Chapter VI: The Huron-Iroquois: a Typical Race (2)

It thus appears probable that in remote centuries, before the discovery of America by European voyagers, the region extending westward from the Labrador coast to Lake Ontario, if not, indeed, to Lake Huron, had been in occupation by those who claimed to be autochthones, and who were known and feared far beyond their own frontiers. But though thus maintaining a haughty predominancy; so far as their arts afford any evidence, they were in their infancy. The country occupied by them, except in so far as it was overgrown with the forest, was well adapted for agriculture; and the Iroquois and Hurons alike compared favourably with the Algonkins in their agricultural industry. A confirmatory evidence of exceptional superiority among this remarkable race is that their women were held in unwonted respect. They had their own representatives in the council of the tribe; and exercised considerable influence in the choice of a chief. But on them devolved all domestic labour, including the cultivation of their fields. This work was entirely carried on by the women, while the share of the men in the joint provision of food was the product of the chase. The beautiful region was still so largely under forest that it must have afforded abundant resources for the hunter; but it furnished no facilities for the inauguration of a copper or bronze age, such as the shores of Lake Superior in vain offered to its Algonkin nomads. Of metallic ores they had no knowledge; and while they doubtless prized the copper brought occasionally from Lake Superior, copper implements are rare in the region which they occupied. Their old alliance with the Algonkins of the great copper region had long come to an end; and when brought under the notice of the French and English colonists, the Algonkins had joined with the Hurons as the implacable foes of the Iroquois confederacy.

In the ancient warfare in which Algonkins and Huron-Iroquois are found united against the nation of the great river valleys, we see evidences of a conflict between widely distinct stocks of northern and southern origin. It is an antagonism between well-defined dolichocephalic and brachycephalic races. In the dolichocephalic Iroquois or Huron, we have the highest type of the forest savage; maintaining as his own the territory of his fathers, and building palisaded towns for the secure shelter of his people. The brachycephalic Mound-Builder, on the other hand, may still survive in one or other of the members of the semi-civilised village communities of New Mexico or Arizona. But if the interpretation of native traditions have any value, they carry us back to pre-Columbian centuries, and tell of long-protracted strife, until what may at first have been no more than the aggressions of wild northern races, tempted by the resources of an industrious agricultural community, became a war of extermination. The elaborately constructed forts of the Mound-Builders, no less abundant throughout the Ohio valley than their curious geometrical earthworks, prove the dangers to which they were exposed, no less than the skill and determination with which the aggressors were withstood, it may be through successive generations, before their final overthrow.

The palisaded Indian town of Hochelaga, one of the chief urban centres of the Huron-Iroquois tribes in the older home of the race, and a sample of the later Huron defences on the Georgian Bay, stood, in the sixteenth century, at the foot of Mount Royal, whence the city of Montreal takes its name; and some of the typical skulls of its old occupants, as well as flint implements and pottery from its site, are now preserved in the Museum of M’Gill University. The latter relics reveal no more than had long been familiar in the remains which abound within the area of the Iroquois confederacy, and elsewhere throughout the eastern states of North America. Their earthenware vessels were decorated with herring-bone and other incised patterns; and their tobacco pipes and the handles of their clay bowls were, at times, rudely modelled into human and animal forms. Their implements of flint and stone were equally rude. They had inherited little more than the most infantile savage arts; and when those were at length superseded, in some degree, by implements and weapons of European manufacture, they prized the more effective weapons, but manifested no desire for mastering the arts to which they were due. To all appearance, through unnumbered centuries, the tide of human life has ebbed and flowed in the valley of the St. Lawrence as unprogressively as on the great steppes of Asia. Such footprints as the wanderers have left on the sands of time tell only of the unchanging recurrence of generations of men as years and centuries came and passed away. Illustrations of native art are now very familiar to us. The ancient flint pits have been explored; and the flint cores and rough-hewn nodules recovered. The implements of war and the chase were the work of the Indian brave. His spears and arrow heads, his knives, chisels, celts, and hammers, in flint and stone, abound. Fish-hooks, lances or spears, awls, bodkins, and other implements of bone and deer’s horn, are little less common. The highest efforts of artistic skill were expended on the carving of his stone pipe, and fashioning the pipe-stem. The pottery, the work of female hands, is usually in the simplest stage of coarse, handmade, fictile ware. The patterns, incised on the soft clay, are the conventional reproductions of the grass or straw-plaiting; or, at times, the actual impressions of the cordage or wicker-work by which the larger clay vessels were held in shape, to be dried in the sun before they were imperfectly burned in the primitive kiln. But the potter also indulged her fancy at times in modelling artistic devices of men and animals, as the handles of the smaller ware, or the forms in which the clay tobacco pipe was wrought. Nevertheless the northern continent lingered to the last in its primitive stage of neolithic art; and its most northern were its rudest tribes, until we pass within the Arctic circle and come in contact with the ingenious handiwork of the Eskimo. Southward beyond the great lakes, and especially within the area of the Mound-Builders, a manifest improvement is noticeable. Alike in their stone carvings and their modelling in clay, the more artistic design and better finish of industrious settled communities are apparent. Still further to the south, the diversified ingenuity of fancy, especially in the pottery, is suggestive of an influence derived from Mexican and Peruvian art. The carved work of some western tribes was also of a higher character. But taking such work at its best, it cannot compare in skill or practical utility with the industrial arts of Europe’s Neolithic age. This region has now been visited and explored by Europeans for four centuries, during a large portion of which time they have been permanent settlers. Its soil has been turned up over areas of such wide extent that the results may be accepted, with little hesitation, as illustrations of the arts and social life subsequent to the occupation of the continent by its aboriginal races. But we look in vain for evidence of an extinct native civilisation. However far back the presence of man in the New World may be traced, throughout the northern continent, at least, he seems never to have attained to any higher stage than what is indicated by such evidences of settled occupation as were shown in the palisaded Indian town of Hochelaga; or at most, in the ancient settlements of the Ohio valley. Everywhere the agriculturist only disturbs the graves of the savage hunter. The earthworks of the Mound-Builders, and still more their configuration, are indeed suggestive of a people in a condition analogous to that of the ancient populace of Egypt or Assyria, toiling under the direction of an overruling caste, and working out intellectual conceptions of which they themselves were incapable. Yet, even in their case, this inference finds no confirmation from the contents of their mounds or earthworks. They disclose only implements of bone, flint, and stone, with some rare examples of equally rude copper tools, hammered into shape without the use of fire. Working in the metals appears to have been confined to the southern continent; or, at least, never to have found its way northward of the Mexican plateau. Nothing but the ingeniously sculptured tobacco pipe, or the better-fashioned pottery, gives the slightest hint of progress beyond the first infantile stage of the tool-maker.

