistic map is based, or that are suggested by it, may be summarized as follows:
First, the North American Indian tribes, instead of speaking related dialects, originating in a single parent language, in reality speak many languages belonging to distinct families, which have no apparent unity of origin.
Second, the Indian population of North America was greatly exaggerated by early writers, and instead of being large was in reality small as compared with the vast territory occupied and theabundant food supply; and furthermore, the population had nowhere augmented sufficiently, except possibly in California, to press upon the food supply.
Third, although representing a small population, the numerous tribes had overspread North America and had possessed themselves of all the territory, which, in the case of a great majority of tribes, was owned in common by the tribe.
Fourth, prior to the advent of the European, the tribes were probably nearly in a state of equilibrium, and were in the main sedentary, and those tribes which can be said with propriety to have been nomadic became so only after the advent of the European, and largely as the direct result of the acquisition of the horse and the introduction of firearms.
Fifth, while agriculture was general among the tribes of the eastern United States, and while it was spreading among western tribes, its products were nowhere sufficient wholly to emancipate the Indian from the hunter state.
Within the area covered by the map there are recognized fifty-eight distinct linguistic families.
These are enumerated in alphabetical order and each is accompanied by a table of the synonyms of the family name, together with a brief statement of the geographical area occupied by each family, so far as it is known. A list of the principal tribes of each family also is given.
= Adaize, Gallatin in Trans. and Coll. Am. Antiq. Soc.,II, 116, 306, 1836. Latham in Proc. Philolog. Soc., Lond.,II, 31-59, 1846. Latham, Opuscula, 293, 1860. Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, xcix, 1848. Gallatin in Schoolcraft Ind. Tribes,III, 402, 1853. Latham, Elements Comp. Phil., 477, 1862 (referred to as one of the most isolated languages of N.A.). Keane, App. to Stanford’s Comp. (Cent. and So. Am.), 478, 1878 (or Adees).= Adaizi, Prichard, Phys. Hist. Mankind,V, 406, 1847.= Adaise, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, pt. 1, 77, 1848.= Adahi, Latham, Nat. Hist. Man, 342, 1850. Latham in Trans. Philolog. Soc., Lond., 103, 1856. Latham, Opuscula, 366, 368, 1860. Latham, Elements Comp., Phil., 473, 477, 1863 (same as his Adaize above).= Adaes, Buschmann, Spuren der aztekischen Sprache, 424, 1859.= Adees. Keane, App. to Stanford’s Comp. (Cent. and So. Am.) 478, 1878 (same as his Adaize).= Adái, Gatschet, Creek Mig. Leg., 41, 1884.
= Adaize, Gallatin in Trans. and Coll. Am. Antiq. Soc.,II, 116, 306, 1836. Latham in Proc. Philolog. Soc., Lond.,II, 31-59, 1846. Latham, Opuscula, 293, 1860. Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, xcix, 1848. Gallatin in Schoolcraft Ind. Tribes,III, 402, 1853. Latham, Elements Comp. Phil., 477, 1862 (referred to as one of the most isolated languages of N.A.). Keane, App. to Stanford’s Comp. (Cent. and So. Am.), 478, 1878 (or Adees).
= Adaizi, Prichard, Phys. Hist. Mankind,V, 406, 1847.
= Adaise, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, pt. 1, 77, 1848.
= Adahi, Latham, Nat. Hist. Man, 342, 1850. Latham in Trans. Philolog. Soc., Lond., 103, 1856. Latham, Opuscula, 366, 368, 1860. Latham, Elements Comp., Phil., 473, 477, 1863 (same as his Adaize above).
= Adaes, Buschmann, Spuren der aztekischen Sprache, 424, 1859.
= Adees. Keane, App. to Stanford’s Comp. (Cent. and So. Am.) 478, 1878 (same as his Adaize).
= Adái, Gatschet, Creek Mig. Leg., 41, 1884.
Derivation: From a Caddo word hadai, sig. “brush wood.”
This family was based upon the language spoken by a single tribe who, according to Dr. Sibley, lived about the year 1800 near the oldSpanish fort or mission of Adaize, “about 40 miles from Natchitoches, below the Yattassees, on a lake called Lac Macdon, which communicates with the division of Red River that passes by Bayau Pierre.”6A vocabulary of about two hundred and fifty words is all that remains to us of their language, which according to the collector, Dr. Sibley, “differs from all others, and is so difficult to speak or understand that no nation can speak ten words of it.”
