CHAPTER I.
§ 1. THE ALGONKIN STOCK.
Scheme of its Dialects--Probable Primitive Location
§ 2. THE IROQUIS STOCK.
The Susquehannocks--The Hurons--The Cherokees
§ 1. _The Algonkin Stock_.
About the period 1500-1600, those related tribes whom we now know by the name of Algonkins were at the height of their prosperity. They occupied the Atlantic coast from the Savannah river on the south to the strait of Belle Isle on the north. The whole of Newfoundland was in their possession; in Labrador they were neighbors to the Eskimos; their northernmost branch, the Crees, dwelt along the southern shores of Hudson Bay, and followed the streams which flow into it from the west, until they met the Chipeways, closely akin to themselves, who roamed over the water shed of Lake Superior. The Blackfeet carried a remote dialect of their tongue quite to the Rocky Mountains; while the fertile prairies of Illinois and Indiana were the homes of the Miamis. The area of Ohio and Kentucky was very thinly peopled by a few of their roving bands; but east of the Alleghanies, in the valleys of the Delaware, the Potomac and the Hudson, over the barren hills of New England and Nova Scotia, and throughout the swamps and forests of Virginia and the Carolinas, their osier cabins and palisadoed strongholds, their maize fields and workshops of stone implements, were numerously located.
It is needless for my purpose to enumerate the many small tribes which made up this great group. The more prominent were the Micmacs of Nova Scotia, the Abnakis of Maine, the Pequots and Narragansets, in New England, the Mohegans of the Hudson, the Lenape on the Delaware, the Nanticokes around Chesapeake Bay, the Pascataway on the Potomac, and the Powhatans and Shawnees further south; while between the Great Lakes and the Ohio river were the Ottawas, the Illinois, the Pottawatomies, the Kikapoos, Piankishaws, etc.
The dialects of all these were related, and evidently at some distant day had been derived from the same primitive tongue. Which of them had preserved the ancient forms most closely, it may be premature to decide positively, but the tendency of modern studies has been to assign that place to the Cree--the northernmost of all.
We cannot erect a genealogical tree of these dialects. It is not probable that they branched off, one after another, from a common stock. The ancient tribes each took their several ways from a common centre, and formed nuclei for subsequent development. We may, however, group them in such a manner as roughly to indicate their relationship. This I do on the following page:--
Cree, Old Algonkin, Montagnais. Chipeway, Ottawa, Pottawattomie, Miami, Peoria, Pea, Piankishaw, Kaskaskia, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kikapoo. Sheshatapoosh, Secoffee, Micmac, Melisceet, Etchemin, Abnaki. Mohegan, Massachusetts, Shawnee, Minsi, } Unami, } Unalachtigo,} Nanticoke, Powhatan, Pampticoke. Blackfoot, Gros Ventre, Sheyenne.
Granting, as we must, some common geographical centre for these many dialects, the question where this was located becomes an interesting one.
More than one attempt to answer it has been made. Mr. Lewis H. Morgan thought there was evidence to show that the valley of the Columbia river, Oregon, "was the initial point from which the Algonkin stock emigrated to the great lake region and thence to the Atlantic coast."[1] This is in direct conflict with the evidence of language, as the Blackfoot or Satsika is the most corrupt and altered of the Algonkin dialects. Basing his argument on this evidence, Mr. Horatio Hale reaches a conclusion precisely the reverse of that of Morgan. "The course of migration of the Indian tribes," writes Mr. Hale, "has been from the Atlantic coast westward and southward. The traditions of the Algonkins seem to point to Hudson's Bay and the coast of Labrador."[2] This latter view is certainly that which accords best with the testimony of language and of history.
We know that both Chipeways and Crees have been steadily pressing westward since their country was first explored, driving before them the Blackfeet and Dakotas.[3]
The Cree language is built up on a few simple, unchangeable radicals and elementary words, denoting being, relation, energy, etc.; it has extreme regularity of construction, a single negative, is almost wholly verbal and markedly incorporative, has its grammatical elements better defined than its neighbors, and a more consistent phonetic system.[4] For these and similar reasons we are justified in considering it the nearest representative we possess of the pristine Algonkin tongue, and unless strong grounds to the contrary are advanced, it is proper to assume that the purest dialect is found nearest the primeval home of the stock.
§2. _The Iroquois Stock_.
