which had passed away entirely ages before the discovery of the New World by Columbus. The numerous and well authenticated antiquities found in various parts of our country clearly demonstrate that there was once a people civilized, and even highly cultiva ted, occupying the broad surface of our Continent; but the date of their occupancy is so remote that all traces of their history, progress, and decay, lie buried in the deepest obscurity. Nature, at the time that Columbus came, had asserted her original dominion over the earth; the forests were all in their full luxuriance, the growth of many centuries; and nought existed to point out who and what they were who formerly lived, and loved, and labored, and died, on the Continent of America. The Indian tribes could give no account of their predecessors; they knew nothing whatever on the subject; and so, probably, as respects these the question must ever remain doubtful, if not wholly inexplicable. As to the Indians themselves it will be sufficient, for the present, to note, that in some points there was soon discovered to be a very general resemblance among all the various tribes. They all partook of the same reddish hue of the skin, their hair was found to be black, lank, and straight, with little or no beard; the cheek-bones were high, the jaw-bone prominent, and the forehead narrow and sloping. Their figure, untrammeled in every movement, was lithe, agile, and often graceful, but they were inferior in muscular strength to the European. Their intellectual faculties were also more limited, and their moral sensibilities, from want of cultivation, less lively. They seemed to be characterized by an inflexibility of organization, which rendered them almost incapable of receiving foreign ideas, or amalgamating with more civilized nations-constituting them, in short, a people that might be broken, but could not be bent. This peculiar organization, too, together with the circumstances in which they were placed, moulded the character of their domestic and social condition. Columbus, in a letter sent to Ferdinand and Isabella, spoke enthusiastically of those natives whom he encountered on his first voyage. "I swear to your majesties," said he, "that there is not a better people in the world than these, more affectionate, affable, or mild. They love their neighbours as themselves: their language is the sweetest, the softest, and the most cheerful; for they always speak smiling; and although they go naked, let your majesties believe me, their customs are very becoming; and their king, who is served with great majesty, has such engaging manners, that it gives great pleasure to see him, and also to consider the great retentive faculty of that people, and their desire of knowledge, which incites them to ask the causes and the effects of things." A larger acquaintance with the Indians showed that their dwellings were of the simplest and rudest character. On some pleasant spot by the banks of a river, or near a sweet spring, they raised their groups of wigwams, constructed of the bark of trees, and easily taken down and removed to another spot. The abodes CH. II.] GOVERNMENT AND CUSTOMS OF THE INDIANS. of the chiefs were sometimes more spacious, and constructed with care, but of the same materials. Their villages were sometimes surrounded by defensive palisades. Skins, taken in the chase, served them for repose. Though principally dependent upon the hunting and fishing, its uncertain supply had led them to cultivate around their dwellings some patches of maize, but their exertions were desultory, and they were often exposed to the severity of famine. Every family did everything necessary within itself; and interchange of articles of commerce was hardly at all known among them. In strictness of speech, the Indians could not be said to have either government or laws. Questions of public interest relating to war, peace, change of hunting grounds, and the like, were discussed in a meeting of the whole tribe, where old and young participated, and the most plausible speaker, or the most energetic and daring warrior, generally carried the day. The chiefs among them were such by superior merit, or superior skill or cunning, not on any principle of appointment recognized among civilized communities; and they exercised their authority as best they might, without being able to compel obedience. The most powerful influences, however, under which the Indians were brought was that exercised by those who had the skill to work upon their ignorance and credulity to establish a claim to their obedience. Like all rude and barbarous tribes, they were very superstitious, and the priests, or “medicine men," were equally feared and observed by the Indians 15 generally. As a consequence of this, the tribes varied in their apparent forms of government. Some were the slaves of a spiritual despotism; some resembled a limited monarchy; others an oligarchy; and others yet a democracy, in which the principal warriors stood nearly on a level. In cases of dispute and dissension, each Indian held to the right of retali ation, and relied on himself almost always to effect his revenge for injuries received. Blood for blood was the