about double that number of families, and might perhaps muster one hundred fighting men."

This represents a communal household of nearly five hundred people, and another great house of the same race (Neche

IROQUOIS.

colees) was still larger, being 226 feet in length. The houses of the Iroquois were 100 feet long. The Creeks, the Mandans, the Sacs, the Mohaves, and other tribes lived in a similar communal way, several related families in each house, living and eating in common. All these built their houses of perishable materials; some arranged

them for defence, others did not, but all the structures bear a certain analogy to each other, and even, when carefully considered, to the pueblos of New Mexico.

Compare, for instance, a ground-plan of one of the Chopunish houses among the Nechecolees with that of an Iroquois house and with a New Mexican pueblo, and one is struck with the resemblance. All these houses seem obviously adapted a communal life, and traces of this practice, varying in different places, come constantly before us. The Pueblo Indians hold their lands in common. The traveller Stephens saw near the ruins of Uxmal the food of a hundred laboring - men prepared at one hut, and

11

96 Ft.

PLAN OF IROQUOIS HOUSE.

220 Ft.

PLAN OF NECHECOLEE HOUSE.

each family sending for its own portion-"a procession of

women and children, each carrying a smoking bowl of hot broth, all coming down the same path, and dispersing among the huts." But this description might easily be paralleled among Northern tribes. I will not dwell on the complex laws of descent and relationship, which are so elaborately described by Morgan in his "Ancient Society," and which appear to have prevailed among all the aboriginal clans. The essential result of all these various observations is this, that whatever degree of barbarism or semi-civilization was attained by any of the early American races, it was everywhere based on similar ways of living; it never resembled feudalism, but came much. nearer to communism; it was the condition of a people substantially free, whose labor was voluntary, and whose chiefs were of their own choosing. After the most laborious investigation ever made into the subject, Bandelier-in the twelfth report of the Peabody Institute-comes to the conclusion that "the social organization and mode of government of the ancient Mexicans was a military democracy, originally based upon communism in living." And if this was true even in the seemingly powerful and highly organized races of Mexico, it was certainly true of every North American tribe.

If we accept this conclusion- and the present tendency of archæologists is to accept it—the greater part of what has been written about prehistoric American civilization proves to have been too hastily said. Tylor, for instance, after visiting the pyramid of Cholula, twenty-five years ago, laid it down as an axiom: "Such buildings as these can only be raised under peculiar social conditions. The ruler must be a despotic sovereign, and the mass of the people slaves, whose subsistence and whose lives are sacrificed without scruple to execute the fancies of the monarch, who is not so much the governor as the unrestricted owner of the country and the people." He did not sufficiently consider that this is the first and easiest way to explain all great structures representing vast labor.

An American writer finds it necessary to explain even the works of the Mound-builders in a similar way. Mr. Foster thinks it clear that "the condition of society among the Mound-builders was not that of freemen, or, in other words,

FORTIFIED VILLAGE OF MOUND-BUILDERS, GROUND-PLAN.

that the State possessed absolute power over the lives and fortunes of its subjects." But the theory of despotism is no more needed to explain a mound or a pueblo than to justify the existence of the "Long Houses" of the Iroquois. Even the less civilized types of the aboriginal American race had

learned how to unite in erecting their communal dwellings; and surely the higher the grade the greater the power.

The Mound-builders were formerly regarded as a race so remote from the present Indian tribes that there could be nothing in common between them, yet all recent inquiries tend to diminish this distance. Many Indian tribes have built burial mounds for their dead. Squier, after the publication of his great work on the mounds of the Mississippi Valley, made an exploration of those of Western New York, and found, contrary to all his preconceived opinions, that these last must have been made by the Iroquois. Some of the most elaborate series of works, as those at Marietta and Circleville, Ohio, have yielded from their deepest recesses articles of European manufacture, showing an origin not farther back than the historic period. Spanish swords and blue glass beads have been found in the mounds of Georgia and Florida. But we need not go so far as this to observe the analogies of structure. If we look at Professor Putnam's ground

plan of a fortified village of the Mound-builders on Spring Creek, in Tennessee, and compare it with a similar plan of a Mandan village as given by Prince Maximilian of Neuwied in 1843, we find their arrangement to be essentially the same. Each is on a promontory protected by the bend of a stream; each is surrounded by an embankment which was once, in all probability, surmounted by a palisade. were the houses, distributed more plan, more formally and conventionally in that of the Prince

FORTIFIED MANDAN VILLAGE.

of Neuwied; in other respects the two villages are almost duplicates. To see how they may have looked when occupied, we may compare them with a representation of a vil lage of the Onondagas, attacked by Champlain in 1615. This

wood-cut is reproduced from one in the "Documentary History of New York." It is clear that the Mound-builders had much in common with those well-known tribes of Indians the Mandans and Onondagas, in their way of placing and protecting their houses; and another comparison has lately been