Whatever may have been the source of special skill among the old agricultural occupants of the Ohio valley, their Iroquois supplanters borrowed from them no artistic aptitude. No remains of its primitive occupants give the slightest hint that the aborigines of Canada, or of the country immediately to the south of the St. Lawrence, derived any knowledge from the old race so curiously skilled in the construction of geometrical earthworks. Any native burial mounds or embankments are on a small scale, betraying no more than the simplest operations of a people whose tools were flint hoes, and horn or wooden picks and shovels. Wherever evidence is found of true working in metals, as distinct from the cold-hammered native copper, as in the iron tomahawk, the copper kettles, and silver crosses, recovered from time to time from Indian graves, their European origin is indisputable. Small silver buckles, or brooches, of native workmanship are indeed common in their graves; for a metallic currency was so unintelligible to them that this was the use to which they most frequently turned French or English silver coinage.

But notwithstanding the general correspondence in arts, habits, and conditions of life, among the forest and prairie tribes of North America, their distinctive classification into various dolichocephalic and brachycephalic types points to diversity of origin and a mingling of several races. So far as the native races of Canada are considered, it has been shown that they belong to the dolichocephalic type. The Alligéwi, or Mound-Builders, on the contrary, appear to have been a strongly marked brachycephalic race; and the bitter antagonism between the two, which ended in the utter ruin of the latter, may have been originally due to race distinctions such as have frequently been the source of implacable strife.

The short globular head-form, which, in the famous Scioto-mound skull, is shown in a strongly marked typical example with the longitudinal and parietal diameters nearly equal, appears to have been common among the southern tribes, such as the Osages, Ottoes, Missouries, Shawnees, Cherokees, Seminoles, Uchees, Savannahs, Catawbas, Yamasees, Creeks, and many others. This seems to point to such a convergence, of two distinct ethnical lines of migration from opposite centres, as is borne out by much other evidence. In noting this aspect of the question anew, the further significant fact may also be once more repeated, that the Eskimo cranium, along with certain specialties of its own, is pre-eminently distinctive as the northern type.

Among what may be accepted as typical Canadian skulls, those recovered from the old site of Hochelaga, and from the Huron ossuaries around Lake Simcoe, have a special value. They represent the native race which, under various names, extended from the Lower St. Lawrence westward to Lake St. Clair. The people encountered by Cartier and the first French explorers of 1535, and those whom Champlain found settled around the Georgian Bay sixty-eight years later, appear to have been of the same stock. Such primitive local names, as Stadaconé and Hochelaga, are not Algonkin, but Huron-Iroquois. Native traditions, as well as the allusions of the earliest French writers, confirm this idea of the occupation by a Huron-Iroquois or Wyandot population of the “region north-eastward from the mouth of the St. Lawrence, at or somewhere along the Gulf coast, before they ever met with the French, or any European adventurers,” as reaffirmed in the narrative of their own native historian, Peter Dooyentate.[133] But whatever confirmation may be found for this native tradition, it is certain that the European adventurers bore no part in their expulsion from their ancient home. The aborigines, whom Jacques Cartier found a prosperous people, safe in the shelter of their palisaded towns, had all vanished before the return of the French under Champlain; and they were found by him in new settlements, which they had formed far to the westward on Lake Simcoe and the Georgian Bay.