rule, and the relations of the slain man were bound to obtain bloody revenge for his death. This principle gave rise, as a matter of course, to innumerable and bitter feuds, and wars of extermination where that was possible. War, indeed, rather than peace and the arts of peace, was the Indian's glory and delight; war, not conducted on the grand scale of more civilized, if not more Christian-like, people, but war where individual skill, endurance, gallantry and cruelty were prime requisites. For such a purpose as revenge the Indian was capable of making vast sacrifices, and displayed a patience and perseverance truly heroic; but when the excitement was over, he sank back into a listless, unoccupied, well nigh useless savage. The intervals of his more exciting pursuits the Indian filled up in the decoration of his person with all the refinements of paint and feathers, with the manufacture of his arms-the club, and the bow and arrows-and of canoes of bark, so light, that they could easily be carried on the shoulder from stream to stream. His amusements were the war-dance and song, and ath letic games, the narration of his exploits, and the listening to the oratory of the chiefs. But, during long periods of his existence, he remained in a state of torpor, gazing listlessly upon the trees of the forests, and the clouds that sailed far above his head; and this vacancy imprinted an habitual gravity and even melancholy upon his aspect and general deportment. As in all uncivilized communities, the main labor and drudgery fell upon the females; planting, tending and gathering the crops; making mats and baskets; carrying burdens; in fact, everything of the kind; so that their condition was little better than that of slaves. For marriage was principally a matter of bargain and sale, the husband giving presents to the father of his bride; and sooner or later, as caprice or any other excuse moved him, degrading her to the place of a mere servant in his house. In general, they had but few children; and were subjected to many and severe attacks of sickness famine and pestilence at times swept away whole tribes. From their migratory habits, their continual wars and battles, their slowness of increase, and their liability to famine and fatal diseases, Mr. Hildreth is inclined to conclude that at no time since the discovery of America did the total Indian population east of the Rocky Mountains exceed, if it equalled, three hundred thousand. The dialects of the various tribes in North America are generally reduced to five heads or subdivisions. "The most widely diffused of these five languages, called the Algonquin, after one of the tribes of Canada, from whom the French missionaries first learned it, is exceedingly harsh and guttural, with few vowels, and words often of intolerable length, occasioned by complicated grammatical forms-a whole sentence, by means of suffixes and affixes, being often expressed in a single word. This character, indeed, is common, in a greater or less degree, to all the American languages, serving to distinguish them, in a remarkable manner from the dialects of the Old World. Tribes of Algonquin speech extended from Hudson's Bay south-east beyond the Chesapeake, and south-west to the Mississippi and Ohio. They inclosed, however, several formidable confederacies, the Hurons, the Iroquois, the Eries, and others settled around Lakes Erie and Ontario, and occupying all the upper waters of the western tributaries of the Chesapeake, who spoke a different language, less guttural and far more sonorous, called the Wyandot, after a tribe inhabiting the north shore of Lake Erie. The Cherokee is peculiar to a confederacy of that name, occupants for centuries of the southern valleys of the great Allegany Chain, from whence they have been but very lately expelled. The common name of Mobilian includes the kindred dialects of the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks or Muscogees, the Appalachees, and Yamassees, ancient inhabitants of the valley of the Lower Mississippi, and thence, by the southern foot of the Alleganies, to the Savannah and beyond it. Compared with the northern languages, the Cherokee and Mobilian are soft and musical, abounding with vow CH. II.] INDIAN LANGUAGES AND TRIBES. els, thus indicating the long continued influence of a southern climate. The number of syllables in the Cherokee is very limited-a circumstance of which an uninstructed but ingenious member of that tribe recently availed himself to invent a syllabic alphabet, by means of which the Cherokee is written and read with great facility. Of the ancient state of the wandering tribes of the prairies west of the Mississippi little is known; but the Dacotah or Sioux, still spoken in a great variety of dialects, has been probably for centuries the prevailing language of that region. The Catawbas, who have left their name to a river of Carolina, and who once occupied a wide adjacent territory; the Uchees, on the Savannah, subjects of the Creeks; the Natchez, a small confederacy on the Lower Mississippi, in the midst of the Choctaws, appear to have spoken peculiar languages; and no doubt, there were other similar cases. Of the dialects west of the