Chapter VI: The Huron-Iroquois: a Typical Race (1)

IT has already been noted in treating of pre-Aryan American men that throughout the northern continent, from the Arctic circle to the Mexican Gulf, no trace has been recovered of the previous existence of anything that properly admits of the term “native civilisation.” The rude arts of Europe’s Stone age belong to a period lying far behind its remotest traditions; unless we appeal to the mythic allusions of Hesiod, or to such poetic imaginings as the _Prometheus_ of Æschylus. But all available evidence serves to show that the condition of the native tribes throughout the northern continent has never advanced beyond the stage which finds its aptest illustration in the arts of their Stone period, including the rudimentary efforts at turning to account their ample resources of native copper without the use of fire.

But this uniformity in the condition of the aborigines, and the consequent resemblance in their arts, habits, and mode of life, has been the fruitful source of misleading assumptions. Everywhere the European explorer met only rude hunting and warring tribes, exhibiting such slight variations in all that first attracts the eye of the most observant traveller, that an exaggerated idea of their ethnical uniformity was the natural result. In the systematisings of the ethnologist, the American type was classed apart as at once uniform and distinctive; and, strange as it may now seem, this idea found nowhere such ready favour as among those who had the fullest access to the evidence by which its truth could be tested. It was the most comprehensive induction of the author of _Crania Americana_, as the fruit of his conscientious researches in American craniology. The authors of _Indigenous Races of the Earth_ and _Types of Mankind_, no less unhesitatingly affirmed that “identical characters pervade all the American races, ancient and modern, over the whole continent.”[111] In this they were sustained by the high authority of Agassiz, who, after discussing in his _Provinces of the Animal World, and their relation to Types of Man_, the fauna peculiar to the American continent, and pointing out the much greater uniformity of its natural productions, when its twin continents are compared with those of the eastern hemisphere, thus summed up the result of his investigations: “With these facts before us, we may expect that there should be no great diversity among the tribes of man inhabiting this continent; and indeed the most extensive investigation of their peculiarities has led Dr. Morton to consider them as constituting but a single race, from the confines of the Esquimaux down to the southernmost extremity of the continent. But, at the same time, it should be remembered that, in accordance with the zoological character of the whole realm, this race is divided into an infinite number of small tribes, presenting more or less difference one from another.” It was natural and reasonable that the men of the sixteenth century should believe in Calibans, or Ewaipanoma, “the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders.” America was to them, in the most literal sense, another world; and it was easier for them to think of it as peopled with such monstrosities than with human beings like ourselves. But it is curious to note in this nineteenth century the lingering traces of the old sentiment; and to see men of science still finding it difficult to emancipate themselves from the idea that this continent is so essentially another world, that it is inconceivable to them that the races by which it is peopled should bear any affinity to themselves or to others of the Old World. American ethnologists long clung to the idea of an essentially distinct indigenous race; and Dr. Nott, Dr. Meigs, and other investigators welcomed every confirmation of the view of Dr. Morton as to the occupation of the whole American continent by one peculiar type from which alone the Eskimo were to be excepted, as an immigrant element, possibly—according to the ingenious speculations of one distinguished student of science,—of remotest European antiquity. Professor Huxley in an address to the Ethnological Society in 1869, suggests hypothetically, that the old Mexican and South American races represent the true American stock; and that the Red Indians of North America may be the product of an intermixture of the indigenous native race with the Eskimo. It is noticeable, at any rate, that nearly all writers, however widely differing on other points, follow Humboldt in classing the Eskimo apart as a distinct type. He remarks in his preface to his _American Researches_, that, “except those which border the polar circle, the nations of America form a single race characterised by the formation of the skull, the colour of the skin, the extreme thinness of the beard, and the straight glossy hair.” Some of the characteristics thus noted are undoubtedly widely prevalent; but the head-form, or “formation of the skull,” is the most important; and a careful comparison of the skulls of different tribes has long since modified the opinion, expressed by the great traveller and reasserted by distinguished American ethnologists.

In reality, were the typical feature most insisted on as universal as it was assumed to be, it would furnish the strongest argument for classifying the predominant Asiatic and American types as one. All the points appealed to suggest affinity to the Asiatic Mongol. But so far from the Eskimo standing apart as a markedly exceptional type, if due allowance be made for the prolonged influence of an Arctic climate, the Huron-Iroquois approximate to them in some very notable ethnical features. The dolichocephalic head-form, especially, is common to them, and to the Algonkin and other Northern Indians. Of those Dr. Latham remarks: “The Iroquois and Algonkins exhibit in the most typical form the characteristics of the North American Indians as exhibited in the earliest descriptions, and are the two families upon which the current notions respecting the physiognomy, habits, and moral and intellectual powers of the so-called Red Race are chiefly founded.” Of the former, Mr. Parkman, who has studied their later history with the minutest care, says: “In this remarkable family of tribes occur the fullest developments of Indian character, and the most conspicuous examples of Indian intelligence. If the higher traits popularly ascribed to the race are not to be found here, they are to be found nowhere.”[112] To this typical American race, accordingly, and to some of its peculiarly distinctive usages, special attention is here directed.

