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Chapter XXII
The aborigines East of the Mississippi.
on the surrender of
Acadia to
England, the lakes,
the rivulets, the granite ledges, of Cape Breton,—of which the irregular outline is guarded by reefs of rocks, and notched and almost rent asunder by the constant action of the sea,—were immediately occu-
pied as a province of
France; and, in 1714, fugitives from
Newfoundland and
Acadia built their huts along its coasts wherever safe inlets invited fishermen to spread their flakes, and the soil, to plant fields and gardens.
In a few years, the fortifications of
Louisburg began to rise—the key to the
St. Lawrence, the bulwark of the
French fisheries, and of French commerce in
North America.
From Cape Breton, the dominion of Louis XIV.
extended up the
St. Lawrence to
Lake Superior, and from that lake, through the whole course of the
Mississippi, to the
Gulf of Mexico and the
Bay of Mobile.
Just beyond that bay began the posts of the Spaniards, which continued round the shores of
Florida to the fortress of
St. Augustine.
The English colonies skirted the
Atlantic, extending from
Florida to the eastern verge of
Nova Scotia.
Thus, if on the east the strait of
Canso divided
France and
England, if on the south a narrow range of forests intervened between
England and
Spain, every where else the colonies of the rival nations were separated from each
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other by tribes of the natives.
The Europeans had
established a wide circle of plantations, or, at least, of posts; they had encompassed the aborigines that dwelt east of the
Mississippi; and, however eager might now be the passion of the intruders for carving their emblems on trees, and designating their lines of anticipated empire on maps, their respective settlements were kept asunder by an unexplored wilderness, of which savages were the occupants.
The great strife of
France and
England for American territory could not, therefore, but involve the ancient possessors of the continent in a series of conflicts, which have, at last, banished the
Indian tribes from the earlier limits of our republic.
The picture of the unequal contest inspires a compassion that is honorable to humanity.
The weak demand sympathy.
If a melancholy interest attaches to the fall of a hero, who is overpowered by superior force, shall we not drop a tear at the fate of nations, whose defeat foreboded the exile, if it did not indeed shadow forth the decline and ultimate extinction, of a race?
The earliest books on
America contained tales as wild as fancy could invent or credulity repeat.
The land was peopled with pygmies and with giants; the tropical forests were said to conceal tribes of negroes and tenants of the hyperborean regions were white, like the polar bear or the ermine.
Jaques Cartier had heard of a nation that did not eat; and the pedant
Lafitau believed, if not in a race of headless men, at
least, that there was a nation of men with the head not rising above the shoulders.
Yet the first aspect of the original inhabitants of the
United States was uniform.
Between the Indians of
Florida and
Canada, the difference was scarcely per
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ceptible.
Their manners and institutions, as well as
their organization, had a common physiognomy; and, before their languages began to be known, there was no safe method of grouping the nations into families.
But when the vast variety of dialects came to be com-
pared, there were found east of the
Mississippi not more than eight radically distinct languages, of which five still constitute the speech of powerful communities, and three are known only as memorials of tribes that have almost disappeared from the earth.
I. The primitive language which was the most widely diffused, and the most fertile in dialects, received from the
French the name of Algonquin.
It was the mother tongue of those who greeted the colonists of
Raleigh at
Roanoke, of those who welcomed the Pilgrims to
Plymouth.
It was heard from the
Bay of Gaspe to the
valley of the Des Moines; from
Cape Fear, and, it may be, from the
Savannah, to the land of the Esquimaux; from the
Cumberland River of
Kentucky to the southern bank of the Missinipi.
It was spoken, though not exclusively, in a territory that extended through sixty degrees of longitude, and more than twenty degrees of latitude.
The
Micmacs, who occupied the east of the continent, south of the little tribe that dwelt round the
Bay of Gaspe, holding possession of
Nova Scotia and the
adjacent isles, and probably never much exceeding three thousand in number, were known to our fathers only as the active allies of the
French.
They often invaded, but never inhabited,
New England.
The
Etchemins, or Canoemen, dwelt not only on the
St. John's River, the Ouygondy of the natives,
but on the
St. Croix, which
Champlain always called from their name, and extended as far west, at least, as
Mount Desert.
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Next to these came the Abenakis, of whom one
tribe has left its name to the
Penobscot, and another to the
Androscoggin; while a third, under the auspices
of Jesuits, had its chapel and its fixed abode in the fertile fields of
Norridgewock.
The clans that disappeared from their ancient hunting-grounds did not always become extinct; they often migrated to the north and west.
Of the Sokokis, who
appear to have dwelt near
Saco, and to have had an alliance with the Mohawks, many, at an early day, abandoned the region where they first became known
to
European voyagers, and placed themselves under the shelter of the
French in
Canada.
The example of emigration was often followed; the savage shunned the vicinity of the civilized: among the tribes of
Texas, there are warriors who are said to trace their lin-
eage to Algonquins on the
Atlantic; and descendants from the
New England Indians now roam over western prairies.
The forests beyond the
Saco, with
New Hampshire, and even as far as
Salem, constituted the sachemship of Pennacook, or
Pawtucket, and often afforded a refuge to the remnants of feebler nations around them.
The tribe of the
Massachusetts, even before the colonization of the country, had almost disappeared from the shores of the bay that bears its name; and the villages of the interior resembled insulated and nearly independent bands, that had lost themselves in the wilderness.
Of the Pokanokets, who dwelt round
Mount Hope, and were sovereigns over
Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and a part of
Cape Cod; of the Narragansetts, who dwelt between the bay that bears their name and the present limits of
Connecticut, holding dominion
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over
Rhode Island and its vicinity, as well as a part
of
Long Island,—the most civilized of the northern nations; of the Pequods, the branch of the Mohegans
that occupied the eastern part of
Connecticut, and ruled a part of
Long Island,—earliest victims to the Europeans,—I have already related the overthrow.
The country between the banks of the
Connecticut and the
Hudson was possessed by independent villages of the Mohegans, kindred with the Manhattans, whose few ‘smokes’ once rose amidst the forests on
New York Island.
The
Lenni Lenape, in their two divisions of the Minsi and the Delawares, occupied
New Jersey, the
valley of the Delaware far up towards the sources of that river, and the entire basin of the
Schuylkill.
Like the benevolent
William Penn, the Delawares were pledged to a system of peace; but, while
Penn forbore retaliation freely, the passiveness of the Delawares was to them the degrading confession of their