Surrounded on all sides by the Algonkins were the _Iroquois_, once called the Five or Six Nations. When first discovered they were on the St. Lawrence, near Montreal, and in the Lake Region of Central New York. Various other, tribes, not in their confederacy, and generally at war with them, spoke dialects of the same language. Such were the Hurons or Wyandots, between the Georgian Bay and Lake Erie, the Neutral Nation on the Niagara river, the Eries on the southern shore of the lake of that name, the Nottoways in Virginia, and the Tuscaroras in North Carolina. The Cherokees, found by the whites in East Tennessee, but whose national legend, carefully preserved for generations, located them originally on the head waters of the Ohio, were a remote offshoot of this same stem.
_The Susquehannocks_.
The valley of the Susquehanna river was occupied by a tribe of Iroquois lineage and language, known as the _Susquehannocks, Conestogas_ and _Andastes_. The last name is Iroquois, from _andasta_, a cabin pole. By some, "Susquehannock" has also been explained as an Iroquois word, but its form is certainly Algonkin. The terminal _k_ is the place-sign, _hanna_ denotes a flowing stream, while the adjectival prefix has been identified by Heckewelder with _schachage_, straight, from the direct course of the river near its mouth, and by Mr. Guss with _woski_, new, which, he thinks, referred to fresh or spring water.
Of these the former will appear the preferable, if we allow for the softening of the gutturals, which was a phonetic trait of the Unami dialect of the Lenape.
The Susquehannocks were always at deadly feud with the Iroquois, and between wars, the smallpox and the whites, they were finally exterminated. The particulars of their short and sad history have been presented with his characteristic thoroughness by Dr. John G. Shea,[5] and later by Prof. N. L. Guss.[6] They were usually called by the Delawares _Mengwe_, which was the term they applied to all the Iroquois-speaking tribes.[7] The English corrupted it to Minqua and Mingo, and as the eastern trail of the Susquehannocks lay up the Conestoga Creek, and down the Christina, both those streams were called "Mingo Creek" by the early settlers.
It is important for the ethnology of Pennsylvania, to understand that at the time of the first settlement the whole of the Susquehanna Valley, from the Chesapeake to the New York lakes, was owned and controlled by Iroquois-speaking tribes. A different and erroneous opinion was expressed by Heckewelder, and has been generally received. He speaks of the Lenape Minsi as occupying the head waters of the Susquehanna. This was not so in the historic period.
The claims of the Susquehannocks extended down the Chesapeake Bay on the east shore, as far as the Choptank River, and on the west shore as far as the Patuxent. In 1654 they ceded to the government of Maryland their southern territory to these boundaries.[8] The first English explorers met them on the Potomac, about the Falls, and the Pascatoways were deserting their villages and fleeing before them, when, in 1634, Calvert founded his colony at St. Mary's.
Their subjection to the Five Nations took place about 1680, and it was through the rights obtained by this conquest that, at the treaty of Lancaster, 1744, Canassatego, the Onondaga speaker for the Nation, claimed pay from the government of Maryland for the lands on the Potomac, or, as that river was called in his tongue, the _Cohongorontas_.
_The Hurons._
The Hurons, Wyandots, or Wendats, were another Iroquois people, who seem, at some remote epoch, to have come into contact with the Lenape. The latter called them _Delamattenos_[9] and claimed to have driven them out of a portion of their possessions. A Chipeway tradition also states that the Hurons were driven north from the lake shores by Algonkin tribes.[10] We know, from the early accounts of the Jesuits, that there was commercial intercourse between them and the tribes south of the lakes, the materials of trade being principally fish and corn.[11] The Jesuit _Relations_ of 1648 contain quite a full account of a Huron convert who, in that year, visited the Lenape on the Delaware River, and had an interview with the Swedish Governor, whom he took to task for neglecting the morals of his men.
_The Cherokees._
The Cherokees were called by the Delawares _Kittuwa_ (_Kuttoowauw_, in the spelling of the native Aupaumut). This word I suppose to be derived from the prefix, _kit_, great, and the root _tawa_ (Cree, _yette_, _tawa_), to open, whence tawatawik, an open, _i.e._, uninhabited place, a wilderness (Zeisberger).
