Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 10 (North American).djvu/57



CHAPTER II

THE FOREST TRIBES

HEN British and French and Dutch colonized North America in the seventeenth century, the region which they entered was a continuous forest extending northward to the tree line of Labrador and Hudson s Bay west, southward to the foot-hills of the mountains and the shores of the Gulf, and westward to about the longitude of the Mississippi River. This vast region was inhabited by numerous tribes of a race new to white men. The Norse, during their brief stay in Vinland, on the northern borders of the forest lands, had heard, through the Skraelings, of men who wore fringed garments, carried long spears, and whooped loudly; but they had not seen those people, whom it had remained for Columbus first to encounter. These men—"Indians" Columbus had called them—were, in respect to polity, organized into small tribal groups; but these groups, usually following relationship in speech and natural proximity, were, in turn, loosely bound together in "confederacies" or "nations." Even beyond these limits affinity of speech delimited certain major groups, or linguistic stocks, normally representing consanguineous races; and, indeed, the whole forest region, from the realm of the Eskimo in the north to the alluvial and coastal lands bordering on the Gulf, was dominated by two great linguistic stocks, the Algonquian and the Iroquoian, whose tribes were the first aborigines encountered by the white colonists.

The Algonquians, when the whites appeared, were by far the more numerous and wide-spread of the two peoples.