The Myths of the North American Indians Part 2

Mounds in Animal Form

Many of these structures represent animal forms, probably the totem or eponymous ancestor of the tribe which reared them. The chief centre for these singular erections seems to have been Wisconsin, where they are very numerous. The eagle, wolf, bear, turtle, and fox are represented, and even the human form has been {18} attempted. There are birds with outstretched wings, measuring more than thirty-two yards from tip to tip, and great mammalian forms sixty-five yards long.

Reptilian forms are also numerous. These chiefly represent huge lizards. At least one mound in the form of a spider, whose body and legs cover an acre of ground, exists in Minnesota.

According to the cla.s.sification of Squier, these structures were employed for burial, sacrifice, and observation, and as temple-sites.

Other structures often found in connexion with them are obviously enclosures, and were probably used for defence. The conical mounds are usually built of earth and stones, and are for the most part places of sepulture. The flat-topped structures were probably employed as sites for buildings, such as temples, council-houses, and chiefs' dwellings.

Burials were rarely made in the wall-like enclosures or effigy mounds.

Many of the enclosures are of true geometrical figure, circular, square, or octagonal, and with few exceptions these are found in Ohio and the adjoining portions of Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia.

They enclose an expanse varying from one to a hundred acres.

What the Mounds Contain

In the sepulchral mounds a large number of objects have been found which throw some light on the habits of the folk who built them.

Copper plates with stamped designs are frequent, and these are difficult to account for. In one mound were found no less than six hundred stone hatchet-blades, averaging seven inches long by four wide.

Under another were exhumed two hundred calcined tobacco-pipes, and copper ornaments with a thin plating of silver; while from others were taken fragments of pottery, obsidian implements, ivory {19} and bone needles, and scroll-work cut out of very thin plates of mica. In several it was observed that cremation had been practised, but in others the bodies were found extended horizontally or else doubled up.

In some instances the ashes of the dead had been placed carefully in skulls, perhaps those of the individuals whose bodies had been given to the flames. Implements, too, are numerous, and axes, awls, and other tools of copper have frequently been discovered.

The Tomb of the Black Tortoise

A more detailed description of one of these groups of sepulchral mounds may furnish the reader with a clearer idea of the structures as a whole. The group in question was discovered in Minnesota, on the northern bank of St. Peter's River, about sixty miles from its junction with the Mississippi. It includes twenty-six mounds, placed at regular distances from each other, and forming together a large rectangle. The central mound represents a turtle forty feet long by twenty-seven feet wide and twelve feet high. It is almost entirely constructed of yellow clay, which is not found in the district, and therefore must have been brought from a distance. Two mounds of red earth of triangular form flank it north and south, and each of these is twenty-seven feet long by about six feet wide at one end, the opposite end tapering off until it scarcely rises above the level of the soil. At each corner rises a circular mound twelve feet high by twenty-five feet in diameter. East and west of the structure stand two elongated mounds sixty feet long, with a diameter of twelve feet. Two smaller mounds on the right and left of the turtle-shaped mound are each twelve feet long by four feet high, and consist of white sand mixed with numerous fragments of mica, covered with {20} a layer of clay and a second one of vegetable mould.

Lastly, thirteen smaller mounds fill in the intervals in the group.

Conant gives an explanation of the whole group as follows: "The princ.i.p.al tomb would be the last home of a great chief, the Black Tortoise. The four mounds which form the corners of the quadrangle were also erected as a sign of the mourning of the tribe. The secondary mounds are the tombs of other chiefs, and the little mounds erected in the north and south corresponded with the number of bodies which had been deposited in them. The two pointed mounds indicate that the Black Tortoise was the last of his race, and the two large mounds the importance of that race and the dignity which had belonged to it.

Lastly, the two mounds to the right and left of the royal tomb mark the burial-places of the prophets or soothsayers, who even to our own day play a great part among the Indian tribes. The fragments of mica found in their tombs would indicate their rank."[6]

[6] _Footprints of Vanished Races_, p. 18.

Who were the Mound-Builders?