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The Iroquois were an important branch of the great stock which included also the Hurons, or Wyandots, the native historical race of Canada. But divided as the two were throughout the whole period of French Canadian history by the bitterest antagonism, it is convenient to speak of them under the term of Huron-Iroquois. In reviewing the history of this indigenous stock, with the suggestions prompted by their peculiar characteristics, it is desirable not only to note the physical geography of the country which they occupied, as a region of forest and lakes, but, still more, to keep in view this fact as a predominant characteristic of the continent, and as one important factor in the evolution of whatever may seem to be peculiar in the forest tribes of North America.

The effects resulting from the physical features of a country on the development and intermingling of its races can nowhere be wisely overlooked. Even within the limits of the British Islands the influences of mountain and lowlands: of the fertile stretches of Kent and the valley of the Thames, the fens of Lincolnshire, the moorlands of Northumbria, and the Welsh and Scottish Highlands, have largely contributed to the perpetuation, if not in some degree to the development, of ethnical distinctions and the diversities in language.

In this respect Britain is an epitome of Europe, with its great mountain ranges and detached peninsulas, by means of which races have been isolated within well-defined areas, and their languages and other distinctive peculiarities preserved. Russia alone, of all European countries, presents analogies to Northern Asia as a region favourable to nomadic life; and in so far as its history differs from that of the continent at large, it accords with such physical conditions. Throughout the whole historic period, as doubtless in prehistoric times, the great chain of mountains reaching from the western spur of the Pyrenees to the Balkans has influenced European progress; while the chief navigable river, the Danube, traversing the continent through one uniform temperate zone, has tended still further to the perpetuation of certain distinctive ethnical characteristics in Central Europe. In all its most important geographical features, the northern continent of America presents a striking contrast to this. An isosceles triangle with its base within the Arctic circle, it tapers to a narrow isthmus towards the equator. Its great mountain chain runs from north to south, and in near proximity to the Pacific coast; and its chief navigable river, rising within the Canadian Dominion, and receiving as its tributaries rivers draining vast regions on either hand, traverses twenty degrees of latitude before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico. A lower range of highlands towards the Atlantic seaboard forms the eastern boundary of the great interior plain. But the Alleghanies or Appalachian system of mountains, though they may be said to extend from the St. Lawrence to the Mexican Gulf, rise only at a few points, as in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to any great elevation. They form rather a long plateau, intersected by wide valleys, diversifying the landscape, without constituting strongly defined barriers or lines of demarcation. As a whole, the continent of North America, eastward from the Rocky Mountains, may be described as a level area, so slightly modified by any elevated regions throughout its whole extent, from the Arctic circle to the Gulf of Mexico, as to present no other impediment except its forests to the wanderings of nomadic tribes. It is interlaced with rivers, and diversified everywhere with lakes, alike available for navigation and for fishing; and, until the intrusion of European immigrants, its forests and prairies abounded with game far in excess of the wants of its population. Everything thus tended to perpetuate the condition of nomadic hunter tribes. This stage of native American history inevitably drew to a close under the influence of European institutions and civilisation; but it is interesting to note, that the same absence of any well-defined geographical limitations of area, which tended to perpetuate the nomadic habits of the savage, has aided in consolidating the great confederacy of the United States, and maintaining an ethnical and political conformity throughout the northern continent in striking contrast to the diversities in race and political institutions in Europe.

History and native traditions alike confirm the idea that the valley of the St. Lawrence was the habitat of the Huron-Iroquois stock as far back as evidence can be appealed to. The Huron traditions tell of a time when the Province of Quebec was the home of the race eastward to the sea; while those of three at least of the members of the Iroquois confederacy in legendary fashion claimed their birth from the soil south of the great river. When the French explorers, under the leadership of Jacques Cartier, first entered the St. Lawrence, in 1535, they found at Stadaconé and Hochelaga—the old native sites now occupied by the cities of Quebec and Montreal,—a population apparently of the Huron-Iroquois stock; and, in so far as reliance may be placed on their traditions, Canada was then populous throughout the whole valley of the St. Lawrence with industrious native tribes, the representatives of a race that had occupied the same region for unnumbered centuries. “Some fanciful tales of a supernatural origin from the heart of a mountain; of a migration to the eastern seaboard; and of a subsequent return to the country of the lakes and rivers, where they finally settled, comprise,” says Brownell,[113] “most that is noticeable in the native traditions of the Six Nations prior to the grand confederation.” But the value of such traditionary transmission of national history among unlettered tribes has received repeated confirmation; and incidents in the history of their famous league, perpetuated with circumstantial minuteness in the traditions of the Iroquois, are assignable apparently to the fifteenth century. The older event of the overthrow of the Alligéwi, in the Ohio valley, of which independent traditional records have been handed down by the Lenni-Lenape, or Delawares, and by the Iroquois, is now believed to be correctly assignable to a date nearly contemporaneous with the assumption of the authority of Bretwalda of the Heptarchy by Egbert of Wessex,—that memorable step in the fusion of “nations” not greatly more important than those of the Iroquois league, until their divisions in speech and polity were effaced in the unity of the English people. As to “the fanciful tale of a supernatural origin from the heart of a mountain,” it is simply a literal rendering of the old Greek metaphor of the autochthones, or children of the soil, symbolised by the Athenians wearing the grasshopper in their hair; and is by no means peculiar to the Iroquois. Mr. Horatio Hale derived from Manderong, an old Wyandot chief, the story, as narrated to him by the Hurons of Lorette. They took him, he said, to a mountain, and showed him the opening in its side from whence the progenitors of the people emerged, when they “first came out of the ground.”[114] The late Huron chief, Tahourenché, or François-Xavier Picard, communicated to me the same legendary tradition of the indigenous origin of his people; telling me, though with a smile, that they came out of the side of a mountain between Quebec and the great sea. He connected this with other incidents, all pointing to a traditional belief that the northern shores of the lower St. Lawrence were the original home of the race; and he spoke of certain ancient events in the history of his people as having occurred when they lived beside the big sea. The earliest authentic reference to this tradition occurs in the _Relations_ for 1636, where Brebeuf, after a brief allusion to certain of their magical songs and dances, says: “The origin of all such mysteries is assigned by them to a being of superhuman stature, who was wounded in the forehead by one of their nation, at the time when they lived near the sea.” The references to a migration from the seaboard obviously point to one of those incidents in the life of the nation which marked for them an epoch like the Hegira of the Arabs. When Champlain followed Cartier nearly seventy years later he found only a few Algonkins in their birch-bark wigwams, where the palisaded towns of the Huron-Iroquois had stood. But no Algonkin legend claims this as their early home. The invariable tradition of the Ojibways points to the Lake Superior region and the country stretching towards Hudson Bay as the ancestral home of the Algonkin tribes.

