Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/158

 146 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920

THE PERIOD OF DEPOPULATION

The fact that the Ohio area, even for comparatively so short a time, should have been denuded of its native inhabitants, is unfor- tunate, to say the least, from an anthropological point of view. Occurring as it did just at the time when Eurpean exploration was pending but not yet accomplished, it severed the connecting chain between prehistoric and historic man in Ohio a loss which only years of painstaking and persevering archaeological research, supple- mented by the scant historic evidence, may hope to retrieve.

While for the present the passing of some of the groups compos- ing Ohio's prehistoric population can be explained only in a general way as the result of natural causes recognized by the anthropolo- gist and the historian it seems probable that the answer to the query as to the ultimate disappearance of the native tribes is to be found, in part, in certain historic records. Moreover, further archaeological evidence, of an important character, is to be had in the same quarter.

The so-called Iroquoian Conquest, culminating about the middle of the seventeenth century in the spectacular campaign which carried the supremacy of the Iroquois Confederation west- ward almost to the Mississippi river, has been accorded the promi- nence which it deserves as an event of general Indian history. Its importance, however, as a contribution to Ohio aboriginal his- tory appears not to have been fully appreciated. Sufficient of the literature on the subject for the purpose in hand is concisely sum- marized in the following quotation :

A factor which contributed greatly to the decline of the Algonquian ascen- dancy was the power of the Iroquoian confederacy, which by the beginning of the seventeenth century had developed a power destined to make them the scourge of the other Indian population from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from Ottawa river in Canada to the Tennessee. After destroying the Huron and the Erie, they turned their power chiefly against the Algonquian tribes, and erelong Ohio and Indiana were nearly deserted, only a few villages of Miami remaining here and there, in the northern portion. The region south and west they made a desert, clearing of native inhabitants the whole country within five hundred miles of their seats. The Algonquian tribes fled before them to the region of the upper lakes and the banks of the Mississippi, and only when the French had guaranteed

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