It is not probable that the reader will agree with all the conclusions drawn in the paragraph quoted above, which would claim for these structures a hieroglyphic as well as a sepulchral significance. But such speculations cannot destroy the inherent interest of the subject, however much they may irritate those who desire to arrive at logical conclusions concerning it. Who then were the folk who raised the mounds of Ohio and the Mississippi and spread their culture from the Gulf states region to the Great Lakes? Needless to say, the 'antiquaries' of the last century stoutly maintained that they were strangers from over the sea, {21} sun- and serpent-worshippers who had forsaken the cities of Egypt, Persia, and Phoenicia, and had settled in the West in order to pursue their strange religions undisturbed. But such a view by no means commends itself to modern science, which sees in the architects of these mounds and pyramids the ancestors of the present aborigines of North America. Many of the objects discovered in the mounds are of European manufacture, or prove contact with Europeans, which shows that the structures containing them are of comparatively modern origin. The articles discovered and the character of the various monuments indicate a culture stage similar to that noted among the more advanced tribes inhabiting the regions where the mounds occur at the period of the advent of the whites. Moreover, the statements of early writers on these regions, such as the members of De Soto's expedition, prove beyond question that some of the structures were erected by the Indians in post-Columbian times. "It is known that some of the tribes inhabiting the Gulf states, when De Soto pa.s.sed through their territory in 1540-41, as the Yuchi, Creeks, Chickasaw, and Natchez, were still using and probably constructing mounds, and that the Quapaw of Arkansas were also using them. There is also doc.u.mentary evidence that the 'Texas' tribe still used mounds at the end of the seventeenth century, when a chief's house is described as being built on one. There is also sufficient evidence to justify the conclusion that the Cherokee and Shawnee were mound-builders....

According to Miss Fletcher, the Winnebago build miniature mounds in the lodge during certain ceremonies."[7]

[7] _Bulletin 30_, Bureau of American Ethnology.

Nothing has been found in the mounds to indicate {22} great antiquity, and the present tendency among archaeologists is to a.s.sign to them a comparatively recent origin.

The 'Nations' of North America

In order that the reader may be enabled the better to comprehend the history and customs of the Red Race in North America, it will be well at this juncture to cla.s.sify the various ethnic stocks of which it is composed. Proceeding to do so on a linguistic basis--the only possible guide in this instance--we find that students of American languages, despite the diversity of tongues exhibited in North America, have referred all of these to ten or a dozen primitive stems.[8] Let us first examine the geographical position of the 'nations' of the American aborigines in the sixteenth century, at the period of the advent of the white man, whilst yet they occupied their ancestral territory.

[8] See the map, p. 361.

The Athapascan stock extended in a broad band across the continent from the Pacific to Hudson Bay, and almost to the Great Lakes below. Tribes cognate to it wandered far north to the mouth of the Mackenzie River, and, southward, skirted the Rockies and the coast of Oregon south of the estuary of the Columbia River, and spreading over the plains of New Mexico, as Apaches, Navahos, and Lipans, extended almost to the tropics. The Athapascan is the most widely distributed of all the Indian linguistic stocks of North America, and covered a territory of more than forty degrees of lat.i.tude and seventy-five degrees of longitude. Its northern division was known as the Tinneh or Dene, and consisted of three groups--eastern, north-western, and south-western, dwelling near the Rockies, in the interior of Alaska, and in the mountain fastnesses of British America respectively.

{23} The Pacific division occupied many villages in a strip of territory about four hundred miles in length from Oregon to Eel River in California. The southern division occupied a large part of Arizona and New Mexico, the southern portion of Utah and Colorado, the western borders of Kansas, and the northern part of Mexico to lat. 25. The social conditions and customs as well as the various dialects spoken by the several branches and offshoots of this great family differed considerably according to climate and environment. Extremely adaptable, the Athapascan stock appear to have adopted many of the customs and ceremonies of such tribes as they were brought into contact with, and do not seem to have had any impetus to frame a culture of their own. Their tribes had little cohesion, and were subdivided into family groups or loose bands, which recognized a sort of patriarchal government and descent. Their food-supply was for the most part precarious, as it consisted almost entirely of the proceeds of hunting expeditions, and the desperate and never-ending search for provender rendered this people somewhat narrow and material in outlook.

The Iroquois

The Iroquois--Hurons, Tuscaroras, Susquehannocks, Nottoways, and others--occupied much of the country from the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario to the Roanoke. Several of their tribes banded themselves into a confederacy known as the 'Five Nations,' and these comprised the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas. The Cherokees, dwelling in the valleys of East Tennessee, appear to have been one of the early offshoots of the Iroquois. A race of born warriors, they pursued their craft with an excess of cruelty which made them the terror of the white settler. It was with the {24} Iroquois that most of the early colonial wars were waged, and their name, which they borrowed from the Algonquins, and which signifies 'Real Adders,' was probably no misnomer. They possessed chiefs who, strangely enough, were nominated by the matrons of the tribe, whose decision was confirmed by the tribal and federal councils. The 'Five Nations' of the Iroquois made up the Iroquois Confederacy, which was created about the year 1570, as the last of a series of attempts to unite the tribes in question. The Mohawks, so conspicuous in colonial history, are one of their sub-tribes. Many of the Iroquoian tribes "have been settled by the Canadian Government on a reservation on Grand River, Ontario, where they still reside.... All the Iroquois [in the United States]

are in reservations in New York, with the exception of the Oneida, who are settled in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The so-called Seneca, of Oklahoma, are composed of the remnants of many tribes ... and of emigrants from all the tribes of the Iroquoian Confederation." In 1689 the Iroquois were estimated to number about twelve thousand, whereas in 1904 they numbered over sixteen thousand.