Rocky Mountains hardly anything is known. Mr. Schoolcraft, in a very interesting paper read before the "New York Historical Society," November, 1846, attributes to the Red Race who inhabited the Continent of America, in the equinoctial latitudes, a very great antiquity, so great indeed, as to be inclined to think that they might have reached the Continent within five hundred years of the original dispersion. That they were of the Shemitic stock, too, can hardly be questioned. Civilization, gov 17 ernment, and arts, began to develop themselves in the tropical regions of Mexico and Central America. Mexico, like Rome of old, seems to have been invaded by one tribe of barbarians after another, who in the end, as in the case of Rome, were meliorated and modified by that civilization which they came to destroy. Such was probably the origin of the Toltecs, and the Aztecs, whom Cortez subdued. Turning our view from this ancient centre of power, to the latitudes of the American Republic, we find there, at the opening of the sixteenth century, various tribes, of divers languages, existing in the mere hunter state, or at most, with some habits of horticulture superadded. They had neither cattle nor arts. They were bowmen and spearmen-roving and predatory, with very little, if anything, in their traditions, to link them to these prior central families of man, but with nearly everything in their physical and intellectual type, to favor such a generic affiliation. They erected groups of mounds, to sacrifice to the sun, moon, and stars. They were, originally, fireworshippers. They spoke ONE general class of transpositive languages. They had instruments of copper, as well as of silex, and porphyries. They made cooking-vessels of tempered clay. They cultivated the most important of all the ancient Mexican grains, the zea mays. They raised the tobacco plant, and used the Aztec drum in religious ceremonies and war-dances. They believed in the oriental doctrines of trans Hildreth's "History of the United States," vol. formation, and the power of necro i., p. 52. VOL. I.---5 mancy, and they were largely in sub jection to an influential and powerful rope in the sixteenth and seventeenth order of priesthood. There can be little doubt that this race dwelt on the Continent of America many centuries before the Christian era, and also that it is anterior in age to the various groups who inhabit the Polynesian Islands. Probably they derived their character and mental peculiarities from the early tribes of Western Asia, which was originally peopled, to a great extent, by the descendants of Shem. In this connection, Mr. Schoolcraft adduces the following as the fulfillment of a very ancient prophecy. "Assuming the Indian tribes to be of Shemitic origin, which is generally conceded, they were met on this Continent, in 1492, by the Japhetic race, after the two stocks had passed around the globe by directly different routes. Within a few years subsequent to this event, as is well attested, the humane influence of an eminent Spanish ecclesiastic, led to the calling over from the coast of Africa, of the Hamitic branch. As a mere historical question, and without mingling it in the slightest degree with any other, the result of three centuries of occupancy has been a series of movements in all the colonial stocks, south and north, by which Japhet has been immeasurably enlarged on the Continent, while the called and not voluntary sons of Ham, have endured a servitude, in the wide-stretching valleys of the tents of Shem.Gen. ix., 27."* centuries found the American Continent peopled by tribes without cultivation, refinement, literature, fixed habitations, or anything which could give them consideration and respect in the eyes of Europeans. They looked upon the Indians as mere savages, having no rightful claim to the country of which they were in possession. They inflicted upon the unhappy natives injuries of various descriptions, as caprice, cruelty, lust, or rapine dictated, and where a different course was pursued it was not so much because the Indians had a right to just treatment, but simply because it pleased here and there liberalminded persons to deal justly and kindly by them. Every European nation deemed that it had acquired a lawful and just claim to the possession of that part of the Continent which any one of its subjects might have discovered or visited, without any reference to the prior occupation and claims of the Indian tribes. In later times, too, the Supreme Court of the United States, (1810)-Chief Justice Marshall delivering the opinion of the Courthas held, that the Indian title to the soil is not of such a character or validity as to interfere with the possession in fee, and disposal, of the land as the State may see fit.* Mr. Justice Story, in speaking of this matter, justly remarks:-"As to countries in the possession of native inhabitants and tribes at the time of the disThey who came from civilized Eu- covery, it seems difficult to perceive what ground of right any discovery * Proceedings of the New York Historical Society, 1846, pp. 33-38. See, also, the "North American Review," No. L., January, 1826. *See Cranch's Reports, vol. vi., p. 142. |