Questions of considerable interest are involved in the consideration of this migration of the Hurons; and the circumstances under which they deserted their earlier home. They were visited by Champlain in 1615, and subsequently by the missionary Fathers, who, in 1639, found them occupying thirty-two palisaded villages, fortified in the same fashion as those described by the first French explorers at Stadaconé and Hochelaga. Their numbers are variously estimated. Brebeuf reckoned them at 30,000; and described them as living together in towns sometimes of fifty, sixty, or a hundred dwellings,—that is, of three or four hundred householders,—and diligently cultivating their fields, from which they derived food for the whole year. Whatever higher qualities distinguished the Iroquois from Algonkin or other native races, were fully shared in by the Hurons; and they are even spoken of with a natural partiality by their French allies, like Sagard, as a patrician order of savages, in comparison with those of the Five Nations. When first visited by French explorers, after their protracted journey through the desolate forests between the Ottawa and Lake Huron, their palisaded towns and cultivated fields must have seemed like an oasis in the desert. “To the eye of Champlain,” says Mr. Parkman, “accustomed to the desolation he had left behind, it seemed a land of beauty and abundance. There was a broad opening in the forest, fields of maize with pumpkins ripening in the sun, patches of sun-flowers, from the seeds of which the Indians made hair-oil, and in the midst the Huron town of Otouacha. In all essential points it resembled that which Cartier, eighty years before, had seen at Montreal; the same triple palisade of crossed and intersecting trunks, and the same long lodges of bark, each containing many households. Here, within an area of sixty or seventy miles, was the seat of one of the most remarkable savage communities of the continent.”[134] The Hurons, thus settled in their latter home, consisted of several “nations,” including their kinsmen to the south, as far as Lake Erie and the Niagara river. They had their own tribal divisions, still perpetuated among their descendants. The Rev. Prosper Vincent Sa∫∫atannen, a native Huron, and the first of his race admitted to the priesthood, informs me that the Hurons of Lorette still perpetuate their ancient classification into four _grandes compagnies_, each of which has its five tribal divisions or clans, by which of old all intermarriage was regulated. The members of the same clan regarded themselves as brothers and sisters, and so were precluded from marriage with one another. The small number of the whole band at La Jeune Lorette renders the literal enforcement of this rule impossible; but the children are still regarded as belonging to the mother’s clan. The five clans into which each of the four companies is divided are:—1. The Deer, _Oskanonton_; 2. The Bear, _Anniolen_; 3. The Wolf, _Annenarisk∫∫a_; 4. The Tortoise, _Andia∫∫ik_; 5. The Beaver, _Tsotai_. There were two, if not more dialects spoken by the old Hurons, or Wyandots; and that of Hochelaga probably varied from any form of the language now surviving. This has to be kept in view in estimating the value of the lists of words furnished by Jacques Cartier of “le langage des pays et Royaulmes de Hochelaga et Canada, aultrement appellée par nous la nouvelle France.”

Of the condition of the region to the west of the Ottawa prior to the seventeenth century nothing is known from direct observation. Before Champlain had an opportunity of visiting it, the whole region westward to Lake Huron had been depopulated and reduced to a desert. The fact that the few natives found by Champlain occupying the once populous region of the Hochelaga Indians were Algonkins, has been the chief ground for the assumption that the expulsion of that old Wyandot stock was due to their hostility. But such an idea is irreconcilable with the fact that the latter, instead of retreating southward to their Huron-Iroquois kinsmen, took refuge among Algonkin tribes. According to the narrative of their own Wyandot historian, Peter Dooyentate, gathered, as he tells us, from traditions that lived in the memory of a few among the older members of his tribe, the island of Montreal was occupied in the sixteenth century by Wyandots or Hurons, and Senecas, sojourning peaceably in separate villages. The tradition is vague which traces the cause of their hostility to the wrath of a Seneca maiden, who had been wronged by the object of her affections, and gave her hand to a young Wyandot warrior on the condition of his slaying the Seneca chief, to whose influence she ascribed the desertion of her former lover. Whatever probability may attach to this romance of the Indian lovers, the tradition that the Hurons were driven from their ancient homes on the St. Lawrence by their Seneca kinsmen is consistent with ascertained facts, as well as with the later history of the Senecas, who are found playing the same part to the Eries under a somewhat similar incentive to revenge, and appear to have taken the lead in the destruction of the Attiwendaronks. The native tradition is of value in so far as it shows that the fatal enmity of the Iroquois to the Hurons was not originally due to the alliance of the latter with the French; but Senecas and Hurons had alike disappeared before Champlain visited the scene of Cartier’s earlier exploration. The Attiwendaronks, who dwelt to the south of the later home of the Hurons, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, may have formed another of the nations of the Wyandot stock expelled from the valley of the St. Lawrence. Situated as they were in their later home, midway between the Hurons and Iroquois, they strove in vain to maintain a friendly neutrality. Charlevoix assigns the year 1635 as the date of their destruction by the latter. Certain it is that between that date and the middle of the century their towns were utterly destroyed; and such of the survivors as lingered in the vicinity were incorporated into the nation of the Senecas, who lay nearest to them.

The Eries were another Huron-Iroquois nation who appear to have persistently held aloof from the league. They were seemingly a fiercer and more warlike people than the Attiwendaronks; they fought with poisoned arrows, and were esteemed or dreaded as warriors. Their numbers must have been considerable, since they were an object of apprehension to the nations of the league whose western frontiers marched with their own. They are affirmed by the native historian, Cusick, to have sprung from the Senecas; but, if so, their separation was probably of remote date, as they were both numerous and powerful. The country which they occupied was noted among the French _coureurs des bois_ for its lynx furs; and they gave accordingly to its people the name of “La Nation du Chat.” Their ancient home is still indicated in the name of the great lake beside which they dwelt. But, for some unknown reason, they refused all alliance with the Senecas and the league of their Iroquois kin, and perished by their violence within seven years after the Huron country was laid waste. “To the Eries, and to the Neuter nation,” or Attiwendaronks, says Schoolcraft, “according to tradition, the Iroquois offered the alternative of admission into the league or extermination; and the strangeness of this proposition will disappear, when it is remembered that an Indian nation regards itself as at war with all others not in actual alliance.”[135] Peace, he adds, was the ultimate aim of the founders of the Iroquois oligarchy; and, for lovers of peace on such terms of supremacy, the _casus belli_ would not be more difficult to find than it has proved to be among the most Christian of kings. In the case of the Eries, as of the elder Wyandots of Hochelaga, the final rupture is ascribed to a woman’s implacable wrath.

