Part 28

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.

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.