Such information as can thus be gleaned from a variety of independent sources, as from the somewhat confused yet trustworthy narrative of David Cusick, the Tuscarora historian, and from Peter Dooyentate, the Wyandot historian, all leads to the same conclusion. From remote and altogether pre-Columbian centuries, the Hurons and other allied tribes—the occupants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of various detached portions of the country north of the St. Lawrence and eastward of the Georgian Bay,—appear to have been in possession of the whole region to which their oldest traditions pointed as the cradle of the race; while nations of the Algonkin stock lay beyond them to the north-west. The great river and the lakes from whence it flows into the lower valley formed a well-defined southern boundary for affiliated tribes; but the first Dutch and English explorers of the Hudson, and of the tract of country which now constitutes the western part of the State of New York, found the river-valleys and lake shores in occupation of the Iroquois confederacy, then consisting of Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and Senecas. These constituted the five nations of the famous Iroquois league. But the Hurons of Canada, with whom they were latterly at deadly feud, appear to have been the oldest representatives of the common race, and were still in occupation of their ancestral home when Cartier first explored the St. Lawrence. The same race had spread far to the south; and its representatives, in detached groups, long continued to perpetuate its influence. These included the Conestogas or Andastes, the Andastogues, the Carantouans, the Cherohakahs or Nottoways, the Tuscaroras, and others, under various names. It is not always easy to recognise the same tribe under its widely dissimilar designations. The Susquehannocks of the English and the Minquas of the Dutch, appear to be the Andastes under other designations, and Champlain’s Carantouans may have been the Eries. Under those and other names the Huron-Iroquois stock extended to the country of the Tuscaroras in North Carolina. Still farther south Gallatin surmised, from linguistic evidence, a connection between the Cherokees and the Iroquois.[115] This fact Mr. Hale has placed beyond doubt; and having detected in the language of the former a grammatical structure mainly Huron-Iroquois, while the vocabulary is to a great extent foreign, he is inclined to think that we thus recover traces of a people, far south in Alabama and Georgia, the descendants of refugees of the conquered Alligéwi, adopted into one of the nations of their Iroquois conquerors.[116]

From one after another of the outlying southern offshoots of the common stock, additions were made from time to time, to restore the numbers of the decimated Iroquois. Westward of the confederacy was the country of the Eries, an offshoot of the Seneca nation, occupying the southern shore of the great lake which perpetuates their name. Immediately to the north of the Eries, within the Canadian frontier, the Attiwendaronks, or Neuters, occupied the peninsula of Niagara, while the Tiontates or Petuns, and other tribes of the same stock, were settled in the fertile region between Lakes Erie and Huron. In 1714, the Tuscaroras, when driven by the English out of North Carolina, were welcomed by their Iroquois kinsmen, and received into the league which thenceforth bore the name of the Six Nations. Towards the middle of the same century the waste of war made them ready to welcome any additions to their numbers; and the Tuteloes and Nanticokes, both apparently Algonkin, furnished fresh accessions to the diminished numbers of the confederacy, but without taking their place as distinct nations.

But of all the nations of the stock thus widely spread westward and southward, the Hurons are the native historical race of Canada, intimately identified with incidents of its early settlement and of friendly intercourse with _La Nouvelle France_. Their language is now recognised as the oldest form of the common speech of the Huron-Iroquois, and it is not creditable to Canadian philologists that its grammar still remains unrepresented in any accurate printed form. The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec did, indeed, publish in its _Transactions_, in 1831, the translation of a Latin MS., compiled with much industry by a missionary who had laboured among the Hurons of Lorette, and whose anonymous work was found amongst the papers of the mission. But it is the production of one ignorant of the science of language, and gives no adequate idea either of the grammatical structure or of the variety and richness of the Huron tongue.

