Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/107

Rh and necessity which drew them into fellowships, with common interests among themselves, called by us “tribes,” or to what extent alliances existed among them for peace and war. There were needful limitations in the size of those fellowships, imposed by the conditions of their existence. The Natchez and Arkansas tribes are regarded as among the most advanced of those of our northern section when first known to Europeans.

The late Lewis H. Morgan, partly through the interpretation of facts, and partly with the inferences from a reasonable theory, has contributed valuable aid to our understanding of aboriginal life. He maintains that their household life was constructed on the communal system, uniting affiliated families as a gens. When the Five Nations, or Iroquois, inhabiting central New York, were first visited by Europeans, they were found to be gathered in family groups of twenty, forty, or even larger households, all literally under one roof. A “Long House,” constructed strongly and for permanency of wood and bark, with a continuous passage through the middle, one door of entrance, provision for the necessary number of fires, and partitions dividing the area, was the common home it might be even of a hundred or more persons. The inmates shared together the yield of the harvest and the hunt. Starting from this well-certified fact, Mr. Morgan proceeds to draw reasonable inferences that this communal system for life, for affiliated families or companies of the aborigines, — generally, and indeed universally, except where circumstances might have withstood it, — prevailed among them. It was once supposed that the extensive adobe structures in New Mexico and in Central America — with their walled enclosures unpierced in the lower story by door or window, and terraced by two, three, or more stories reared upon them, to which access was gained by ladders — were the remains of the palatial residences of chiefs and caciques, and that they were then surrounded with clusters of more