Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/109

Rh the Pcquots, and the Nipmucks of New England — have become extinct, or such surviving remnants of their stock as may exist have been merged in other tribes; what there are of the Lenape are now known as Delawares. The same processes of the absorption or extinction of tribal names, which began among the aborigines on the sea-coast, have followed the extension of invasions and settlements through the whole breadth of the continent. One tribe has adopted the remnant of one or more other tribes, giving to them its own name, or appropriating a new one. Many of the original and of the existing tribes were and are known by an alias. Such titles as the Nez-Perces, the Gros-Ventres, and the Diggers speak for themselves as conferred upon, not assumed by, those who bear them. Remnants of seventeen tribes, collected from Oregon and Northern California, are consolidated in the Grande Ronde agency in Oregon. Such matters as are of chief importance and interest on these points will present themselves in subsequent pages.

What is the relative place on the scale of humanity to be assigned to the average North American Indian? Certainly, not near the top of that scale; as certainly, not at the foot of it. The scale is a full and varied one. We know far better than our ancestors knew, at the time when they first saw our aborigines, how many links there are on the chain of a common humanity. The anatomy of the skeleton, the outlines of the form, and the possession of any ray of that intelligence which we distinguish from instinct in animals, — these are in general the certificates of a claim for men over brutes. In assigning a place on the human scale to any tribe or race of human beings, we must first have defined to ourselves the specimens which mark its highest and its lowest. Nor in either case must we accept an ideal as a specimen. The loftiest definition ever given of the being called man is in the Scripture sentence, that he is but “a little lower than the angels, and is