It was from an examination of Sibley’s vocabulary that Gallatin reached the conclusion of the distinctness of this language from any other known, an opinion accepted by most later authorities. A recent comparison of this vocabulary by Mr. Gatschet, with several Caddoan dialects, has led to the discovery that a considerable percentage of the Adái words have a more or less remote affinity with Caddoan, and he regards it as a Caddoan dialect. The amount of material, however, necessary to establish its relationship to Caddoan is not at present forthcoming, and it may be doubted if it ever will be, as recent inquiry has failed to reveal the existence of a single member of the tribe, or of any individual of the tribes once surrounding the Adái who remembers a word of the language.
Mr. Gatschet found that some of the older Caddo in the Indian Territory remembered the Adái as one of the tribes formerly belonging to the Caddo Confederacy. More than this he was unable to learn from them.
Owing to their small numbers, their remoteness from lines of travel, and their unwarlike character the Adái have cut but a small figure in history, and accordingly the known facts regarding them are very meager. The first historical mention of them appears to be by Cabeça de Vaca, who in his “Naufragios,” referring to his stay in Texas, about 1530, calls them Atayos. Mention is also made of them by several of the early French explorers of the Mississippi, as d’Iberville and Joutel.
The Mission of Adayes, so called from its proximity to the home of the tribe, was established in 1715. In 1792 there was a partial emigration of the Adái to the number of fourteen families to a site south of San Antonio de Bejar, southwest Texas, where apparently they amalgamated with the surrounding Indian population and were lost sight of. (From documents preserved at the City Hall, San Antonio, and examined by Mr. Gatschet in December, 1886.) The Adái who were left in their old homes numbered one hundred in 1802, according to Baudry de Lozieres. According to Sibley, in 1809 there were only “twenty men of them remaining, but more women.” In 1820 Morse mentions only thirty survivors.
> Algonkin-Lenape, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Antiq. Soc.,II, 23, 305, 1836. Berghaus (1845), Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1848. Ibid, 1852.> Algonquin, Bancroft, Hist. U. S.,III, 337, 1840. Prichard Phys. Hist. Mankind,V, 381, 1847 (follows Gallatin).> Algonkins, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, pt. 1, xcix, 77, 1848. Gallatin in Schoolcraft Ind. Tribes,III, 401, 1853.> Algonkin, Turner in Pac. R. R. Rept.,III, pt. 3, 55, 1856 (gives Delaware and Shawnee vocabs.). Hayden, Cont. Eth. and Phil. Missouri Inds., 232, 1862 (treats only of Crees, Blackfeet, Shyennes). Hale in Am. Antiq., 112, April, 1883 (treated with reference to migration).< Algonkin, Latham in Trans. Philolog. Soc., Lond., 1856 (adds to Gallatin’s list of 1836 the Bethuck, Shyenne, Blackfoot, and Arrapaho). Latham, Opuscula, 327, 1860 (as in preceding). Latham, Elements Comp. Phil, 447, 1862.< Algonquin, Keane, App. Stanford’s Comp., (Cent. and S. Am.), 460, 465, 1878 (list includes the Maquas, an Iroquois tribe).> Saskatschawiner, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1848 (probably designates the Arapaho).> Arapahoes, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1852.X Algonkin und Beothuk, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 72, 1887.
> Algonkin-Lenape, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Antiq. Soc.,II, 23, 305, 1836. Berghaus (1845), Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1848. Ibid, 1852.
> Algonquin, Bancroft, Hist. U. S.,III, 337, 1840. Prichard Phys. Hist. Mankind,V, 381, 1847 (follows Gallatin).
> Algonkins, Gallatin in Trans. Am. Eth. Soc.,II, pt. 1, xcix, 77, 1848. Gallatin in Schoolcraft Ind. Tribes,III, 401, 1853.
> Algonkin, Turner in Pac. R. R. Rept.,III, pt. 3, 55, 1856 (gives Delaware and Shawnee vocabs.). Hayden, Cont. Eth. and Phil. Missouri Inds., 232, 1862 (treats only of Crees, Blackfeet, Shyennes). Hale in Am. Antiq., 112, April, 1883 (treated with reference to migration).
< Algonkin, Latham in Trans. Philolog. Soc., Lond., 1856 (adds to Gallatin’s list of 1836 the Bethuck, Shyenne, Blackfoot, and Arrapaho). Latham, Opuscula, 327, 1860 (as in preceding). Latham, Elements Comp. Phil, 447, 1862.