Father Le Moyne, while on a mission to the Onondagas in 1654, learned that the Iroquois confederacy were excited to fury against the Eries. A captive Onondaga chief is said to have been burnt at the stake after he had been offered, according to Indian custom, to one of the Erie women, to take the place of her brother who had been murdered while on a visit to the Senecas. It is a characteristic illustration of how the feuds of ages were perpetuated. The traditions of the Iroquois preserved little more than the fact that the Eries had perished by their fury. But a story told to Mr. Parkman by a Cayuga Indian, only too aptly illustrates the hideous ferocity of their assailants. It represented that the night after the great battle in which the Eries suffered their final defeat, the forest was lighted up with more than a thousand fires, at each of which an Erie was being tortured at the stake.[136] The number is probably exaggerated. But it is only thus, as it were in the lurid glare of its torturing fires, that we catch a glimpse of this old nation as it vanished from the scene. Of the survivors, the greater number were adopted, according to Indian fashion, into the Seneca nation.

Some of the earthworks met with to the south of Lake Erie show proofs of greater constructive labour than anything found in Canada. Still more interesting are the primitive hieroglyphics of an inscription on Cunningham’s Island, ascribed to the Eries, and which Schoolcraft describes as by far the most elaborate work of its class hitherto found on the continent.[137] But the rock inscription, though highly interesting as an example of native symbolism and pictographic writing, throws no light on the history of its carvers; and of their language no memorial is recoverable, for they had ceased to exist before the great lake which perpetuates their name was known to the French.

More accurate information has been preserved in reference to the Hurons, among whom the Jesuit Fathers laboured with self-denying zeal, from time to time reporting the results in their _Relations_ to the Provincial of the Order at Paris. One of the most characteristic religious ceremonies of the Hurons was the great “Feast of the Dead,” celebrated apparently at intervals of twelve years, when the remains of their dead were gathered from scaffolded biers, or remote graves, and deposited amid general mourning in the great cemetery of the tribe. Valuable robes and furs, pottery, copper kettles and others of their choicest possessions, including the pyrulæ, or large tropical shells brought from the Gulf of Mexico, with wampum, prized implements, and personal ornaments, were all thrown into the great trench, which was then solemnly covered over. By the exploration of those Huron ossuaries, the sites of the palisaded villages of the Hurons of the seventeenth century have been identified in recent years; and there are now preserved in the Laval University at Quebec upwards of eighty skulls recovered from cemeteries at St. Ignace, St. Joachin, Ste. Marie, St. Michael, and other villages, the scenes of self-denying labour, and in some cases of the cruel torturings, of the French missionaries by whom they were thus designated. Other examples of skulls from the same ossuaries, I may add, are now in the Museums of the University of Toronto, the London Anthropological Society, and the Jardin des Plantes at Paris. The skulls recovered from those ossuaries have a special value from the fact that the last survivors were driven out of the country by their Iroquois foes in 1649; and hence the crania recovered from them may be relied upon as fairly illustrating the physical characteristics of the race before they had been affected by intercourse with Europeans. The Huron skull is of a well-defined dolichocephalic type, with, in many cases, an unusual prominence of the occipital region; the parietal bones meet more or less at an angle at the sagittal suture; the forehead is flat and receding; the superciliary ridges in the male skulls are strongly developed; the malar bones are broad and flat, and the profile is orthognathic. Careful measurements of thirty-nine male skulls yield a mean longitudinal diameter of 7.39 to a parietal diameter of 5.50; and of eighteen female skulls, a longitudinal diameter of 7.07 to a parietal diameter of 5.22.[138]

Who were the people found by Cartier in 1535, seemingly long-settled and prosperous, occupying the fortified towns of Stadaconé and Hochelaga, and lower points on the St. Lawrence? The question is not without a special interest to Canadians. According to the native Wyandot historian, they were Wyandots or Hurons, and Senecas. That they were Huron-Iroquois, at any rate, and not Algonkins, is readily determined. We owe to Cartier two brief vocabularies of their language, which, though obscured probably in their original transcription, and corrupted by false transliterations in their transference to the press, leave no doubt that the people spoke a Huron-Iroquois dialect. To which of the divisions it belonged is not so obvious. The languages, in the various dialects, differ only slightly in most of the words which Cartier gives. Sometimes they agree with Huron, and sometimes with Iroquois equivalents. The name of Hochelaga, “at the beaver-dam,” is Huron, and the agreement as a whole preponderates in favour of a Huron rather than an Iroquois dialect. But there was probably less difference between the two then, than at the more recent dates of their comparison. In dealing with this important branch of philological evidence, I have been indebted to the kindness of my friend, Mr. Horatio Hale, for a comparative analysis of the vocabulary supplied by Cartier, embodying the results of long and careful study. He has familiarised himself with the Huron language by personal intercourse with members of a little band of civilised Wyandots, settled on their reserve at Anderdon, in Western Ontario. The language thus preserved by them, after long separation from other members of the widely scattered race, probably presents the nearest approximation to the original forms of the native tongue, as spoken on the Island of Montreal and the lower St. Lawrence. In comparing them allowance has to be made for varieties of dialect among the old occupants of the lower valley of the St. Lawrence, and also for the changes wrought on the Huron language in the lapse of three and a half centuries, not simply by time, but also as the result of intercourse and intermixture with other peoples. The habit of recruiting their numbers by the adoption of prisoners and broken tribes could not fail to exercise some influence on the common tongue. The _k_ or hard _g_ of Cartier is, in the Wyandot, frequently softened to a _y_; and on the other hand, the _n_ is strengthened by a _d_ sound, as in Cartier’s pregnant term _Canada_, the old Hochelaga word for a town, which has become in the Wyandot _Yandata_; and so in other instances.

