A School History of the United States Part 7

%57%. When Europeans first set foot on our sh.o.r.es, they found the country already inhabited, and, adopting the name given to the men of the New World by Columbus, they called these people "Indians."

They were not "Indians," or natives of Asia, but a race by themselves, which ages before the time of Columbus was spread over all North and South America.

Like their descendants in the West to-day, they had red or copper-colored skins, their eyes and long straight hair were jet black, their faces beardless, and their cheek bones high.

%58. The Villages.%---East of the Rocky Mountains the Indians lived in villages, often covering several acres in area, and surrounded by stockades of two and even three rows of posts. The stockade was pierced with loopholes, and provided with platforms on which were piles of stones for the defenders to hurl on the heads of their enemies.

Sometimes the structures which formed the village were wigwams--rude structures made by driving poles into the ground in a circle, drawing their tops near together, and then covering them with bark or skins.

Sometimes the dwellings had rudely framed sides and roofs covered with layers of elm bark. Usually these structures were fifteen or twenty feet wide by 100 feet long. At each end was a door. Along each side were ten or twelve stalls, in each of which lived a family, so that one house held twenty or more families. Down the middle at regular intervals were fire pits where the food was cooked, the smoke escaping through holes in the roof.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, Vol. I., pp. 17, 18.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Buffalo-skin lodge]

%59. Clans and Tribes.%--All the families living in such a house traced descent from a common female ancestor, and formed a clan. Each clan had its own name,--usually that of some animal, as the Wolf, the Bear, or the Turtle,--its own sachem or civil magistrate, and its own war chiefs, and owned all the food and all the property, except weapons and ornaments, in common. A number of such clans made a tribe, which had one language and was governed by a council of the clan sachems.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Seneca long house]

%60. The Three Indian Races.%--With slight exceptions, the tribes living east of the Mississippi are divided, by those who have studied their languages, into three great groups:

1. The Muskhogees, who lived south of the Tennessee River and comprised the Creek, the Seminole, the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw tribes.

2. The Iroquoian group, which occupied the country from the Delaware and the Hudson to and beyond the St. Lawrence and Lakes Ontario and Erie, besides isolated tracts in North Carolina and Tennessee. The chief tribes were the Iroquois proper,--forming a confederacy in central New York known as the Five Nations (Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks),--the Hurons, the Eries, the Cherokees, and the Tuscaroras.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Moccasin]

3. The Algonquian group, which occupied the rest of what is now the United States east of the Mississippi, besides the larger part of Canada. In this group were the Mohegans, Pequots, and Narragansetts of New England; the Delawares; the Powhatans of Virginia; the Shawnees of the Ohio valley, and many others living around the Great Lakes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Flint Hatchet]

%61. Weapons and Implements and Clothing.%--All of these tribes had made some progress towards civilization. They used pottery and ornamental pipes of clay. They raised beans and squashes, pumpkins, tobacco, and maize, or Indian corn, which they ground to meal by rubbing between two stones. For hunting they had bows, arrows with stone heads, hatchets of flint, and spears. In summer they went almost naked. In winter they wore clothing made from the skins of fur-bearing animals and the hides of buffalo and deer. For navigating streams and rivers, lakes and bays, they constructed canoes of birch bark sewed together with thongs of deerskin and smeared at the joints with spruce-tree gum.

%62. Traits of Character.%--Living an outdoor life, and depending for daily food not so much on the maize they raised as on the fish they caught and the animals they killed, the Indians were most expert woodsmen. They were swift of foot, quick-witted, keen-sighted, and most patient of hunger, fatigue, and cold. White men were amazed at the rapidity with which the Indian followed the most obscure trail over the most difficult ground, at the perfection with which he imitated the bark of the wolf, the hoot of the owl, the call of the moose, and at the catlike tread with which he walked over beds of autumn leaves the side of the grazing deer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Ornamental pipe]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Quiver, with bows and arrows]

Courage and fort.i.tude he possessed in the highest degree. Yet with his bravery were a.s.sociated all the vices, all the dark and crooked ways, which are the resort of the cowardly and the weak. He was treacherous, revengeful, and cruel beyond description. Much as he loved war (and war was his chief occupation), the fair and open fight had no charm for him.

To his mind it was madness to take the scalp of an enemy at the risk of his own, when he might waylay him in an ambush or shoot him with an arrow from behind a tree. He was never so happy as when, at the dead of night, he roused his sleeping victims with an unearthly yell and ma.s.sacred them by the light of their burning home.

%63. The French and the Indians.%--The ways in which French and English colonists acted towards the Indian are highly characteristic, and account for much in our history.

From the day when Champlain, in 1609, joined his Huron-Algonquin neighbors and went with them on the warpath against the Iroquois, the French held to the policy of making friends with the Indians. No pains were spared to win them to the cause of France. They were flattered, petted, treated with ceremonial respect, and became the companions, as the women often became the wives, of the Frenchmen. Much was expected of this mingling of races. It was supposed that the Indian would be won over to civilization and Christianity. But the Frenchmen were won over to the Indians, and adopted Indian ways of life. They lived in wigwams, wore Indian dress, decorated their long hair with eagle feathers, and made their faces hideous with vermilion, ocher, and soot.

%64. Coureurs de Bois.%--There soon grew up in this way a cla.s.s of half-civilized vagrants, who ranged the woods in true Indian style, and gained a living by guiding the canoes of fur traders along the rivers and lakes of the interior. Stimulated by the profits of the fur trade, these men pushed their traffic to the most distant tribes, spreading French guns, French hatchets, beads, cloth, tobacco and brandy, and French influence over the whole Northwest. Where the trader and the _coureur de bois_ went, the priest and the soldier followed, and soon mission houses and forts were established at all the chief pa.s.ses and places suited to control the Indian trade.

