Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/40

 games, the narration of his exploits, and the listening to the oratory of the chiefs. But, during long periods of his existence, he remained in a state of torpor, gazing listlessly upon the trees of the forests, and the clouds that sailed far above his head; and this vacancy imprinted an habitual gravity and even melancholy upon his aspect and general deportment.

As in all uncivilized communities, the main labor and drudgery fell upon the females; planting, tending and gathering the crops; making mats and baskets; carrying burdens; in fact, everything of the kind; so that their condition was little better than that of slaves. For marriage was principally a matter of bargain and sale, the husband giving presents to the father of his bride; and sooner or later, as caprice or any other excuse moved him, degrading her to the place of a mere servant in his house. In general, they had but few children; and were subjected to many and severe attacks of sickness: famine and pestilence at times swept away whole tribes.

From their migratory habits, their continual wars and battles, their slowness of increase, and their liability to famine and fatal diseases, Mr. Hildreth is inclined to conclude that at no time since the discovery of America did the total Indian population east of the Rocky Mountains exceed, if it equalled, three hundred thousand.

The dialects of the various tribes in North America are generally reduced to five heads or subdivisions. "The most widely diffused of these five languages, called the Algonquin, after one of the tribes of Canada, from whom the French missionaries first learned it, is exceedingly harsh and guttural, with few vowels, and words often of intolerable length, occasioned by complicated grammatical forms—a whole sentence, by means of suffixes and affixes, being often expressed in a single word. This character, indeed, is common, in a greater or less degree, to all the American languages, serving to distinguish them, in a remarkable manner from the dialects of the Old World. Tribes of Algonquin speech extended from Hudson's Bay south-east beyond the Chesapeake, and south-west to the Mississippi and Ohio. They inclosed, however, several formidable confederacies, the Hurons, the Iroquois, the Eries, and others settled around Lakes Erie and Ontario, and occupying all the upper waters of the western tributaries of the Chesapeake, who spoke a different language, less guttural and far more sonorous, called the Wyandot, after a tribe inhabiting the north shore of Lake Erie; The Cherokee is peculiar to a confederacy of that name, occupants for centuries of the southern valleys of the great Allegany Chain, from whence they have been but very lately expelled. The common name of Mobilian includes the kindred dialects of the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks or Muscogees, the Appalachees, and Yamassees, ancient inhabitants of the valley of the Lower Mississippi, and thence, by the southern foot of the Alleganies, to the Savannah and beyond it. Compared with the northern languages, the Cherokee and Mobilian are soft and musical, ebounding with