did exist, a monument of any kind deliberately erected by an Indian or a tribe to commemorate an event in Indian history. This is a highly interesting fact. Here, living to-day, is a people that builds no monuments; that writes no records; that leaves no intentional sign of its existence. Mankind in its earliest years could do no less. Unquestionably the American Indians are one of the oldest races of men on the earth. Compared with them, the Assyrians, the Chinese, the Egyptians, are children of yesterday.

Geologists tell us that America is older than Europe or Asia; that the oldest land in the world is the St. Lawrence valley; the oldest land in the United States, the Adirondacks. Thus the land and the native races of our country are the oldest on the globe. To study the characteristics of the American Indian is to find further proof of this. The Indian never laughs or jokes in the presence of a white man, or a stranger; whatever his years-boy, youth, or man-he has the saturnine touch of old age upon him. His moral sense is scarcely developed. He wholly lacks industrial invention; had he possessed it, he would have been a builder. He was a wild animal in human form. Soon, the colonists discovered that he was far more dangerous than any wild beast. His intellect was wonderfully keen. Within the range of his activities it could not be surpassed. An American Indian differs from all other savages in being an intellectual wild man, cunning beyond the cunning of any other savage the world has ever seen.

Europeans found this country a scene of ancient feuds and perpetual war. It was a world of ceaseless bloodshed. In consequence, the native population of the continent was small. Some portions had no human inhabitants. This was true of the greater part of Massachusetts, southern New Hampshire, and Vermont. Smallpox and the Mohawks there had destroyed the native tribes. All down the Atlantic coast, as far as the Savannah River, the first colonists found few Indians, and these only remnants of once powerful tribes. The Five Nations called the Indians on the Delaware and the Susquehanna "women." It was fortunate for the first settlers that the tribes along the coast were so feeble. Had the seat of the Five Nations extended over

THEIR NUMBERS

3

this region, the settlement of America would have been long delayed.

There were many tribes and clans, but only three races of Indians east of the Mississippi. The division was never made by the Indians themselves, but by white men who base their opinions on the study of Indian languages. The three great race divisions were Algonquin, Iroquois, and Mobilion, or Maskokian. A fourth race division, the Sioux, or Dakota family, was represented in the tribes living between the Santee and Potomac rivers. At the time of the settlement of Jamestown, there were less than two hundred thousand Indians, within the present boundaries of the United States, east of the Mississippi River. Of the number to the west, there is no knowledge. There are about as many Indians within the United States to-day as there were east of the Mississippi, two centuries and a half ago.

Of the tribes that acted so important a part in the history of our country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Five Nations numbered about ten thousand at the time of their greatest strength; the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, Cherokees, and Catawbas, about sixty thousand; the tribes from Ohio to Lake Superior were far less numerous. Marquette and other French explorers, who first visited the old Northwest, passed over hundreds of miles of the wilderness and saw no signs of human population. It may safely be said that the original population of the continent has been greatly overestimated. An Indian war party of a hundred was seldom seen; of a thousand, only a few times in our history; of ten thousand

never.

A family lived in a tepee, lodge or wigwam, which was made by spreading bark or skins over poles usually like a tent, but among the Five Nations, like a house. The Seneca long-house usually consisted of twenty-four sections; those at the ends containing provisions; each of the others containing a family. There were no windows. Along the sides were the sleeping quarters. At intervals, down the midway, were fires for cooking and heating. The smoke found its way out through the roof. The Five Nations had

a fixed home. The Indians of the Mississippi Valley used the tepee. The Mandans, on the upper Missouri, built a circular lodge, and covered the roof with clay which hardened in the sun like rock. The hearth fire was in a pit in the center of the floor; around this the families were arranged, each having a triangular section.

Among the Indians, all relationship was through the clan, which consisted of all families descended from the same female ancestor. Each clan was a unit, having its chiefs, sachems, warriors, medicine-man, its food, land, and name in common. Three famous clans of the Five Nations were the Wolf, the Bear, and the Turtle. the token of the Wolf clan, a sort of earmark to a large The Wolf was family group. All clans having a common ancestor made up a tribe and spoke a tribal tongue. were a league of tribes. The Indians were much given to The Five Nations debating all important matters in council. were represented by the older and most distinguished Here the tribes sachems. A chief was a leader of a most famed leader was usually the spokesman for a tribe. war party. The The Indian women did all the work; moved the lodges and put them up at the new camps; kept the traditions of the tribe and owned all the land. The torturing of prisoners was their peculiar right. Indian women originated the most cruel tortures inflicted on that great company of white captives from the days of Captain John Smith to the days. of General Custer. Indian children grew up with the dogs. Discipline among them was unknown. They differed from the elders only in size and strength. The women taught the children how to torture prisoners; the men taught them to hunt, to war, and to boast.

Down to the coming of the whites, the Indians dressed in skins, or ornamented themselves with feathers; colored their own skins with clay and the juice of plants, and were armed only with bows, arrows, spears, clubs, and tomahawks of stone. They lived almost solely on animal food, corn, beans, and pumpkins. They made bags of skins, filled them with water, heated this by throwing in hot stones, and then cooked their food. They made canoes of bark sewed with thongs of deerskin, and smeared the joints with