Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 10 (North American).djvu/58

14 Their tribes included, along the Atlantic coast, the Micmac of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the Abnaki, Pennacook, Massachuset, Nauset, Narraganset, Pequot, etc., of New England, the Mahican and Montauk of New York, the Delaware of New Jersey, and the Nanticoke and Powhatan of Virginia and North Carolina. North of the St. Lawrence were the Montagnais and Algonquin tribes, while westward were the Chippewa and Cree, mainly between the Great Lakes and Hudson s Bay. The Potawatomi, Menominee, Sauk and Fox, Miami, Illinois, and Shawnee occupied territory extending from the western lakes southward to Tennessee and westward to the Mississippi. On the Great Plains the Arapaho and Cheyenne and in the Rocky Mountains the Siksika, or Blackfeet, were remote representatives of this vast family of tribes. In contrast, the Iroquoian peoples were compact and little divided. The two centres of their power were the region about Lakes Erie and Ontario and the upper St. Lawrence, southward through central New York and Pennsylvania, and the mountainous region of the Carolina and Virginia colonies. Of the northern tribes the Five Nations, or Iroquois Confederacy, of New York, and the Canadian Huron, with whom they were perpetually at war, were the most important; of the southern, the Tuscarora and Cherokee. In all the wide territory occupied by these two great stocks the only considerable intrusion was that of the Catawba, an offshoot of the famed Siouan stock of the Plains, which had established itself between the Iroquoian Cherokee and the Algonquian Powhatan.

As the territories of the forest tribes were similar—heavily wooded, whether on mountain or plain, copiously watered, abounding in game and natural fruits—so were their modes of life and thought cast to the same pattern. Every man was a hunter; but, except in the Canadian north, agriculture was practised by the women, with maize for the principal crop, and the villages were accordingly permanent. Industries were of