Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/41

30 under which they have been ethnologically divided, one type or family from another.

The principal and most numerous of these several primitive stocks, comprising a large group of still existing tribes, have been euphoniously named by Henry R. Schoolcraft, with the generic term of, derived from the word Algonquin, a name given by the early French discoverers to a tribe of this family living on the St. Lawrence River, near Quebec, whose descendants are now residing, partially civilized, at the Lake of the Two Mountains, in Canada.

Judging from their oral traditions, and the specimens of their different languages which have been made public by various writers, travellers, and missionaries, nearly every tribe originally first discovered by the Europeans residing on the shores of the Atlantic, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, south to the mouth of the James River in Virginia, and the different tribes occupying the vast area lying west and northwest of this eastern boundary to the banks of the Mississippi, from the mouth of the Ohio to Hudson Bay, belong to the Algic family. In this general area the Six Nations of New York, the Wyandots, and formerly the Winnebagoes, who, however, now reside west of the Mississippi, are the principal exceptions.

The red men who first greeted our Pilgrim Fathers on the rock-bound coast of Plymouth, and who are so vitally connected with their early history, were Algics. The people who treated with the good William Penn for the site of the present great city of Philadelphia, and who named him "me guon," meaning in the Ojibway language "a pen" or feather, were of the Algic stock.

The tribes over whom Pow-hat-tan (signifying "a dream") ruled as chief, and who are honored in the name of Po-ca-hon-tas (names so closely connected with that of Capt. John Smith, and the early Virginia colonists), belonged to this wide-spread family, whose former posses-