The languages or dialects spoken by many native Indian tribes have undoubtedly perished with the races to which they pertained; but the numerous Huron-Iroquois dialects still existing, not only in written form, but as living tongues, afford valuable materials for ethnical study. The history of other Indian tribes abundantly accounts for the multiplication of a minute diversity of languages so specially characteristic of the American continent, with the endless subdivisions of its indigenous population into petty tribes, kept apart by internecine feuds. The number of native American languages is estimated by Vater, in his _Linguarum Totius Orbis Index_, at about five hundred. But the question forthwith arises: What shall be regarded as constituting a language? For, in the wanderings of little bands of Indian nomads, and the adoption of refugees from disbanded tribes, dialects multiply indefinitely. Nearly six hundred of such are catalogued by Mr. Bancroft, in his _Native Races of the Pacific States_, as spoken between Alaska and the Isthmus of Panama.

Until recently the tendency has been to assume an underlying unity of speech for the whole American languages, based on the polysynthetic or holophrastic characteristic ascribed to the whole; just as by an exaggerated estimate of the prevalence of a predominant head-form, one physical type was long assumed to characterise the American race from Hudson Bay to Tierra del Fuego. Perhaps, so far as language is concerned, the present tendency is towards the opposite extreme. Major Powell, the chief of the Ethnographical Bureau at Washington, recognises eighty groups of languages in North America, between which no affinity is thus far apparent. Fifty-five of those he believes to be satisfactorily determined as distinct stocks. On the other hand, Professor Whitney, after noticing the complexity of the inquiry when directed to the native American languages, thus proceeds: “Yet it is the confident opinion of linguistic scholars that a fundamental unity lies at the base of all these infinitely varying forms of speech; that they may be, and probably are, all descended from a single parent language.”[117]

Here then is a field for much useful research, with the promise of valuable results. The subject is rendered more important owing to the fact that, of nearly all the nations of the North American continent, their languages are the only surviving memorials of the race. Already, under the efficient supervision of the Ethnographic Bureau of the United States, systematic contributions are being secured for this important branch of knowledge, so far as their own geographical area is concerned. A no less important area is embraced in the Dominion of Canada, and the attention of the Government is now directed to the necessity for timely action in this matter. In the North-West, and in British Columbia, languages are disappearing and races becoming extinct. Mr. Hale has contributed to the American Philosophical Society’s _Transactions_ a valuable monogram on the Tutelo tribe and language, derived mainly from Nikonha, the last full-blood Tutelo, who survived till upwards of a hundred years of age. He was married to a Cayuga woman, and lived among her people on their Grand river reserve. “My only knowledge of the Tuteloes,” says Mr. Hale, “had been derived from the few notices comprised in Gallatin’s _Synopsis of the Indian Tribes_, where they are classed with the nations of the Huron-Iroquois stock. At the same time the distinguished author, with the scientific caution which marked all his writings, is careful to mention that no vocabulary of the language was known. That which was now obtained showed, beyond question, that the language was totally distinct from the Huron-Iroquois tongues, and that it was closely allied to the language of the Dakota family.”[118] But for the timely exertion of a philological student, this interesting link in the history of the Huron-Iroquois relations with affiliated tribes would have been lost beyond recall.

The history of the Huron-Iroquois race, and especially of the Six Nation Indians, since the settlement of the main body for the past century on their reserves on the Grand river, in the Province of Ontario, curiously illustrates the pertinacity with which they have cherished the dialectic varieties of a common tongue. But while the essential differences of language everywhere constitute one of the most obvious distinctions of race, it is interesting to note the recognition by the Indians of affinities of dialects, and even remote kinship based on such evidence; as in the readmission of the Tuscaroras to the Iroquois family of nations. According to Brebeuf, the kinship of the Attiwendaronks of the Niagara peninsula was recognised by the Hurons in that designation which classed them as a “people of a language a little different.”[119] Peter Jones Kahkewaquonaby, a civilised Ojibway, adopted into the Mohawk nation, in speaking of the traditions of the Indians as to their own origin, says: “All the information I have been able to gain in relation to the question amounts to the following. Many, many winters ago the Great Spirit, Keche-Manedoo, created the Indians. Every nation speaking a different language is a second creation, but all were made by the same Supreme Being.”[120]

Among the races of the northern continent, none east of the Rocky Mountains more fitly represent their special characteristics than the great Huron-Iroquois family. Their language is remarkable for its compass and elaborate grammatical structure; and the numerous dialects of the common mother tongue furnish evidence of migration and conquest over a wide region eastward of the Mississippi. To such philological evidence many inquirers are now turning for a clue to the origin of the races of the New World, and for the recovery of proofs of their affinity to one or other of the Old World stocks. Professor Whitney, after dwelling on the “exaggeratedly agglutinative type” of the ancient Iberian language, and its isolation among the essentially dissimilar languages of Aryan Europe, thus proceeds: “The Basque forms a suitable stepping-stone from which to enter the peculiar linguistic domain of the New World, since there is no other dialect of the Old World which so much resembles in structure the American languages”[121]; not indeed, as he adds, that they are all of accordant form; for he pronounces the grouping of them in a single great family as “a classification of ignorance.” The possibilities of ancient communication between the opposite shores of the Atlantic, and the migration of colonists of the New World from the Mediterranean Sea, have already been discussed in dealing with the legend of the Lost Atlantis. Great indeed as is the interval of time therein implied, it would not suffice to erase all traces of affinity of languages. But it would be vain to hope for any historical guidance recoverable from the oldest of Iroquois legends. If, moreover, Iberian, Hittite, Egyptian, Phœnician, or other of the world’s gray fathers, transplanted to America the germs of its long indigenous stock, we look in vain for any traces of their Old World civilisation north of the Mexican Gulf. Nor is it by any means an established truth that the arts of Central America or Peru are of any very great antiquity. Their metallurgy was at a crude, yet suggestive, stage at which it was not likely to be long arrested. The same may be said of their hieroglyphic records; though they certainly present some highly significant analogies to the Chinese phase of word-writing, calculated, along with other aspects of resemblance to that stage of partial, yet long-enduring, civilisation of which China is the Asiatic exemplar, to modify our estimate of the possible duration of Central and Southern American civilisation. Nevertheless the assumption of an antiquity in any degree approximating to that of Egypt seems wholly irreconcilable with the evidence. Their architecture was barbaric, though imposing from the scale on which their great temples and palaces were built. In Central America especially, the aggregation of numerous ill-lighted little chambers, like honey-comb cells excavated out of the huge pile, is strongly suggestive of affinity to the Casas Grandes, and the Pueblos of the Zuñi; and this is confirmed by the correspondence traceable between many of their architectural details and the ornamentation of the Pueblo pottery.