The revolution which, at the critical period of the advent of the Trench in the valley of the St. Lawrence, in the interval of sixty-eight years between the visits of Cartier and Champlain, displaced the fortified and populous Indian capital of Hochelaga and left the surrounding regions a desolate wilderness, is a mysterious event. Had Champlain been curious to learn the facts of an occurrence then so recent there could have been little difficulty in recovering the history of the exodus of the Hochelagans. But it had no interest for the French adventurers of that day. The well-fortified Wyandot towns had given place to a few ephemeral birch-bark wigwams belonging to another race; and the readiest solution of the mystery has been to ascribe the expulsion of the Wyandots, or Hurons, from their ancient home in Eastern Canada, to the Algonkins. This, as already shown, is irreconcilable with the fact that Champlain found them in friendly alliance with the latter against their common foe, the Iroquois. If, however, the Wyandot tradition of the expulsion of the Hurons from the island of Montreal by the Senecas be accepted, it is in no degree inconsistent with the circumstances subsequently reported by Champlain; but rather serves to account for some of them, if it is assumed that the Senecas were, in their turn, driven out by the Algonkins, and then finally withdrew beyond the St. Lawrence.

But there is another kind of evidence bearing on the question of the affinities of the people first met with by Cartier in 1535, which also has its value here. The descriptions of the palisaded towns of the Hurons on the Georgian Bay very accurately reproduce that which Cartier gives of Hochelaga. Ephemeral as such fortifications necessarily were, the construction of a rampart formed of a triple row of trunks of trees, surmounted with galleries, from whence to hurl stones and other missiles on their assailants, was a formidable undertaking for builders provided with no better tools than stone hatchets, and with no other means of transport than their united labour supplied. But the design had the advantage of furnishing a self-supporting wall, and so of saving the greater labour of digging a trench, with such inadequate tools, in soil penetrated everywhere with the roots of forest trees. It was the Huron-Iroquois system of military engineering, in which they contrasted favourably with the Algonkins, among whom the absence of such evidence of settled habits as those secure defences supplied, was characteristic of these ruder nomads. But such urban fortifications no less strikingly contrast with the elaborate and enduring military earthworks to the south of the great lakes. The pottery and implements found on the site of Hochelaga are of the same character as many examples recovered from the Huron ossuaries. On the other hand the peculiar rites, of which those ossuaries are the enduring memorials, appear to have distinguished the western Hurons from the older settlers on the St. Lawrence. The great Feast of the Dead, with its recurrent solemnities, when after the lapse of years the remains of their dead were exhumed, or removed from their scaffold biers, was the most characteristic religious ceremonial of the Hurons; and was practised with still more revolting rites by the kindred Attiwendaronks. Festering dead bodies were kept in their dwellings, preparatory to scraping the flesh from their bones; and the decaying remains of recently buried corpses were exhumed for reinterment in the great trench, which was prepared with enormous labour, and furnished with the most lavish expenditure of prized furs, wampum, and other possessions.

In all ages and states of society unavailing sorrow has tempted the survivors to extravagant excesses in the effort to do honour to the loved dead; and sumptuary laws have been repeatedly enacted to restrain such demonstrations within reasonable bounds. _The Book of Rites_ suffices to suggest that the ancient funeral rites of the Iroquois were of the same revolting and wasteful character, until their mythic reformer, Hiawatha, superseded them with a simpler symbolical funeral service. “I have spoken of the solemn event which has befallen you,” are the introductory words to the thirteenth paragraph of “The Condoling Council,” and it thus proceeds: “Every day you are losing your great men. They are being borne into the earth; also the warriors, and also your women, and also your grandchildren; so that in the midst of blood you are sitting.” It is therefore enacted, in the twenty-seventh paragraph, evidently in lieu of older practices: “This shall be done. We will suspend a pouch upon a pole, and will place in it some mourning wampum, some short strings, to be taken to the place where the loss was suffered. The bearer will enter, and will stand by the hearth, and will speak a few words to comfort those who will be mourning; and then they will be comforted, and will conform to the great law.”

A string of black wampum sent round the settlement is still, among the Indians of the Six Nations, the notice of the death of a chief, as a belt of black wampum was a declaration of war. It seems not improbable that the people of Stadaconé and Hochelaga had submitted to the wise social and religious reforms by which the ancient rites of their dead were superseded by the symbolism of the mourning wampum, and hence the absence of ossuaries throughout the island of Montreal and the whole region to the east. But when the fugitive Wyandots fled into the wilderness, and reared new homes around Lake Simcoe and in the western peninsula, they may have revived traditional usages of their fathers, and resumed rites which had been reluctantly abandoned. Among the civilised Indians of the Six Nations some memorials of their ancestral rites of the dead still survive. A visitor to the reserve at the time of the death of a late highly esteemed chief told me that on the event being known it was immediately responded to by all within hearing by the prolonged utterance, in a mournful tone, of the cry _Kwé_, and this, passing from station to station, spread the news of their loss throughout the reserve. Nearly the same sound, uttered in a quicker note, _Quaig!_ is the salutation among the Hurons of Lorette.