%65. The English and the Indians.%--How, meantime, did the English act toward the Indians? In the first place, nothing led them to form close relationship with the tribes. The fur trade--the source of Canadian prosperity--and the zeal of priests eager for the conversion of the heathen, which sent the traders, the _coureurs de bois_, and the priests from tribe to tribe and from the Atlantic halfway to the Pacific, did not appeal to the English colonists. Farming and commerce were the sources of their wealth. Their priests and missionaries were content to labor with the Indians near at hand.

In the second place, the policy of the French towards the Indians, while founded on trade, was directed by one central government. The policy of the English was directed by each colony, and was of as many kinds as there were colonies. No English frontier exhibited such a mingling of white men and red as was common wherever the French went. Among the English there were fur traders, but no _coureurs de bois_. Scorn on the one side and hatred on the other generally marked the intercourse between the English and the Indians. One bright exception must indeed be made. Penn was a broad-minded lover of his kind, a man of most enlightened views on government and human rights; and in the colony planted by him there was made a serious effort to treat the Indian as an equal. But the day came when men not of his faith dealt with the Indians in true English fashion.

Remembering this difference of treatment, we shall the better understand how it happened that the French could sprinkle the West with little posts far from Quebec and surrounded by the fiercest of tribes, while the English could only with difficulty defend their frontier.[1]

[Footnote 1: A fine account of the Indians, and the French and English ways of treating them, is given in Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, Vol. I., pp. 16-25, 41-45, 46-56, 64-80.]

%66. Early Indian Wars.%--Again and again this frontier was attacked.

In 1636 the Pequots, who dwelt along the Thames River in Connecticut, made war on the settlers in the Connecticut River valley towns. Men were waylaid and scalped, or taken prisoners and burned at the stake.

Determined to put an end to this, ninety men from the Connecticut towns, with twenty from Ma.s.sachusetts and some Mohegan Indians, in 1637 marched against the marauders. They found the Pequots within a circular stockade near the present town of Stonington, where of 400 warriors all save five were killed.

%67. King Philip's War.%--During nearly forty years not a tribe in all New England dared rise against the white men. But in 1675 trouble began again. The settlers were steadily crowding the Indians off their lands. No lands were taken without payment, yet the sales were far from being voluntary. A new generation of Indians, too, had grown up, and, heedless of the lesson taught their fathers, the Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Wampanoags, led by King Philip and Canonchet, rose upon the English. A dreadful war followed. When it ended, in 1678, the three tribes were annihilated. Hardly any Indians save the friendly Mohawks were left in New England. But of ninety English towns, forty had been the scene of fire and slaughter, and twelve had been destroyed utterly.

%68. The Iroquois.%--Elsewhere on the frontier a happier relation existed with the Indians. The Iroquois of central New York were the fiercest and most warlike Indians of the Atlantic coast. But the fight with Champlain, in 1609, by turning them into implacable enemies of the French, had rendered them all the more tolerant of the Dutch and the English, while their complete conquest and subjugation of the Delawares, or Lenni Lenape, prepared the way for the easy settlement of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

%69. Penn and the Lenni Lenape.%--These Indians were Algonquian, and lived along the Delaware River and its tributaries. But early in the seventeenth century they had been reduced to va.s.salage by the Five Nations, had been forbidden to carry arms, and had been forced to take the name of Women.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, Vol. I., pp. 30-32, 80-82.]

When the Dutch and Swedes began their settlements on the South River, and when Penn, in 1683, made a treaty with the Delawares, the settlers had to deal with peaceful Indians. No horrid wars mark the early history of Pennsylvania.

%70. The Powhatans in Virginia.%--Much the same may be said of the Virginia tribes. They were far from friendly, and had they been as fierce and warlike as the northern tribes, neither the skill of John Smith, nor the marriage of Pocahontas (the daughter of Powhatan) with John Rolfe, nor fear of the English muskets, would have saved Jamestown.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Powhatan Indians at work[1]]

[Footnote 1: From a model.]

On the other hand, the destruction of the tribes in New England and the feud between the French and the Iroquois saved New England. For the time had now come for the opening of the long struggle between the French and the English for the ownership of the continent.

SUMMARY

1. The inhabitants of the New World at the time of its discovery, by mistake called Indians, were barbarians, lived in rude, frail houses, and used weapons and implements inferior to those of the whites.

2. The Indian tribes of eastern North America are mostly divided into three great groups: Muskhogean, Iroquoian, and Algonquian.

3. In general, the French made the Indians their friends, while the English drove them westward and treated them as an inferior race.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE BRITISH COLONIES AND EUROPEAN POSSESSIONS 1733]

CHAPTER VIII

THE STRUGGLE FOR NEW FRANCE AND LOUISIANA

%71. Louisiana, or the Mississippi Basin.%--The landing of La Salle on the coast of Texas, and the building of Fort St. Louis of Texas, gave the French a claim to the coast as far southward as a point halfway between the fort and the nearest Spanish settlement, in Mexico. At that point was the Rio Grande, a good natural boundary. On the French maps, therefore, Louisiana extended from the Rocky Mountains and the Rio Grande on the west, to the Alleghany Mountains on the east, and from the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to New France on the north. This confined the English colonies to a narrow strip between the Alleghany Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. As the colonies were growing in population, and as the charters of Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and Carolina gave them great stretches of territory in the Mississippi valley, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, a bitter contest for possession of the country should take place between the French and the English in America.

The contest began in 1689, and ended in 1763, and may easily be divided into two periods: 1. That from 1689 to 1748, when the struggle was for Acadia and New France. 2. That from 1754 to 1763, when the struggle was not only for New France, but for Louisiana also.