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This is a chapter
from the book "The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of
Aboriginal Canada" by Stephen Leacock.
Of the uncounted centuries of the
history of the red man in America before the coming of the Europeans
we know very little indeed. Very few of the tribes possessed even a
primitive art of writing. It is true that the Aztecs of Mexico, and
the ancient Toltecs who preceded them, understood how to write in
pictures, and that, by this means, they preserved some record of
their rulers and of the great events of their past. The same is true
of the Mayas of Central America, whose ruined temples are still to
be traced in the tangled forests of Yucatan and Guatemala. The
ancient Peruvians also had a system, not exactly of writing, but of
record by means of QUIPUS or twisted woollen cords of different
colours: it is through such records that we have some knowledge of
Peruvian history during about a hundred years before the coming of
the Spaniards, and some traditions reaching still further back. But
nowhere was the art of writing sufficiently developed in America to
give us a real history of the thoughts and deeds of its people
before the arrival of Columbus.
This is especially true of those
families of the great red race which inhabited what is now Canada.
They spent a primitive existence, living thinly scattered along the
sea-coast, and in the forests and open glades of the district of the
Great Lakes, or wandering over the prairies of the west. In hardly
any case had they any settled abode or fixed dwelling-places. The
Iroquois and some Algonquins built Long Houses of wood and made
stockade forts of heavy timber. But not even these tribes, who
represented the furthest advance towards civilization among the
savages of North America, made settlements in the real sense. They
knew nothing of the use of the metals. Such poor weapons and tools
as they had were made of stone, of wood, and of bone. It is true
that ages ago prehistoric men had dug out copper from the mines that
lie beside Lake Superior, for the traces of their operations there
are still found. But the art of working metals probably progressed
but a little way and then was lost,--overwhelmed perhaps in some
ancient savage conquest. The Indians found by Cartier and Champlain
knew nothing of the melting of metals for the manufacture of tools.
Nor had they anything but the most elementary form of agriculture.
They planted corn in the openings of the forest, but they did not
fell trees to make a clearing or plough the ground. The harvest
provided by nature and the products of the chase were their sole
sources of supply, and in their search for this food so casually
offered they moved to and fro in the depths of the forest or roved
endlessly upon the plains. One great advance, and only one, they had
been led to make. The waterways of North America are nature's
highway through the forest. The bark canoe in which the Indians
floated over the surface of the Canadian lakes and rivers is a
marvel of construction and wonderfully adapted to its purpose: This
was their great invention. In nearly all other respects the Indians
of Canada had not emerged even from savagery to that stage half way
to civilization which is called barbarism.
These Canadian aborigines seem to have
been few in number. It is probable that, when the continent was
discovered, Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, contained
about 220,000 natives--about half as many people as are now found in
Toronto. They were divided into tribes or clans, among which we may
distinguish certain family groups spread out over great areas.
Most northerly of all was the great
tribe of the Eskimos, who were found all the way from Greenland to
Northern Siberia. The name Eskimo was not given by these people to
themselves. It was used by the Abnaki Indians in describing to the
whites the dwellers of the far north, and it means 'the people who
eat raw meat.' The Eskimo called and still call themselves the
Innuit, which means 'the people.'
The exact relation of the Eskimo to
the other races of the continent is hard to define. From the fact
that the race was found on both sides of the Bering Sea, and that
its members have dark hair and dark eyes, it was often argued that
they were akin to the Mongolians of China. This theory, however, is
now abandoned. The resemblance in height and colour is only
superficial, and a more careful view of the physical make-up of the
Eskimo shows him to resemble the other races of America far more
closely than he resembles those of Asia. A distinguished American
historian, John Fiske, believed that the Eskimos are the last
remnants of the ancient cave-men who in the Stone Age inhabited all
the northern parts of Europe. Fiske's theory is that at this remote
period continuous land stretched by way of Iceland and Greenland
from Europe to America, and that by this means the race of cave-men
was able to extend itself all the way from Norway and Sweden to the
northern coasts of America. In support of this view he points to the
strangely ingenious and artistic drawings of the Eskimos. These
drawings are made on ivory and bone, and are so like the ancient
bone-pictures found among the relics of the cave-men of Europe that
they can scarcely be distinguished.