The astronomy and the calendars, both of Mexico and Peru, with their detailed methods of recording their divisions of time, are all suggestive of an immature phase of civilisation in the very stage of its emergence from barbarism, modified, in some cases, by the recent acquisition of certain arts. As to the peculiar phase of Mexican art, and whatever other evidence of progress Mexico supplies, they appear to me no more than natural products of the first successful intrusion of the barbarians of the northern continent on the seats of tropical civilisation. Certain it seems, at least, that if an earlier civilisation had ever existed in the north, or if the representatives of any Old World type were present there in numbers for any length of time, some traces of their lost arts must long since have come to light.

But the conservative power of language is indisputable; and if the kinship now claimed for the polysynthetic languages of both hemispheres be correct, we are on the threshold of significant disclosures. The Huron-Iroquois tongue, in its numerous ramifications, as well as some of the native languages that have outlived the last of the races to which they belonged, may preserve traces of affinities as yet unrecognised. But in no respect are the Huron-Iroquois more correctly adducible as a typical race of American aborigines than in the absence of all evidence of their ever having acquired any of the arts upon which civilisation depends. We look in vain in their vocabularies for terms of science, or for names adapted to the arts and manufactures on which social progress depends. But they had developed a gift of oratory, for which their language amply sufficed, and from which we may infer the presence in this race of savages of latent powers, capable of wondrous development. “Their languages show, in their elaborate mechanism, as well as in their fulness of expression and grasp of thought, the evidence of the mental capacity of those who speak them. Scholars who admire the inflections of the Greek and Sanscrit verb, with their expressive force and clearness, will not be less impressed with the ingenious structure of the verb in Iroquois. It comprises nine tenses, three moods, the active and passive voices, and at least, twenty of those forms which in the Semitic grammars are styled conjugations. The very names of these forms will suffice to give evidence of the care and minuteness with which the framers of this remarkable language have endeavoured to express every shade of meaning. We have the diminutive and augmentative forms, the cis-locative and trans-locative, the duplicative, reiterative, motional, causative, progressive, attributive, frequentative, and many others.”[122] To speak, indeed, of the Iroquois as, in a consciously active sense, the framers of all this would be misleading. But it unquestionably grew up in the deliberations around the council fire, where the conflicting aims of confederate tribes were swayed by the eloquence of some commanding orator, until the fiercest warrior of this forest race learned to value more the successful wielding of the tongue in the _Kanonsionni_, or figurative Long House of the League, even than the wielding of the tomahawk in the field. At the organisation of the confederacy, the Canyengas or Mohawks were figuratively said to have “built a house,” _rodinonsonnih_, or rather to have “built the long house” in which the council fire of the Five Nations was kindled. Of this the Senecas, lying on the extreme west, were styled the “door-keepers,” and the Onondagas, whose territory was central, were the custodians. The whole usage is rhetorical and figurative. Under such influences the language of the Huron-Iroquois was framed, and it grew rich in emotional and persuasive forms. It only needed the evolution of a true alphabet out of the pictorial symbolism on their painted robes, or the grave-posts of their chiefs, to inaugurate a literature which should embody the orations of the Iroquois Demosthenes, and the songs of a native Homer, for whom a vehicle of thought was already prepared, rich and flexible as poet could desire.

