country between the Wisconsin and the upper branches of the Illinois, and held the passes from Green Bay and Fox River to the Mississippi; (13) on the prairies east of the Mississippi lived the Sioux or Dakotas. Their range was from Saskatchewan to lands south of the Arkansas, but with the early history of Canada they have little to do1.

(9) Hurons or Wyandots. These tribes spoke a kindred language with the Iroquois, and inhabited the peninsula between Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario. Thither the Franciscans and Jesuits travelled at a very early period. They resembled the Iroquois in their dwellinghouses, their palisaded forts, and clan system, although they were not confederated. Their numbers were about 20,000. They were conquered in 1649 by the Iroquois, who invaded them in the depth of winter, and by attacks and surprises scattered their clans, some finding refuge with the French near Quebec, where their descendants still live at a place called Lorette, others retiring along Lake Superior. From the west they were driven back by the fierce buffalo hunters and roving tribes of the west, and found their way to Detroit about 1680, where they made a permanent settlement.

(10) The Iroquois or Five Nations, viz. Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, stretched from Lake Ontario to the sources of the Ohio, Susquehannah, and the Delaware. We hear of the Iroquois or Five Nations more than any other native tribes in the conflict between French and English. When the Tuscaroras, a tribe of North Carolina, became merged with them, they were known as the Six Nations (1714).

The Iroquois were, according to Parkman, foremost in war, foremost in eloquence, foremost in savage acts, and extended their depredations from Quebec to the Carolinas, 1 See Appendix iii.

and from the western prairies to the forests of Maine. On the south they forced tribute from the Delawares, and pierced to the fastnesses of the Cherokees, who lived in the upper valley of the Tennessee River and the highlands of Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. On the north they uprooted the ancient settlements of the kindred tribes of the Hurons, living between Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario; on the west they exterminated the Eries and Andastes, and spread destruction amongst the Illinois. They were the conquering tribe of North America, and they owed their triumphs partly to their advanced organisation, partly to their indomitable courage, and partly to the geographical position of the country they lived in. They dwelt within the present limits of the state of New York, where there is easy access to other parts of North America by means of lakes and rivers. The era of their confederacy was about 1500, just 100 years before the Dutch founded New York (1609), and they do not boast of a history before this. The mainstay of Iroquois polity was the system of Totems. There were eight Totem clans which ran through the five confederate tribes, constituting a double bond between them. Each tribe had a sachem, who managed its internal affairs; but when foreign affairs were dealt with a general council was held in the Valley of Onondaga. The Iroquois had few positive beliefs, but many traditions and superstitions. They believed in a Great Spirit, in a God of the Waters, who descended to the world to teach people. Under the Falls of Niagara they believed that the Spirit of Thunder dwelt in company with his giant brood, and in the forests they conjured up terrible forms of wild beasts, monsters, and serpents. In Lake Ontario there existed a horned serpent of portentous size and power. Once a two-headed serpent, so the myth ran, ravaged the land and destroyed the people till killed by the

E

magic arrow of a child. The poet Longfellow has described in 'Hiawatha' the life, ideas and romance of the race, their stern courage and occasional tenderness, their mysticism, religion, and strange personification of nature. The life of the Iroquois was one of sharp excitement and sudden contrasts. In the chase, on the war-path, at the festival, with games of hazard, dances and orgies, they practised and exhausted their native energy. They cultivated maize, and in 1696 Count Frontenac, the Governor of Canada, found miles of cultivated fields extending from their villages. Notwithstanding their widespread victories it is calculated that the Iroquois warriors never exceeded 4000.

(11) Such, however, was the desolating activity of the Iroquois bands that it took them only twenty-five years (1650-1675) to utterly destroy the clans of the Hurons, Neutrals, Andastes and Eries. After conquest they made no attempt at re-organisation or a military system. They were the worst of conquerors, and left behind them the most complete ruin and devastation. The Iroquois formed an island, as it were, in the vast expanse of the Algonkin population, which extended from Hudson's Bay to Carolina.

