2i 4 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



of the Iroquois, but its main area is west of the Mississippi, embracing 

 the wide plains over which roamed the buffalo. These areas are 

 separated by the states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, 

 Illinois and Michigan, where now reside the Algonquian, or at least 

 where they were found by the Europeans when they made acquaintance 

 with the region. Guided by the same principles, we may infer reason- 

 ably that, on the amelioration of the glacial climate, the Siouan family, 

 residing wholly on the southeastern Atlantic seaboard, migrated toward 

 the north and west, crossing the mountains that bound them in, and 

 sought the plains on the west. With the vicissitudes of war and the 

 lapse of thousands of years, those who remained on the east side of the 

 Alleghany Mountains were permanently separated from those who mi- 

 grated, and the western tribes expanded rapidly over the western plains 

 of the Missouri, becoming powerful and a scourge to their neighbors, 

 " the Iroquois of the West," as they have been termed not inaptly. 



We can infer, therefore, that these two stocks, the Algonquian and 

 the Siouan, moving, one from the southwest and the other from the 

 southeast toward the Mississippi Valley, early came into collision, and 

 that in the main the Mississippi River at first constituted the boundary 

 line separating their domains. This early hostility became a hereditary 

 war, and on the side of the Siouan stock the Iroquois also participated. 

 I do not know of any record, and of but one tradition, of war between 

 the Iroquois stock and the Siouan stock west of the Alleghanies, but 

 both these stocks maintained bitter and hereditary war against the 

 Algonquian. The prehistoric Siouan people were neighbors in the 

 Carolinas of the prehistoric Iroquois, and the two people more or less 

 allied in language and having similar customs and the same opportuni- 

 ties for northward migration probably moved about simultaneously, 

 both tribes crossing the mountains into the country where the waters 

 flowed in the western direction, the Iroquois to the north of the Sioux. 



It is a remarkable fact that, with the exception of the earthworks 

 of the gulf coast, these two stocks are the only ones that have been 

 found to have had a general custom of constructing earth mounds 

 and embankments. 4 These common resemblances, regardless of any 



4 The mounds that are common in southern Michigan and along the Lake 

 Huron shore northward from Detroit, as well as those in northern Ohio and 

 western New York are attributable to the Iroquois or to some of their kindred 

 tribes, viz: the Hurons, Eries and Neutrals. The Iroquois dominion extended 

 to the north shore of lake Huron even in historic time. An old Dutch map of 

 1690 (?) published by Van der Aa has " Iroquoysen " in the northern part of 

 Wisconsin. Indeed there is good reason for believing that the Iroquoian and 

 Siouan stocks at this time possessed the whole country east of the Mississippi 

 River and south of the Great Lakes to northern Georgia, constituting together 

 the great Ohio dynasty of the mound-builders. The true earth mounds of 

 northern Wisconsin are probably later than this period. Mr. Geo. A. West says 