So far as the physical traits of the American aborigines furnish any evidence of ethnical affinity they unquestionably suggest some common line of descent with the Asiatic Mongol; and this is consistent with the agglutinate characteristics common to a large class of languages of both continents. But, on the other hand, the characteristic head-form of the Huron-Iroquois, as well as that of Algonkin and other northern tribes, deviates alike from the brachycephalic type of the southern Indians and from that of the Asiatic Mongols. Humboldt, who enjoyed rare opportunities for studying the ethnical characteristics of both continents, but to whom, nevertheless, the northern races, with their dolichocephalic type of head were unknown, dwells, in his _American Researches_, on the striking resemblance which the American race bear to the Asiatic Mongols. Latham classes both under the common head of Mongolidæ; and Dr. Charles Pickering, of the American Exploring Expedition, arrived at the same conclusion as the result of his own independent study of the races of both continents. Nevertheless, however great may be the resemblance in many points between the true Red Indian and the Asiatic Mongol, it falls short of even an approximate physical identity. The Mongolian of Asia is not indeed to be spoken of as one unvarying type any more than the American. But the extent to which the Mongolian head-form and peculiar physiognomy characterise one widely diffused section of the population of the eastern continent, gives it special prominence among the great ethnical divisions of the human race. Morton assigns 1421 as the cranial capacity of eighteen Mongol, and only 1234 as that of 164 American skulls other than Peruvian or Mexican. Dr. Paul Topinard, in discussing the American type, adds: “If we are to rely on the method of cubic measurement followed by Morton, the American skull is one of the least capacious of the whole human race.”[123] But Dr. Morton’s results are in some respects misleading. The mean capacity yielded by the measurements of 214 American skulls in the Peabody Museum of Archæology, including a considerable number of females, is 1331; and with a carefully selected series, excluding exceptionally large and small crania, the results would be higher. Twenty-six male California skulls, for example, yield a mean capacity of 1470. The Huron-Iroquois crania would rank among such exceptional examples.[124] The forehead is, indeed, low and receding, but the general cerebral capacity is good; and Dr. Morton specially notes its approximation to the European mean.[125]

But the assumption of uniformity in the ethnical characteristics of the various races of North and South America is untenable. All probabilities rather favour the idea of different ethnical centres, a diversity of origin, and considerable admixture of races. All evidence, moreover, whether physical or philological, whatever else it may prove, leaves no room for doubt as to a greatly prolonged period of isolation of the native races of the New World. Whether they came from the Mediterranean, in that old mythic dawn the memory of which survived in the legend of a submerged Atlantis; or the history of their primeval migration still lingers among fading traces of philological affinity with the Basques; or if, with the still more remote glimpses which affinite Arctic ethnology has been assumed to supply, we seek to follow the palæolithic race of Central Europe’s Reindeer period in the long pilgrimage to Behring Straits, and so to the later home of the American Mongol; this, at least, becomes more and more obvious, that they brought with them no arts derived from the ancient civilisations of Egypt or of Asia. So far, at least, as the northern continent is concerned, no evidence tends to suggest that the aborigines greatly differed at any earlier period from the condition in which they were found by Cartier when he first entered the St. Lawrence. They were absolutely ignorant of metallurgy; and notwithstanding the abundance of pure native copper accessible to them, they cannot be said even to have attained to that rudimentary stage of metallurgic art which for Europe is spoken of as its “Copper Age.” Copper was to them no more than a malleable stone, which they fashioned into axes and knives with their stone hammers. Their pottery was of the most primitive crudeness, hand-fashioned by their women without the aid of the potter’s wheel. The grass or straw-plaiting of their basket-work might seem to embody the hint of the weaver’s loom; but the products of the chase furnished them with skins of the bear and deer, sufficient for all purposes of clothing. They had advanced in no degree beyond the condition of the neolithic savage of Europe’s Stone age when, at the close of the fifteenth century, they were abruptly brought into contact with its cultured arts. The gifted historian, Mr. Francis Parkman, who has thrown so fascinating an interest over the story of their share in the long-protracted struggle of the French and English colonists of North America, says of them: “Among all the barbarous nations of the continent the Iroquois stand paramount. Elements which among other tribes were crude, confused, and embryotic, were among them systematised and concreted into an established polity. The Iroquois was the Indian of Indians. A thorough savage, yet a finished and developed savage. He is perhaps an example of the highest elevation which man can reach without emerging from his primitive condition of the hunter.” Yet with this high estimate of the race as pre-eminent among Red Indian nations, he adds: “That the Iroquois, left under their institutions to work out their destiny undisturbed, would ever have developed a civilisation of their own, I do not believe.”[126] They had not, in truth, taken the first step in such a direction; and, were it not for the evidence which language supplies, it would be conceivable that they, and the whole barbarian nations of which they are a type, were Mongol intruders of a later date than the Northmen of the tenth century; who, it seems far from improbable, encountered only the Eskimo of the Labrador coast, or their more southern congeners, then extending to the south of the St. Lawrence. The prevalence of a brachycephalic type of head among southern Indian tribes, while dolichocephalic characteristics are common to the Eskimo and to the Huron-Iroquois and other northern nations, lends countenance to the idea of an intermixture of Red Indian and Eskimo blood. The head-forms, however, though both long, differ in other respects; and a divergence is apparent on comparing the bones of the face, with a corresponding difference in their physiognomy.