The later history of the Hurons and Iroquois is not without its special interest. One little band, the Hurons of Lorette, the representatives of the refugees from the massacre of 1648, has lingered till our own day in too close proximity to the French _habitants_ of Quebec to preserve in purity the blood of the old race. But great as are the alterations which time and intermixture with the white race have effected, they still retain many intellectual as well as physical traits of their original stock after an interval of two hundred and thirty-six years, during which intimate intercourse, and latterly frequent intermarriage with those of European blood, have wrought inevitable change on the race.[139] Other more vigorous representatives of the old Huron stock occupy a small reservation in the Township of Anderdon, in Western Ontario, from whom the vocabulary was derived which furnished a test of the language of the Hochelagans in the sixteenth century. But the Hurons of Lorette have also preserved their native tongue; and an ample vocabulary[140] of the older form of their language survives. A third modification of the ancient tongue no doubt exists; for the larger remnant of the survivors of the Hurons, after repeated wanderings, is now settled, far from the native home of the race, on reserves conceded to them by the American Government in Kansas.

The Hurons have thus, for the most part, disappeared from Canada; but it is not without interest to note that the revolution which, upwards of a century ago, severed the connection of the old colonies to the south of the St. Lawrence with the region to the north, restored to Canada its ancient Iroquois. This race of savage warriors acquired the mastery of a region equal in extent to Central Europe; and by a system of warfare, not, after all, more inherently barbarous or recklessly bloody than that of Europe’s Grand Monarch, reconstructed the social and political map of the continent east of the Mississippi. Their influence acquired a novel importance when, in the seemingly insignificant rivalries of French and English fur-traders, they practically determined the balance of power between the two foremost nations of Europe on this continent. Their indomitable pertinacity proved more than a match alike for European diplomacy and military skill; and, as they maintained an uncompromising hostility to the French at a time when the rival colonists were nearly equally balanced, the failure of the magnificent schemes of Louis XIV. and his successors to establish in North America such a supremacy as Charles V. and Philip II. had held in Mexico and Peru, is largely traceable to them. It is natural that the Anglo-American student of history should estimate highly the polity of savage warriors who thus foiled the schemes of one of the most powerful monarchies of Europe for the mastery of this continent. The late Hon. L. H. Morgan thus writes of them: “They achieved for themselves a more remarkable civil organisation, and acquired a higher degree of influence, than any other race of Indian lineage except those of Mexico and Peru. In the drama of European colonisation they stood, for nearly two centuries, with an unshaken front against the devastations of war, the blighting influence of foreign intercourse, and the still more fatal encroachments of a restless and advancing border population. 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.”[141] But in this their historian applies to the Iroquois a European standard, similar to that by which Prescott unconsciously magnified Mexican barbarism into a rivalry with the contemporary civilisation of Spain. The romance attached to the Hodenosauneega, or Kononsionni, the famous league of the Long House or United Households, more truly derives its chief interest and value from the fact that its originators remained to the last savages. It is, at any rate, important to keep this fact in view, and to interpret the significance of the league in that light. When the treaty which initiated it was entered into by the Caniengas and the Oneidas, they were both in that primitive stage of unsophisticated barbarism to which the term “Stone Period” has been applied. In the absence of all knowledge of metallurgy, their implements and weapons were alike simple and rude. Agriculture, under such conditions, must have been equally primitive; and as for their wars, when they were not defensive, they appear to have had no higher aim than revenge. Gallatin, no unappreciative witness, says of them: “The history of the Five Nations is calculated to give a favourable opinion of the intelligence of the Red Man. But they may be ranked among the worst of conquerors. They conquered only in order to destroy, and, it would seem, solely for the purpose of gratifying their thirst for blood. Towards the south and the west they made a perfect desert of the whole country within 500 miles of their seats. A much greater number of those Indians, who since the commencement of the seventeenth century have perished by the sword in Canada and the United States, have been destroyed by that single nation than in all their wars with the Europeans.”[142]

To characterise the combination effected among such tribes as one presenting elements of wise civil institutions; or indeed to introduce such terms as league and federal system, in the sense in which they have been repeatedly employed, as though they referred to a confederation akin to those of the ancient Achæans or Ætolians, is to suggest associations altogether misleading. Though an interesting phase of American savage life, to which its long duration gives a marked significance, the Iroquois league was by no means unique; though it was the oldest, and may have been the model on which others were framed. The Creek confederacy embraced numerous tribes between the Mobile, Alabama, and Savannah rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico. At the head of it were the Muskhogees, a numerous and powerful, but wholly savage race of hunters. Like the Oneidas, Onandagas, and the still older Wyandots, they and the Choctaws claimed to be autochthones. The Muskhogees appealed to a tradition of their ancestors that they issued from a cave near the Alabama river; while the Choctaws pointed to the frontier region between them and the Chickasaws, where, as they affirmed, they suddenly emerged from a hole in the earth, a numerous and mighty people. The system of government amongst the members of this southern confederacy seems to have borne considerable resemblance to that of the Iroquois; if it was not borrowed from it. Every village was the centre of an independent tribe or nation, with its own chief; and the restraints imposed on the individual members, except when co-operating in some special enterprise or religious ceremonial, appear to have been slight.