The designation is geographical. According to the tradition of the Cherokees, they once lived (probably about the fourteenth century) in the Ohio Valley, and claimed to have been the constructors of the Grave Creek and other earthworks there.[12] Some support is given to this claim by the recent linguistic investigations of Mr. Horatio Hale,[13] and the archaeological researches of Prof. Cyrus Thomas.[14] They were driven southward by their warlike neighbors, locating their council fire first near Monticello, Va., and the main body reaching East Tennessee about the close of the fifteenth century. As late as 1730 some of them continued to live east of the Alleghanies, while, on the other hand, it is evident, from the proper names preserved by the chroniclers of De Soto's expedition (1542), that at that period others held the mountains of Northern Georgia. To the Delawares they remained _kit-tawa-wi_, inhabitants of the great wilderness of Southern Ohio and Kentucky.
Delaware traditions distinctly recalled the period when portions of the Cherokees were on the Ohio, and recounted long wars with them.[15] When the Lenape assumed the office of peacemaker, this feud ceased, and was not renewed until the general turmoil of the French-Indian wars, 1750-60. After this closed, in 1768, the Cherokees sought and effected a renewal of their peaceful relations with the Delawares, and in 1779 they even sent a deputation of "condolence" to their "grandfather," the Lenape, on the death of the head chief, White Eyes.[16]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Lewis H. Morgan, _Indian Migrations_, in Beach's _Indian Miscellany_, p. 218.
[2] H. Hale, _Indian Migrations as Evidenced by Language_, p. 24. (Chicago, 1883.)
[3] See the R. P. A. Lacombe _Dictionnaire de la Langue des Cris. Introd._, p. xi. (Montreal, 1874.)
[4] See Joseph Howse, _A grammar of the Cree Language_, p. 13, et al. (London, 1842)
[5] In a note to Mr. Gowan's edition of George Alsop's _Province of Maryland_, pp. 117-121 (New York, 1869); also, in 1858, in an article "On the Identity of the Adastas, Minquas, Susquehannocks, and Conestogas," in the _Amer. Hist. Mag._, Vol. II, p. 294.
[6] _Early Indian History on the Susquehanna_, p. 31. (Harrisburg, 1883).
[7] _Megnwe_ is the Onondaga _yenkwe_, males, or men, _viri_, and was borrowed from that dialect by the Delawares, as a general term. Bishop Ettwein states that the Iroquois called the Delawares, Mohegans, and all the New England Indians _Agozhagduta_.
[8] Bozman, _History of Maryland_, Vol. I, p. 167.
[9] Heckewelder, _History of the Indian Nations_, p. 80.
[10] Peter Jones, _History of the Ojibway Nation_, p. 32.
[11] _Relation da Jesuites_, 1637, p. 154. The Hurons, at that time, are stated to have had reliable traditions running back more than two hundred years. _Relation de 1639_, p. 50.
[12] "The Cherokees had an oration, in which was contained the history of their migrations, which was lengthy." This tradition related "that they came from the upper part of the Ohio, where they erected the mounds on Grave Creek, and that they removed hither [to East Tennessee] from the country where Monticello is situated." This memory of their migrations was preserved and handed down by official orators, who repeated it annually, in public, at the national festival of the green corn dance. J. Haywood, _Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee_, pp. 224-237. (Nashville, 1823.) Haywood adds: "It is now nearly forgotten." I have made vain attempts to recover some fragments of it from the present residents of the Cherokee Nation.
[13] _Indian Migrations as Evidenced by Language_, p. 22.
[14] Prof. Thomas has shown beyond reasonable doubt that the Cherokees were mound builders within the historic period.
[15] Loskiel, _Geschichte der Mission_, etc., p. 160; Heckewelder, _History of the Indian Nations_, p. 54. Bishop Ettwein states that the last Cherokees were driven from the upper Ohio river about 1700-10. His essay on the "Traditions and Languages of the Indian Nations," written for General Washington, in 1788, was first published in the _Bulletin of the Pa. Hist. Soc._, 1844.
[16] Heckewelder, _Indian Nations_, pp. 88, 327. Mr. H. Hale, in _The Iroquois Book of Rites_, has fully explained the meaning and importance of the custom of "condolence." The Stockbridge Indian, Aupaumut, in his Journal, writes of the Delawares, that when they lose a relative, "according to ancient custom, long as they are not comforted, they are not to speak in public, and this ceremonie of comforting each other is highly esteemed among these nations." _Narrative of Hendrick Aupaumut_, in _Mems. Hist. Soc. Pa._, Vol. II, p. 99.