Dr. Latham recognised the Iroquois as one of the most typical families of the North American race, and Mr. Parkman styles them “the Indian of the Indians.” The whole Huron-Iroquois history illustrates their patient, politic diplomacy, their devotion to hunting and to war. But their policy gave no comprehensive aim to wars which reduced their numbers, and threatened their very existence as a race. Throughout the entire period of any direct knowledge of them by Europeans, there is constant evidence of feuds between members of the common stock, due in part, indeed, to their becoming involved in the rivalries of French and English colonists, but also traceable to hereditary animosities perpetuated through many generations. The strongly marked diversities in the dialects of the Six Nations is itself an evidence of their long separation, prior to their confederation, in the earlier half of the fifteenth century. By far the most trustworthy narrative of this famous league is embodied by Mr. Horatio Hale in _The Iroquois Book of Rites_, a contribution to aboriginal American literature of singular interest and value. Among the members of this confederacy the Tuscaroras occupy a peculiar position. They were reunited to the common stock so recently as 1714, but their traditions accord with those of the whole Huron-Iroquois family in pointing to the Lower St. Lawrence as their original home; and the diversity of the Tuscarora dialect from those of the older nations of the league furnishes a valuable gauge of the significance of such differences as evidence of the length of period during which the various members of the common stock had been separated. On the other hand, the manner in which, in the absence of any hereditary feud, the Iroquois respected the bonds of consanguinity, and welcomed the fugitive immigrants from North Carolina, throws an interesting light on the history of the race, and the large extent of country occupied by it in the time of its greatest prosperity.

The earliest home of the whole Huron-Iroquois stock was within the area of Quebec and Eastern Ontario, and they have thus a claim on the interest of Canadians as their precursors in the occupation of the soil; while, in so far as its actual occupancy by the representatives of the common stock is concerned, the Hurons were welcomed to a friendly, if fatal, alliance with the early French colonists; and the Iroquois of the Six Nations have enjoyed a home, under the protection of England, on the western Canadian reserves set apart for their use upwards of a century ago.

There is one notable inconsistency in the traditions of the Huron-Iroquois which is significant. The fathers of the common stock dwelt, according to their most cherished memories, in their northern home on the St. Lawrence, and beside the great sea. It ranked also among the ancient traditions of the “Wampum-keepers,” or official annalists, that there came a time when, from whatever cause, the Caniengas—Ka-nyen-ke-ha-ka, or Flint people, _i.e._ the Mohawks,—the “eldest brother” of the family, led the way from the northern shore of the St. Lawrence to their later home in what is now the State of New York. But the prehistoric character of this later tradition is shown by the fact that the Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas, all claimed for themselves the character of autochthones in their later home. The precise spot where, according to the cherished legend of the Oneidas, they literally sprang from the soil, is still marked by “the Oneida Stone,” a large boulder of flesh-coloured syenite, from which the latter called themselves Oniota-aug, “the people begot from the stone.” It occupies a commanding site overlooking a fine expanse of country stretching to the Oneida Lake. But, according to Mr. Hale, the name of the Oneida nation, in the council of the league, was _Nihatirontakowa_, usually rendered the “great-tree people,” or literally “those of the great log.” This designation is connected, most probably as an afterthought, with a legendary meeting of their people with Hiawatha.[127] The beautiful legend of this benefactor of his people has been embalmed in the Indian epic of Longfellow, and dealt with as a chapter of genuine history in Mr. Horatio Hale’s _Iroquois Book of Rites_. At a period when the tribes were being wasted by constant wars within and without, a wise and beneficent chief arose among the Onondagas. His name is rendered: “he who seeks the wampum belt.” He had long viewed with grief the dissensions and misery of his people, and conceived the idea of a federal union which should ensure peace. The system which he devised was to be not a loose and transitory league, such as the Indian tribes were familiar with; but a permanent organisation, foreshadowing as it were the federal union of the Anglo-American Colonies. “While each nation was to retain its own council and its management of local affairs, the general control was to be lodged in a federal senate, composed of representatives elected by each nation, holding office during good behaviour, and acknowledged as ruling chiefs throughout the confederacy. Still further, and more remarkably, the confederation was not to be a limited one. It was to be infinitely expansive. The avowed design of its proposer was to abolish war altogether. He wished the federation to extend until all the tribes of men should be included in it. Such,” says Mr. Hale, “is the positive testimony of the Iroquois themselves, and their statement is supported by historical evidence.”[128] The league survived far on into the eighteenth century; but the dream of universal peace among the nations of the New World, if it ever found any realisation, had vanished in the reawakening of the demon of strife.

In all the accounts of the Iroquois their league is noted as distinguishing them from the Algonkins and other ruder tribes of North America. The story of this league has been reproduced by successive historians, not without rhetorical exaggerations borrowed from the institutions of civilised nations, both of ancient and modern times. The late Hon. L. H. Morgan says of this tribal union: “Under their federal system the Iroquois flourished in independence, and capable of self-protection, long after the New England and Virginia races had surrendered their jurisdictions, and fallen into the condition of dependent nations; and they now stand forth upon the canvas of Indian history, prominent alike for the wisdom of their civil institutions, their sagacity in the administration of the league, and their courage in its defence. When their power and sovereignty finally passed away, it was through the events of peaceful intercourse, gradually progressing to this result.”[129] Schoolcraft in like manner refers to “their advancement in the economy of living, in arms, in diplomacy, and in civil polity,” as evidence of a remote date for their confederacy.[130] But while thus contrasting the “power and sovereignty” of the Iroquois with the “dependent nations” to the south, Schoolcraft leaves it manifest that, whatever may have been the extent of the ancient confederacy, in the seventeenth century their whole numbers fell short of 12,000; and in 1677 their warriors or fighting men were carefully estimated at 2150. The diversity of dialects of the different members of the league is a source of curious interest to the philologist; but the fact that, among a people numerically so small, local dialects were thus perpetuated, is a proof of the very partial influence of the league as a bond of union. It serves to illustrate the general defect of native American polity. “Nothing,” says Max Müller, “surprised the Jesuit missionaries so much as the immense number of languages spoken by the natives of America. But this, far from being a proof of a high state of civilisation, rather showed that the various races of America had never submitted for any length of time to a powerful political concentration.[131] The Iroquois were undoubtedly pre-eminent in the highest virtues of the savage; and could they have been isolated in the critical transitional stage, like the ancient Egyptians in their Nile valley, the Greeks in their Hellenic peninsula, or the Anglo-Saxons in their insular stronghold—