Mr. Hale has shown that the language of the Cherokees has a grammar mainly Huron-Iroquois, and a vocabulary largely recruited from some foreign source. From this he infers that one portion of the conquered Alligéwi, while the conflict still lasted, may have cast in their lot with the conquering race, just as the Tlascalans did with the Spaniards in their war against the Aztecs, and hence the origin of the great Cherokee nation. The fugitive Alligéwi, he surmises, may have fled down the Mississippi till they reached the country of the Choctaws, themselves a mound-building people; and to the alliance of the two he would thus trace the difference in the language of the latter from that of their eastern kindred, the Creeks or Muskhogees.[143] On the assumption of such a combination of ethnical elements, the origin of the Creek confederacy is easily accounted for. It is to this same element of language that we have to revert for guidance in the interpretation of the history of this remarkable race. It would be an evasion of the most essential evidence on which any reliable conclusions must be based, if the fact were overlooked that the Iroquois never emerged beyond the primitive stage of the Stone period. Nevertheless in one element of intellectual development their progress had been great. Each nation of the Iroquois league had its chief, to whom pertained the right of kindling the symbolic council-fire, and of taking the lead in all public assemblies. When the representative chiefs of the nations gathered in the Long House around the common council-fire of the league, it was no less necessary that they should be able and persuasive speakers than brave warriors. Rhetoric was cultivated in the council-house of the Iroquois no less earnestly than in the Athenian ekklesia or the Roman forum. Acute reasoning and persuasive eloquence demanded all the discriminating refinements of grammar, and the choice of terms which an ample vocabulary supplies. The holophrastic element has been noted as a peculiar characteristic of American languages. The word-sentences thus constructed not only admitted of, but encouraged, an elaborate nicety of discrimination; while the marked tendency of the process, so far as the language itself is concerned, was to absorb all other parts in the verb. Time, place, manner, aim, purpose, degree, and all the other modifications of language are combined polysynthetically with the root. Nouns are to a large extent verbal forms; and not only nouns and adjectives, but adverbs and prepositions, are regularly conjugated. Elaborated polysyllables, flexibly modified by systematic internal changes, give expression, in one compounded word-sentence, to every varying phase of intricate reasoning or emotion; and the complex structure shows the growth of a language in habitual use for higher purposes than the mere daily wants of life. The vocabulary in use in some rural districts in England has been found to include less than three hundred words; and in provincial dialects, thus restricted, the refinements of grammatical expression disappear. Among such rustic communities speech plays a very subordinate part in the business of life. But upon the deliberations of the Indian council-house depended the whole action of the confederacy. Hence, while in all else the Iroquois remained an untutored savage, his language is a marvellously systematised and beautiful structure, well adapted to the requirements of intricate reasoning and persuasive subtlety.

Professor Whitney says, in reference to American languages generally, what may more especially be applied to the Huron-Iroquois: “There are infinite possibilities of expressiveness in such a structure; and it would only need that some native American Greek race should arise, to fill it full of thought and fancy, and put it to the uses of a noble literature, and it would be rightly admired as rich and flexible, perhaps beyond anything else that the world knew.”[144] Yet, on the other hand, the Iroquois dispense with the whole labials, never articulate with their lips, and throw entirely aside from their alphabetical series of phonetics six of those most constantly in use by us.

In this direction, then, lies an ethnological problem which cannot fail to awaken ever-increasing interest. To the native languages of the New World we must look for a true key to the solution of some of the most curious and difficult questions involved in the peopling of the continent. “There lies before us,” says Professor Whitney, “a vast and complicated problem in the American races; and it is their language that must do by far the greatest part of the work in solving it.”

Of the languages of the Huron-Iroquois, the Huron appears to be the oldest, if not the parent stock. When this aggressive race had spread, as conquerors, far to the south of the St. Lawrence, the mother nation appears to have held on to the cradleland of the race, where its representatives were found still in possession when the first European explorers entered the St. Lawrence. Colonists, of French or English origin, have been in more or less intimate intercourse with them ever since, yet the materials for any satisfactory study of the Huron language, or of a comparison between it and the various Iroquois dialects, are still scanty and very inadequate. The languages of the Five Nations that originally constituted the members of the Iroquois league, are, in the strictest sense of the term, dialects. In their council-house on the Grand river, the chiefs of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onandagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, speak each in their own language and need no interpreter. Nevertheless, the differences are considerable; and a Seneca would scarcely find the language of a Mohawk intelligible to him in ordinary conversation. But the separation of the Tuscaroras from the Iroquois on the Mohawk river had been of long duration, and their language differs much more widely from the others.

The Mohawk language was adopted at an early date for communicating with the Indians of the Six Nations. The New England Company, established in 1649, under favour of the Lord Protector, Cromwell, “for the propagation of the Gospel in New England,” was revived on the restoration of Charles II. under a royal charter; and with the eminent philosopher, Robert Boyle, as its first governor, vigorous steps were taken for the religious instruction of the Indians. The correspondence of Eliot, “the Apostle of the Indians,” with the first governor of the Company, is marked by their anxiety for the completion of the Massachusetts Bible, which, along with other books, he had translated for the benefit of the Indians of New England. The silver Communion Service, still preserved at the reserve on the Grand river, presented to the ancestors of the Mohawk nation by Queen Anne, is an interesting memorial of the early efforts for their Christianisation. It bears the inscription: “A. R., 1711. =The Gift of Her Majesty, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, and of her Plantations in North America, Queen: to her Indian Chappel of the Mohawks.=” The date has a special interest in evidence of the transforming influences already at work; for it was not till three years later that the Tuscaroras were received into the confederation, and the Iroquois became known by their later appellation as the Six Nation Indians. In accordance with the efforts indicated by the royal gift, repeated steps were taken for translating the Scriptures and the Prayer-Book into their language. In a letter of the Rev. Dr. Stuart, missionary to the Six Nations, dated 1771, he describes his introduction to Captain Brant at the Mohawk village of Canajoharie, and the aid received from him in revising the Indian Prayer-Book, and in translating the Gospel of St. Mark and the Acts of the Apostles into the Mohawk language. The breaking out of the revolutionary war arrested the printing of these translations. The manuscripts were brought to Canada in 1781, and placed in the hands of Colonel Clause, the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs. This gentleman subsequently carried them to England, where they were at length printed. A more recent edition of the Mohawk Prayer-Book, prepared under the direction of the Rev. Abraham Nelles, a missionary of the New England Company, with the aid of a native catechist, issued from the Canadian press in 1842. The Indian text is accompanied with its English equivalent on the opposite page, and this _Kaghyadouhsera ne Yoedereanayeadagwha_, or Book of Common Prayer, is still in use in the religious services of the Six Nation Indians at their settlement on the Grand river.