The Algonquins

The Algonquian[9] family surrounded the Iroquois on every side, and extended westward toward the Rocky Mountains, where one of their famous offshoots, the Blackfeet, gained a notoriety which has rendered them the heroes of many a boyish tale. They were milder than the Iroquois, and less Spartan in habits. Their {25} western division comprised the Blackfeet, Arapaho, and Cheyenne, situated near the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains; the northern division, situated for the most part to the north of the St. Lawrence, comprised the Chippeways and Crees; the north-eastern division embraced the tribes inhabiting Quebec, the Maritime Provinces, and Maine, including the Montagnais and Micmacs; the central division, dwelling in Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio, included the Foxes, Kickapoos, Menominees, and others; and the eastern division embraced all the Algonquian tribes that dwelt along the Atlantic coast, the Abnaki, Narragansets, Nipmucs, Mohicans (or Mohegans), Shawnees, Delawares, and Powhatans.

[9] This name has been adopted to distinguish the _family_ from the tribal name, 'Algonquin' or 'Algonkin,' but is not employed when speaking of individuals. Thus we speak of 'the Algonquian race,' but, on the other hand, of 'an Algonquin Indian.'

The Algonquins were the first Indians to come into contact with the white man. As a rule their relations with the French were friendly, but they were frequently at war with the English settlers. The eastern branch of the race were quickly defeated and scattered, their remnants withdrawing to Canada and the Ohio valley. Of the smaller tribes of New England, Virginia, and other eastern states there are no living representatives, and even their languages are extinct, save for a few words and place-names. The Ohio valley tribes, with the Wyandots, formed themselves into a loose confederacy and attempted to preserve the Ohio as an Indian boundary; but in 1794 they were finally defeated and forced to cede their territory. Tec.u.mseh, an Algonquin chief, carried on a fierce war against the United States for a number of years, but by his defeat and death at Tippecanoe in 1811 the spirit of the Indians was broken, and the year 1815 saw the commencement of a series of Indian migrations westward, and a wholesale cession of Indian territory which continued over a period of about thirty years.

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A Sedentary People

The Algonquins had been for generations the victims of the Iroquois Confederacy, and only when the French had guaranteed them immunity from the attacks of their hereditary enemies did they set their faces to the east once more, to court repulse a second time at the hands of the English settlers. Tall and finely proportioned, the Algonquins were mainly a sedentary and agricultural people, growing maize and wild rice for their staple foods. Indeed, more than once were the colonists of New England saved from famine by these industrious folk. In 1792 Wayne's army found a continuous plantation along the entire length of the Maumee River from Fort Wayne to Lake Erie, and such evidence entirely shatters the popular fallacy that the Indian race were altogether lacking in the virtues of industry and domesticity. They employed fish-sh.e.l.ls and ashes as fertilizers, and made use of spades and hoes. And it was the Algonquins who first instilled in the white settlers the knowledge of how to prepare those succulent dainties for which New England is famous--hominy, succotash, maple-sugar, and johnny-cake. They possessed the art of tanning deerskin to a delicate softness which rendered it a luxurious and delightful raiment, and, like the Aztecs, they manufactured mantles of feather-work. They had also elaborated a system of picture-writing. In short, they were the most intelligent and advanced of the eastern tribes, and had their civilization been permitted to proceed unhindered by white aggression and the recurring inroads of their hereditary enemies, the Iroquois, it would probably have evolved into something resembling that of the Nahua of Mexico, without, perhaps, exhibiting the sanguinary fanaticism of that people. The great weakness of the Algonquian {27} stock was a lack of solidity of character, which prevented them from achieving a degree of tribal organization and cohesion sufficient to enable them to withstand their foes.

The Muskhogean Race

The Muskhogean race included the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles, who occupied territory in the Gulf states east of the Mississippi, possessing almost all of Mississippi and Alabama, and portions of Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. Many early notices of this people are extant. They were met by Narvaez in Florida in 1528, and De Soto pa.s.sed through their territory in 1540-41.

By 1700 the entire Apalachee tribe had been civilized and Christianized, and had settled in seven large and well-built towns.

But the tide of white settlement gradually pressed the Muskhogean tribes backward from the coast region, and though they fought stoutly to retain their patrimony, few of the race remain in their native area, the majority having been removed to the tribal reservation in Oklahoma before 1840. They were an agricultural and sedentary people, occupying villages of substantially built dwellings. A curious diversity, both physical and mental, existed among the several tribes of which the race was composed. They possessed a general council formed of representatives from each town, who met annually or as occasion required. Artificial deformation of the skull was practised by nearly all of the Muskhogean tribes, chiefly by the Choctaws, who were called by the settlers 'Flatheads.' The Muskhogean population at the period of its first contact with the whites has been estimated at some fifty thousand souls. In 1905 they numbered rather more, but this estimate included about fifteen thousand freedmen of negro blood.

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