< Algonquin, Keane, App. Stanford’s Comp., (Cent. and S. Am.), 460, 465, 1878 (list includes the Maquas, an Iroquois tribe).
> Saskatschawiner, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1848 (probably designates the Arapaho).
> Arapahoes, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 17, 1852.
X Algonkin und Beothuk, Berghaus, Physik. Atlas, map 72, 1887.
Derivation: Contracted from Algomequin, an Algonkin word, signifying “those on the other side of the river,” i.e., the St. Lawrence River.
The area formerly occupied by the Algonquian family was more extensive than that of any other linguistic stock in North America, their territory reaching from Labrador to the Rocky Mountains, and from Churchill River of Hudson Bay as far south at least as Pamlico Sound of North Carolina. In the eastern part of this territory was an area occupied by Iroquoian tribes, surrounded on almost all sides by their Algonquian neighbors. On the south the Algonquian tribes were bordered by those of Iroquoian and Siouan (Catawba) stock, on the southwest and west by the Muskhogean and Siouan tribes, and on the northwest by the Kitunahan and the great Athapascan families, while along the coast of Labrador and the eastern shore of Hudson Bay they came in contact with the Eskimo, who were gradually retreating before them to the north. In Newfoundland they encountered the Beothukan family, consisting of but a single tribe. A portion of the Shawnee at some early period had separated from the main body of the tribe in central Tennessee and pushed their way down to the Savannah River in South Carolina, where, known as Savannahs, they carried on destructive wars with the surrounding tribes until about the beginning of the eighteenth century they were finally driven out and joined the Delaware in the north. Soon afterwards the rest of the tribe was expelled by the Cherokee and Chicasa, who thenceforward claimed all the country stretching north to the Ohio River.
The Cheyenne and Arapaho, two allied tribes of this stock, had become separated from their kindred on the north and had forced their way through hostile tribes across the Missouri to the Black Hills country of South Dakota, and more recently into Wyoming and Colorado, thus forming the advance guard of the Algonquian stock in that direction, having the Siouan tribes behind them and those of the Shoshonean family in front.
Population.—The present number of the Algonquian stock is about 95,600, of whom about 60,000 are in Canada and the remainder in the United States. Below is given the population of the tribes officially recognized, compiled chiefly from the United States Indian Commissioner’s report for 1889 and the Canadian Indian report for 1888. It is impossible to give exact figures, owing to the fact that in many instances two or more tribes are enumerated together, while many individuals are living with other tribes or amongst the whites:
Abenakis of St. Francis and Bécancour, Quebec
“Amalecites” of Témiscouata and Viger, Quebec
“Amalecites” of Madawaska, etc., New Brunswick
Of Renfrew, Golden Lake and Carleton, Ontario
With Iroquois (total 131) at Gibson, Ontario
Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency, Indian Territory
Shoshone Agency, Wyoming (Northern Arapaho)
Carlisle school, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence school, Kansas
Pine Ridge Agency, South Dakota (Northern Cheyenne)
Cheyenne and Arapaho Agency, Indian Territory
Carlisle school, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence school, Kansas
With Salteau in Manitoba, etc., British America (treaties Nos. 1, 2, and 5: total, 6,066)
Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Agency, Indian Territory
Incorporated with Cherokee, Indian Territory
Muncie in New York, principally with Onondaga and Seneca
Munsee with Stockbridge (total 133), Green Bay Agency, Wis.
Munsee with Chippewa at Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas (total 75)
Munsee with Chippewa on the Thames, Ontario
Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas
Mackinac Agency, Michigan (about one-third of 5,563 Ottawa and Chippewa)
Mackinac Agency, Michigan (Chippewa alone)
Devil’s Lake Agency, North Dakota (Turtle Mountain Chippewa)
Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas (one-half of 75 Chippewa and Muncie)
Mackinac Agency, Michigan (5,563 Ottawa and Chippewa)
With “Ojibbewas” on Manitoulin and Cockburn Islands, Ontario
Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas
With Chippewa on Walpole Island, Ontario
Pottawatomie and Great Nemaha Agency, Kansas
Lawrence, Hampton, and Carlisle schools
Incorporated with Cherokee, Indian Territory
Lawrence, Carlisle, and Hampton schools
Blackfoot reserves in Alberta, British America (with Sarcee and Assiniboine)
In New York (with Tuscarora and Seneca)