Some characteristics of the language, such as the absence of labials, constitute not only a distinctive difference from the old Huron speech, but afford proof of the latter being the older form. “It is a fact,” says Professor Max Müller, in referring to his intercourse with an intelligent native Mohawk, then a student at Oxford, “that the Mohawks never, either as infants or as grown-up people, articulate with their lips. They have no _p_, _b_, _m_, _f_, _v_, _w_—no labials of any kind.”[145] The statement, so far as the Mohawk infants are concerned, is open to further inquiry; but Dr. Oronhyatekha, the Mohawk referred to, who pursued his studies for a time in the University of Toronto, and to whom I have been largely indebted in this and other researches in Indian philology, not only rejects the six letters already named, but also _c_, _g_, _l_, _z_. The alphabet is thus reduced to seventeen letters. Professor Max Müller notes in passing, that the name “Mohawk” would seem to prove the use of the labial. But it is of foreign origin, though possibly derived from their own term: _oegwehokough_, “people.” The name employed by themselves is “Canienga.” The practice of speaking without ever closing the lips is an acquired habit of later origin than the forms of the parent tongue. A comparison of any of the Iroquois dialects with the Huron as still spoken by the Wyandots of Ontario, shows the _m_ in use by the latter in what is no doubt a surviving example of the oldest form of the Huron-Iroquois language. This Huron _m_ frequently becomes _w_ in the Iroquois dialects, _e.g._ _skatamendjaweh_, “one hundred,” becomes in Mohawk _unskadewennyaweh_; _rume_, “man,” Mohawk, _ronkwe_, etc. These and other examples of this interchangeable characteristic of Indian phonology, and the process of substitution in the absence of labials, are illustrated in the table of Huron-Iroquois numerals on the following page. The habit of invariably speaking with the lips open is the source of very curious modifications in the Iroquois vocabularies when compared with that of the Wyandots. The _m_ gives place to _w_, _nw_, _nh_, or _nhu_; also to _ku_ and _nkw_, and so frequently changes the whole character of the word by the modifications it gives rise to.

A comparison of the numerals of cognate languages and dialects is always instructive; and with the growing disposition of American philologists to turn to the Basques, as the only prehistoric race of Europe that has perpetuated the language of an Allophylian stock with possible analogies to the native languages of America, their numerals may be placed alongside of those of the Huron-Iroquois. The permanency of the names for numerals, and their freedom from displacement by synonyms,

COMPARATIVE TABLE OF NUMERALS.

────┬──────────┬──────────────────┬─────────────────────┬─────────────────
│ │ │ │
│HOCHELAGA.│ HURON. │ │
│(Cartier.)│ (Lorette.) │ WYANDOT. │ MOHAWK.
│ │ │ │
────┼──────────┼──────────────────┼─────────────────────┼─────────────────
│ │ │ │
1│segada} │ │ │
│secata} │skāt │scat │unska
2│tigneny} │ │ │
│tignem } │tendi │tendee │dekenih
3│asche │chin │shaight │ahsunh
4│honnacon │ndak │andaght │kayerih
5│ouiscon │wisch │weeish │wisk
6│indahir │wahia │waushau │yayak
7│ayaga │tsotaré │sootaie │jadah
8│adigue │ateré │autarai │sadekonh
9│madellon │entson │aintru │tyodonh
10│assem │asen │aughsagh │oyerih
11│ ... │asenskatiskaré │assan escate escarhet│unskayawenreh
12│ ... │asentenditiskaré │asanteni escarhet │dekenihyawenreh
13│ ... │āsenachinskaré │ ... │ahsunhyawenreh
14│ ... │asendakskaré │ ... │kayerihyawenreh
15│ ... │asenwischskaré │ ... │wiskyawenreh
16│ ... │asenwahiaskaré │ ... │yayakyawenreh
17│ ... │asentsotaréskaré │ ... │jadahyawenreh
18│ ... │asenateréskaré │ ... │sadekonhyawenreh
19│ ... │asenentsonskaré │ ... │tyodonhyawenreh
20│ ... │tendi eouasen │tendeitawaughsa │dewasunh
30│ ... │achink iouasen │ ... │ahsunhniwasunh
100│ ... │enniot iouasen │scutemaingarwe │unskadewennyaweh
1000│ ... │asenate ouendiaré │assen attenoignauoy │oyerih-
│ │ │ │ nadewennyaweh
│ │ │ │
────┴──────────┴──────────────────┴─────────────────────┴─────────────────