(12) The North American Indians were entirely dif ferent from the natives of Mexico and Peru, with whom the Spaniards were brought into contact. The Peruvians were a civilised nation with a central worship. The Temple of the Sun, their deity, at Cuzco, was their national shrine; the Inca or king, their hereditary ruler of divine origin, to whose support one third of the land was devoted. The Mexican empire, with its capital of 60,000 people, and cultivated territories extending in the reign of Montezuma 500 leagues from east to west, and more than 200 leagues from north to south, was no less wonderful. Yet both these kingdoms fell

before the Spaniards almost at the first blast of the trumpet. The Iroquois were unwearying foes, their 'braves' acting singly or in small parties, unlike the Zulu 'impis' or regiments. In craft they were superior, in endurance equal to the Zulus. For both, hardihood was the first virtue; for both, the simple diet of mealies or Indian corn sufficed; for both, the council (in Kaffir land the Pitso) gave opportunities for stirring eloquence to chiefs and elders, and over both the sorcerer or witchdoctor exercised his weird power. In both races a strange Spirit-worship, amongst Indians the Manitouworship, prevailed. The Manitou might be a bird, a buffalo, a feather, a skin.

(13) The Indian warrior is not only idle at intervals, -when not on the chase or foray, but he is proud of this idleness. Woman is the labourer, and bears the burden of life and dies in hardship, as Wordsworth has described her in his poem on the 'Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman.' His picture is to a great extent true, only the Indian woman, being left behind to die from exhaustion, would not have complained. That would have been undignified. During the mild season there was little suffering, but thrift was wanting, and winter came upon them unprepared. This is a picture of the winter and of the summer life of these North American tribes::

'In the calm days of summer the Ojibwa fisherman pushes his birch canoe upon the great inland ocean of the north, and, as he gazes down into the pellucid depths, he seems like one balanced between earth and heaven. The watchful fish-hawk circles above his head, and below, further than his line will reach, he sees the trout glide shadowy and silent over the glimmering pebbles. The little islands on the verge of the horizon seem now starting into spires, now melting from the sight, now shaping themselves into a thousand fantastic forms with the

strange mirage of the waters; and he fancies that the evil spirits of the lake lie basking their serpent forms on those unhallowed shores. Again, he explores the watery labyrinths where the stream sweeps amongst pine-tufted islands, or runs, black and deep, beneath the shadows of moss-bearded firs; or he drags his canoe upon the sandy beach, and while his camp-fire crackles on the grass-plat, reclines beneath the trees and smokes and laughs away the sultry hours in a lazy luxury of enjoyment.

'But when winter descends upon the earth, sealing the fountains, fettering the stream, and turning the greenrobed forests to a shivering, naked wilderness, then, bearing their fragile dwellings on their backs, the Ojibwa family wander forth into the wilderness, cheered only on their dreary track by the whistling of the north-east wind and the hungry cry of wolves. By the banks of some frozen stream, women and children, men and dogs lie crouched together around the fire. They spread their benumbed fingers over the embers, while the wind shrieks through the fir-trees like the gale through the rigging of a frigate, and the narrow concave of the wigwam sparkles with the frost-work of their congealed breath. In vain they beat the magic drum and call upon the guardian Manitouthe wary moose keeps aloof; the bear lies close in his hollow tree, and famine stares them in the face. And now the hunter can fight no more against the nipping cold and blinding sleet. Still and stark, with haggard cheek and shrivelled lips, he lies amongst the snow-drifts; till with tooth and claw the famished wild cat strives in vain to pierce the frigid marble of limbs. Such harsh treatment is thrown away on the Indian; he lives in misery as his father lived before him ".

(14) In the peninsula of Florida in the sixteenth century there were three Indian confederacies of the 1 Parkman's Conspiracy of Pontiac.