The theory is only a conjecture. It is
certain that at one time the Eskimo race extended much farther south
than it did when the white men came to America; in earlier days
there were Eskimos far south of Hudson Bay, and perhaps even south
of the Great Lakes.
As a result of their situation the
Eskimos led a very different life from that of the Indians to the
south. They must rely on fishing and hunting for food. In that
almost treeless north they had no wood to build boats or houses, and
no vegetables or plants to supply them either with food or with the
materials of industry. But the very rigour of their surroundings
called forth in them a marvellous ingenuity. They made boats of seal
skins stretched tight over walrus bones, and clothes of furs and of
the skins and feathers of birds. They built winter houses with great
blocks of snow put together in the form of a bowl turned upside
down. They heated their houses by burning blubber or fat in
dish-like lamps chipped out of stones. They had, of course, no
written literature. They were, however, not devoid of art. They had
legends and folk-songs, handed down from generation to generation
with the utmost accuracy. In the long night of the Arctic winter
they gathered in their huts to hear strange monotonous singing by
their bards: a kind of low chanting, very strange to European ears,
and intended to imitate the sounds of nature, the murmur of running
waters and the sobbing of the sea. The Eskimos believed in spirits
and monsters whom they must appease with gifts and incantations.
They thought that after death the soul either goes below the earth
to a place always warm and comfortable, or that it is taken up into
the cold forbidding brightness of the polar sky. When the aurora
borealis, or Northern Lights, streamed across the heavens, the
Eskimos thought it the gleam of the souls of the dead visible in
their new home.
Farthest east of all the British North
American Indians were the Beothuks. Their abode was chiefly
Newfoundland, though they wandered also in the neighbourhood of the
Strait of Belle Isle and along the north shore of the Gulf of St
Lawrence. They were in the lowest stage of human existence and lived
entirely by hunting and fishing. Unlike the Eskimos they had no
dogs, and so stern were the conditions of their life that they
maintained with difficulty the fight against the rigour of nature.
The early explorers found them on the rocky coasts of Belle Isle,
wild and half clad. They smeared their bodies with red ochre, bright
in colour, and this earned for them the name of Red Indians. From
the first, they had no friendly relations with the Europeans who
came to their shores, but lived in a state of perpetual war with
them. The Newfoundland fishermen and settlers hunted down the Red
Indians as if they were wild beasts, and killed them at sight. Now
and again, a few members of this unhappy race were carried home to
England to be exhibited at country fairs before a crowd of grinning
yokels who paid a penny apiece to look at the 'wild men.'
Living on the mainland, next to the
red men of Newfoundland lay the great race of the Algonquins, spread
over a huge tract of country, from the Atlantic coast to the head of
the Great Lakes, and even farther west. The Algonquins were divided
into a great many tribes, some of whose names are still familiar
among the Indians of to-day. The Micmacs of Nova Scotia, the
Malecite of New Brunswick, the Naskapi of Quebec, the Chippewa of
Ontario, and the Crees of the prairie, are of this stock. It is even
held that the Algonquins are to be considered typical specimens of
the American race. They were of fine stature, and in strength and
muscular development were quite on a par with the races of the Old
World. Their skin was copper-coloured, their lips and noses were
thin, and their hair in nearly all cases was straight and black.
