Section 2. The Red Man's Empire

Just where our American aborigines came from is still a debated question. The fact that archæologists are convinced that the ancient "cultures" (handicraft, pottery, etc.)

Asiatic origin theory

of northwest America and northeastern Asia were similar, is taken by many to prove that our American "Indian" originated in Asia and crossed Bering Strait to this continent.

No one who has a clear picture of our wholly different regions which produce blue grass like Kentucky or rice like the Carolinas, winter wheat like the Dakotas or oranges

like California, and who realizes that in our zones there developed such different people as New England Yankees, Texas cowboys, Colorado miners, Mississippi steamboatmen, and Virginia planters, could suppose these regions to have been occupied by "Indians" of one kind.

The first of our historians described these red men as "tall," "grave," "lordly," and "wise." This stereotyped description long clung to our histories, whereas the fact is that food, occupation, and environment made Indians differ just the same as those factors have made mankind differ the world over. In height the red men varied as we do, averaging about five feet eight inches; the plainsmen among them were tallest, just as statistics of both our Civil War and the recent World War prove our plainsmen to be the tallest and healthiest Amer

icans to-day.

Physical characteristics of

icans

The Indian was "grave" when white men the first Amer appeared-and no wonder! The latter claimed that the Indian had no right of ownership

of the land, that only Christians could "discover" and possess land. A French officer on the Allegheny River

once surprised the natives by telling them that they did not even own the dirt beneath their finger-nails! European

European theory of Indian land rights

statesmen said that Indians had the right of occupation only. Most people are grave when strangers appear preaching that kind of gospel. The pristine red man was, in fact, a jolly chatterbox. Even of our modern Indians Owen Wister has said: "Almost any Indian is full of talk when he chooses, and when he gets hold of a joke he never lets go." This seeming gravity of the Indian agreed well with what the first-comers styled his "lordly" demeanor.

It seemed to the foreigner that the red man was very adept in letting the women do the work. In point of fact, the ancient division of labor and the rewards of labor among these people was very just. The man of the family spent many months each year on the hunt,

Indian labor system

often reduced meanwhile nearly to starvation. Every skin or hide which he secured became, on his arrival at home, the property of his squaw; in turn, all that she raised in garden or field belonged to her lord. Any careful study of the Indian's method of working out the labor problem through those long centuries assures the student that it had some very good points. In all this life a-field and a-forest, in catching fish and killing game, in making utensils, tools, or weapons from wood, grass, bone, and skin, in the arts of cultivation, moulding, tanning, and weaving, the red men, of course, became pastmasters of a hundred "tricks of the trade" which made them seem to white men unusually "wise." Yet, as a matter of fact, their senses were no more acute than white men's became when given an equal training in the "lost arts" of the forest. On the other hand, many Indian boys have proven that they can do very well when given the advantages which our own boys have in school.

Lost arts of the Indian

The most advanced Indian tribes knew no written language beyond rude picture writing; the Algonquin tribes used symbols, while tribes in Central America employed a poor type of hieroglyphics. Allegory, however, made the spoken Indian

THE RED MAN'S EMPIRE. (Showing the location of the main tribes and the chief Indian trails inland from the

Atlantic Coast.)

They had no

language beautiful, as is illustrated by the gem quoted by one of the French missionaries. An Indian told him that his dead father "was hunting the souls of bear and beaver in the Soul Land, walking on the souls of his snowshoes on the soul of the snow." Very good and very bad qualities were found commingled in these first Americans; stoical indifference to suffering was a common virtue as was faithfulness to friends and bitter hatred

written
language

From the Iroquois Groups in the N. Y. State Museum

THE HUNTING SEASON. (A Seneca family grouped about their hunting lodge preparing deer skins and deer meat for their use.)

of enemies. "His pathetic passage across the page of history," says Professor Bassett, "has appealed to the idealist, but his cruelty and vindictiveness awakened horror in most of those who encountered him."

Families and
tribes

By the test of dialect and language scholars divide the half million Indians who originally occupied the United States into sixty families. In a rough way, the Mississippi River separated the race into two equal parts numerically, although 90 per cent. of the families lived west of it. If, in your mind's eye, you enlarge the state of New York so as to include a wide border around Lakes Erie

and Ontario, and add to that empire central Pennsylvania, you will glimpse the territory held by the most important Indian nation in the East. It was the Iroquois ConfederThe Iroquois acy, made up of the Mohawk, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Seneca tribes. These contained about ten thousand souls and they could raise two thousand fighting men. Because

of the strategic position of their homeland, because of their innate courage and intelligence, and because they earliest re

From the Iroquois Groups in the N. Y. State Museum

THE CORN HARVEST. (Gathering and braiding corn, pounding corn for meal, and baking corn bread, in the Genesee Valley, N. Y.)

The Algonquins

About the Iroquois, on every side, lay the thirty-five tribes of the Algonquin family. Extending (map p. 11) from the St. Lawrence far into the Mississippi Basin, they could not, and did not, have the compactness nor develop the centralized power and political organization known among their inveterate enemies, the Iroquois, who shared the eastern part of the United States with them. In our Southland the the great Muskhogean family was found, while beyond the Mississippi were the Siouan, Sho