Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/220

200 “Hiawatha,” and proximately a truthful historical description by the late Lewis H. Morgan, — an adopted member of the tribe, and familiar from early years with its rich traditions. There seems to have been more of system and method in the confederated League of the Tribes composing the union, than there was of like organization in each of its component parts.

In the several independent or even affiliated Indian tribes with which the Europeans came into contact from the first colonization, the latter assumed that there was a tolerably well-arranged method in each of them for the administration of affairs of peace and war by a chief and his council, who had an almost arbitrary authority; that he received tribute, which was equivalent to a system of taxation; and that the proceeds constituted a sort of common treasury to be drawn upon for public uses. One of the grievances alleged by King Philip and other sachems when, under the influence of the Apostle Eliot, many of the Indians had been gathered into villages of their own that they might be instructed and trained, was that they ceased to pay the tribute which they had previously rendered to their chiefs. There may, therefore, have been instances, more or less defined, in which such usages prevailed among the tribes. But it is safe to say that they were by no means general, still less indicative of a universal custom of Indian government. There was no occasion for endowing a chief, or for furnishing him a salary. The probability is that there has been more of organized and of administrative order in several of the tribes since the coming of the whites than there was before, and that modifications and adaptations of original Indian usages, or a recourse to some wholly new ones, have necessarily followed upon intimacy of relations with the strangers. When the whites wished to make a treaty with a tribe, to obtain a grant of land, or to execute any other like covenant, they would naturally call for such persons among them as had authority,