When the Europeans first saw the Algonquins they had already made
some advance towards industrial civilization. They built huts of
woven boughs, and for defence sometimes surrounded a group of huts
with a palisade of stakes set up on end. They had no agriculture in
the true sense, but they cultivated Indian corn and pumpkins in the
openings of the forests, and also the tobacco plant, with the
virtues of which they were well acquainted. They made for themselves
heavy and clumsy pottery and utensils of wood, they wove mats out of
rushes for their houses, and they made clothes from the skin of the
deer, and head-dresses from the bright feathers of birds. Of the
metals they knew, at the time of the discovery of America, hardly
anything. They made some use of copper, which they chipped and
hammered into rude tools and weapons. But they knew nothing of
melting the metals, and their arrow-heads and spear-points were
made, for the most part, not of metals, but of stone. Like other
Indians, they showed great ingenuity in fashioning bark canoes of
wonderful lightness.
We must remember, however, that with
nearly all the aborigines of America, at least north of Mexico, the
attempt to utilize the materials and forces supplied by nature had
made only slight and painful progress. We are apt to think that it
was the mere laziness of the Indians which prevented more rapid
advance. It may be that we do not realize their difficulties. When
the white men first came these rude peoples were so backward and so
little trained in using their faculties that any advance towards art
and industry was inevitably slow and difficult. This was also true,
no doubt, of the peoples who, long centuries before, had been in the
same degree of development in Europe, and had begun the intricate
tasks which a growth towards civilization involved. The historian
Robertson describes in a vivid passage the backward state of the
savage tribes of America. 'The most simple operation,' he says, 'was
to them an undertaking of immense difficulty and labour. To fell a
tree with no other implements than hatchets of stone was employment
for a month. ...Their operations in agriculture were equally slow
and defective. In a country covered with woods of the hardest
timber, the clearing of a small field destined for culture required
the united efforts of a tribe, and was a work of much time and great
toil.' The
religion of the Algonquin Indians seems to have been a rude nature
worship. The Sun, as the great giver of warmth and light, was the
object of their adoration; to a lesser degree, they looked upon fire
as a superhuman thing, worthy of worship. The four winds of heaven,
bringing storm and rain from the unknown boundaries of the world,
were regarded as spirits. Each Indian clan or section of a tribe
chose for its special devotion an animal, the name of which became
the distinctive symbol of the clan. This is what is meant by the
'totems' of the different branches of a tribe.
The Algonquins knew nothing of the art
of writing, beyond rude pictures scratched or painted on wood. The
Algonquin tribes, as we have seen, roamed far to the west. One
branch frequented the upper Saskatchewan river. Here the ashes of
the prairie fires discoloured their moccasins and turned them black,
and, in consequence, they were called the Blackfeet Indians. Even
when they moved to other parts of the country, the name was still
applied to them.
Occupying the stretch of country to
the south of the Algonquins was the famous race known as the
Iroquoian Family. We generally read of the Hurons and the Iroquois
as separate tribes. They really belonged, however, to one family,
though during the period of Canadian history in which they were
prominent they had become deadly enemies. When Cartier discovered
the St Lawrence and made his way to the island of Montreal, Huron
Indians inhabited all that part of the country. When Champlain came,
two generations later, they had vanished from that region, but they
still occupied a part of Ontario around Lake Simcoe and south and
east of Georgian Bay. We always connect the name Iroquois with that
part of the stock which included the allied Five Nations--the
Mohawks, Onondagas, Senecas, Oneidas, and Cayugas,--and which
occupied the country between the Hudson river and Lake Ontario. This
proved to be the strongest strategical position in North America. It
lies in the gap or break of the Alleghany ridge, the one place south
of the St Lawrence where an easy and ready access is afforded from
the sea-coast to the interior of the continent. Any one who casts a
glance at the map of the present Eastern states will realize this,
and will see why it is that New York, at the mouth of the Hudson,
has become the greatest city of North America. Now, the same reason
which has created New York gave to the position of the Five Nations
its great importance in Canadian history. But in reality the racial
stock of the Iroquois extended much farther than this, both west and
south. It took in the well-known tribe of the Eries, and also the
Indians of Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac. It included even the
Tuscaroras of the Roanoke in North Carolina, who afterwards moved
north and changed the five nations into six.
The Iroquois were originally natives
of the plain, connected very probably with the Dakotas of the west.