. . . . set in the silver sea
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive—

until they learned to unite with their courage and persistency in war some of the elements of progress in civilisation ascribed to them, they might have proved the regenerators of the continent, and reserved it for permanent occupation by races of native origin. “Wherever they went,” says Schoolcraft, “they carried proofs of their energy, courage, and enterprise. At one period we hear the sound of their war-cry along the Straits of the St. Mary’s, and at the foot of Lake Superior; at another, under the walls of Quebec, where they finally defeated the Hurons under the eyes of the French.”[132] And after glancing at the long history of their triumphs, he adds: “Nations trembled when they heard the name of the Konoshioni.”

In older centuries, while the Huron-Iroquois still constituted one united people in their ancestral home to the north of the St. Lawrence, they must have been liable to contact with the Eskimo, both on the north and the east; and greatly as the two races differ, the dolichocephalic type of head common to both is not only suggestive of possible intermixture, but also of encroachments on the Eskimo in early centuries by this aggressive race. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as probably at a much earlier date, when the Iroquois had parted from the Hurons, they became unquestionably _the_ aggressive race of the northern continent; and were an object of dread to widely severed nations. Their earliest foes were probably the Algonkins, whose original home appears to have been between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay. Nevertheless, there was a time, according to the traditions of both, apparently in some old pre-Columbian century, when Iroquois and Algonkins combined their forces against the long-extinct stock whose name survives in that of the Alleghany Mountains and river. But if so, their numbers must have then vastly exceeded that of their whole combined nations at any period subsequent to their first intercourse with Europeans. For if the growing opinion is correct that the Alligéwi were the so-called “Mound-Builders” of the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, they must have been a numerous people, occupying a territory of great extent, and carrying on agriculture on a large scale. So far as metallurgy—that crucial test of civilisation,—is concerned, they had not advanced beyond the stage of Iroquois progress. Their pottery and ingenious carvings in stone have already been noted, along with their singular geometrical earthworks which still puzzle the American archæologist, from the evidence they show of skill in a people still practically in their Stone period. The only conceivable solution of the mystery, as already suggested, seems to me the assumption of some “Druidic” or Brahminical caste, distinct from the native Alligéwi stock, who ruled in those great northern river-valleys, as in Peru; and, like the mythic Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs, taught them agriculture, and directed the construction of the marvellous works to which they owe their later distinctive name. But for some unknown reason they provoked the united fury of Iroquois and Algonkins; and after long-protracted strife were driven out, if not wholly exterminated. A curious phase of incipient native civilisation thus perished; and, notwithstanding all the romance attached to the league of the Iroquois, it is impossible to credit them at any stage of their own history with the achievement of such a progress in agriculture or primitive arts as we must ascribe to this ancient people of the Ohio valley. To the triumph of the Iroquois in this long-protracted warfare may have been due the haughty spirit which thenceforth demanded a recognition of their supremacy from all surrounding nations. Their partial historians ascribe to them a spirit of magnanimity in the use of their power, and a mediatorial interposition among the weaker nations that acknowledged their supremacy. They appear, indeed, to have again entered into alliance with an Algonkin nation. Their annalists have transmitted the memory of a treaty effected with the Ojibways, when the latter dwelt on the shores of Lake Superior; and the meeting-place of the two powerful races was at the great fishing-ground of the Sault Ste. Marie rapids, within reach of the copper-bearing rocks of the Keweenaw peninsula. The league then established is believed to have been faithfully maintained on both sides for upwards of two hundred years. But if so, it had been displaced by bitter feud in the interval between the visits of Cartier and Champlain to the St. Lawrence.

The historical significance given to the legend of Hiawatha by the coherent narrative so ingeniously deduced by Mr. Horatio Hales from _The Iroquois Book of Rites_, points to a long-past era of beneficent rule and social progress among the Huron-Iroquois. But the era is pre-Columbian, if not mythic. The pipe of peace had been long extinguished, and the buried tomahawk recovered, when the early French explorers were brought into contact with the Iroquois and Hurons. The history of their deeds, as recorded by the Jesuit Fathers from personal observation, is replete with the relentless ferocity of the savage. War was their pastime; and they were ever ready to welcome the call to arms. La Salle came in contact with them on the discovery of the Illinois; and Captain John Smith, the founder of Virginia, encountered their canoes on the Chesapeake Bay bearing a band of Iroquois warriors to the territories of the Powhattan confederacy. They were then, as ever, the same fierce marauders, intolerant of equality with any neighbouring tribe. The Susquehannocks experienced at their hands the same fate as the Alligéwi. The Lenapes, Shawnees, Nanticokes, Unamis, Delawares, Munsees, and Manhattans, were successively reduced to the condition of dependent tribes. Even the Canarse Indians of Long Island were not safe from their vengeance; and their power seems to have been dreaded throughout the whole region from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.