Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/220

208 and Ojibways, who speak dialects of the great Algonkin stock, but he recognized no connection between their speech and that of the Blackfeet. Later inquirers, and at first even Gallatin himself (after studying a brief list of Blackfoot words), took the same view. Subsequent investigations satisfied that distinguished philologist that his first impressions were incorrect, and that the Blackfoot language really belonged to the Algonkin stock. More recently the French missionaries have made the same discovery, "by studying," as M. Lacombe writes to me, "the grammatical rules of these languages." From the extensive comparative list of words and grammatical forms in the Blackfoot, Cree, and Ojibway languages, with which he has favored me, it appears that while the Blackfoot is in its grammar purely Algonkin, many of the most common words in its vocabulary are totally different from the corresponding words in the Algonkin tongues. Others which are found, on careful examination, to be radically the same as the corresponding Algonkin terms, are so changed and distorted that the resemblance is not at first apparent. These facts admit of but one explanation. They are the precise phenomena to which we are accustomed in the case of mixed languages. In such languages (of which our English speech is a notable example), we expect the grammar to be derived entirely from one source, while the words will be drawn from two or more. Furthermore, wherever we find a mixed language, we infer a conquest of one people by another. In the present instance, we may well suppose that when the Blackfoot tribes were forced westward from the Red River country to the foot of the Rocky Mountains, they did not find their new abode uninhabited. It is probable enough that the people whom they found in possession had come through the passes from the country west of those mountains. If these people were overcome by the Blackfeet, and their women taken as wives by the conquerors, two results would be likely to follow. In the first place, the language would become a mixed speech, in grammar purely Algonkin, but in the vocabulary largely recruited from the speech of the conquered tribe. A change in the character of the amalgamated people would also take place. The result of this change might be better inferred if we knew the characteristics of both the constituent races. But it may be said that a frequent if not a general result of such a mixture of races is the production of a people of superior intelligence and force of character.

The religion of these tribes (applying this term to their combined mythology and worship) resembles the language. It is in the main Algonkin, but includes some beliefs and ceremonies derived from some other source. In their view, as in that of the Ojibways, the Delawares, and other Algonkin nations, there were two creations—the primary, which called the world into existence, and the secondary, which found the world an expanse of sea and sky (with, it would seem, a few animals disporting themselves therein), and left it in its present state.