But they moved eastwards from the Mississippi valley towards
Niagara, conquering as they went. No other tribe could compare with
them in either bravery or ferocity. They possessed in a high degree
both the virtues and the vices of Indian character--the unflinching
courage and the diabolical cruelty which have made the Indian an
object of mingled admiration and contempt. In bodily strength and
physical endurance they were unsurpassed. Even in modern days the
enervating influence of civilization has not entirely removed the
original vigour of the strain. During the American Civil War of
fifty years ago the five companies of Iroquois Indians recruited in
Canada and in the state of New York were superior in height and
measurement to any other body of five hundred men in the northern
armies. When
the Iroquoian Family migrated, the Hurons settled in the western
peninsula of Ontario. The name of Lake Huron still recalls their
abode. But a part of the race kept moving eastward. Before the
coming of the whites, they had fought their way almost to the sea.
But they were able to hold their new settlements only by hard
fighting. The great stockade which Cartier saw at Hochelaga, with
its palisades and fighting platforms, bore witness to the ferocity
of the struggle. At that place Cartier and his companions were
entertained with gruesome tales of Indian fighting and of wholesale
massacres. Seventy years later, in Champlain's time, the Hochelaga
stockade had vanished, and the Hurons had been driven back into the
interior. But for nearly two centuries after Champlain the Iroquois
retained their hold on the territory from Lake Ontario to the
Hudson. The conquests and wars of extermination of these savages,
and the terror which they inspired, have been summed up by General
Francis Walker in the saying: 'They were the scourge of God upon the
aborigines of the continent.'
The Iroquois were in some respects
superior to most of the Indians of the continent. Though they had a
limited agriculture, and though they made hardly any use of metals,
they had advanced further in other directions than most savages.
They built of logs, houses long enough to be divided into several
compartments, with a family in each compartment. By setting a group
of houses together, and surrounding them with a palisade of stakes
and trees set on end, the settlement was turned into a kind of fort,
and could bid defiance to the limited means of attack possessed by
their enemies. Inside their houses they kept a good store of corn,
pumpkins and dried meat, which belonged not to each man singly but
to the whole group in common. This was the type of settlement seen
at Quebec and at Hochelaga, and, later on, among the Five Nations.
Indeed, the Five Nations gave to themselves the picturesque name of
the Long House, for their confederation resembled, as it were, the
long wooden houses that held the families together.
All this shows that the superiority of
the Iroquois over their enemies lay in organization. In this they
were superior even to their kinsmen the Hurons. All Indian tribes
kept women in a condition which we should think degrading. The
Indian women were drudges; they carried the burdens, and did the
rude manual toil of the tribe. Among the Iroquois, however, women
were not wholly despised; sometimes, if of forceful character, they
had great influence in the councils of the tribe. Among the Hurons,
on the other hand, women were treated with contempt or brutal
indifference. The Huron woman, worn out with arduous toil, rapidly
lost the brightness of her youth. At an age when the women of a
higher culture are still at the height of their charm and
attractiveness the woman of the Hurons had degenerated into a
shrivelled hag, horrible to the eye and often despicable in
character. The inborn gentleness of womanhood had been driven from
her breast by ill-treatment. Not even the cruelest of the warriors
surpassed the unhallowed fiendishness of the withered squaw in
preparing the torments of the stake and in shrieking her toothless
exultation beside the torture fire.
Where women are on such a footing as
this it is always ill with the community at large. The Hurons were
among the most despicable of the Indians in their manners. They were
hideous gluttons, gorging themselves when occasion offered with the
rapacity of vultures. Gambling and theft flourished among them.
Except, indeed, for the tradition of courage in fight and of
endurance under pain we can find scarcely anything in them to
admire. North
and west from the Algonquins and Huron-Iroquois were the family of
tribes belonging to the Athapascan stock. The general names of
Chipewyan and Tinne are also applied to the same great branch of the
Indian race. In a variety of groups and tribes, the Athapascans
spread out from the Arctic to Mexico. Their name has since become
connected with the geography of Canada alone, but in reality a
number of the tribes of the plains, like the well-known Apaches, as
well as the Hupas of California and the Navahos, belong to the
Athapascans. In Canada, the Athapascans roamed over the country that
lay between Hudson Bay and the Rocky Mountains. They were found in
the basin of the Mackenzie river towards the Arctic sea, and along
the valley of the Fraser to the valley of the Chilcotin. Their
language was broken into a great number of dialects which differed
so widely that only the kindred groups could understand one
another's speech. But the same general resemblance ran through the
various branches of the Athapascans. They were a tall, strong race,
great in endurance, during their prime, though they had little of
the peculiar stamina that makes for long life and vigorous old age.
Their descendants of to-day still show the same facial
characteristics--the low forehead with prominent ridge bones, and
the eyes set somewhat obliquely so as to suggest, though probably
without reason, a kinship with Oriental peoples.
The Athapascans stood low in the scale
of civilization. Most of them lived in a prairie country where a
luxuriant soil, not encumbered with trees, would have responded to
the slightest labour. But the Athapascans, in Canada at least, knew
nothing of agriculture. With alternations of starvation and rude
plenty, they lived upon the unaided bounty of tribes of the far
north, degraded by want and indolence, were often addicted to
cannibalism.
The Indians beyond the mountains, between the Rockies and the sea,
were for the most part quite distinct from those of the plains. Some
tribes of the Athapascans, as we have seen, penetrated into British
Columbia, but the greater part of the natives in that region were of
wholly different races. Of course, we know hardly anything of these
Indians during the first two centuries of European settlement in
America. Not until the eighteenth century, when Russian traders
began to frequent the Pacific coast and the Spanish and English
pushed their voyages into the North Pacific,--the Tlingit of the far
north, the Salish, Tsimshian, Haida, Kwakiutl-Nootka and Kutenai. It
is thought, however, that nearly all the Pacific Indians belong to
one kindred stock. There are, it is true, many distinct languages
between California and Alaska, but the physical appearance and
characteristics of the natives show a similarity throughout.
The total number of
the original Indian population of the continent can be a matter of
conjecture only. There is every reason, however, to think that it
was far less than the absurdly exaggerated figures given by early
European writers. Whenever the first explorers found a considerable
body of savages they concluded that the people they saw were only a
fraction of some large nation. The result was that the Spaniards
estimated the inhabitants of Peru at thirty millions. Las Casas, the
Spanish historian, said that Hispaniola, the present Hayti, had a
population of three millions; a more exact estimate, made about
twenty years after the discovery of the island, brought the
population down to fourteen thousand! In the same way Montezuma was
said to have commanded three million Mexican warriors--an obvious
absurdity. The early Jesuits reckoned the numbers of the Iroquois at
about a hundred thousand; in reality there seem to have been, in the
days of Wolfe and Montcalm, about twelve thousand. At the opening of
the twentieth century there were in America north of Mexico about
403,000 Indians, of whom 108,000 were in Canada. Some writers go so
far as to say that the numbers of the natives were probably never
much greater than they are to-day. But even if we accept the more
general opinion that the Indian population has declined, there is no
evidence to show that the population was ever more than a thin
scattering of wanderers over the face of a vast country. Mooney
estimates that at the coming of the white man there were only about
846,000 aborigines in the United States, 220,000 in British America,
72,000 in Alaska, and 10,000 in Greenland, a total native population
of 1,148,000 from the Mississippi to the Atlantic.
The limited means of support possessed
by the natives, their primitive agriculture, their habitual
disinclination to settled life and industry, their constant wars and
the epidemic diseases which, even as early as the time of Jacques
Cartier, worked havoc among them, must always have prevented the
growth of a numerous population. The explorer might wander for days
in the depths of the American forest without encountering any trace
of human life. The continent was, in truth, one vast silence, broken
only by the roar of the waterfall or the cry of the beasts and birds
of the forest. |
