RACE AN-D LANGUAGE. 



345 



Duponceau, Gallatin, and Pickering were the most conspicuous, who 

 fifty years ago laid the foundation of American ethnology, basing it 

 entirely on language. Albert Gallatin, applying to the study of lin- 

 guistics the penetrating sagacity which had resolved the most intricate 

 questions of national diplomacy and finance, framed on this basis his 

 great work, the " Synopsis of the Indian Tribes east of the Rocky 

 Mountains," which, published in 183G, still remains the highest au- 

 thority on the subject. Later investigators have followed in the same 

 line. Hayden, in his "Ethnography and Philology of the Indian 

 Tribes of the Missouri Valley " ; Dall, in his treatises on the " Tribes 

 of Alaska and of Washington Territory " ; Powers, in his " Tribes of 

 California" ; Stoll, in his " Ethnography of Guatemala" ; and Gatschet, 

 in his account of the " Southern Families of Indians," have all been in- 

 evitably led to the linguistic classification as the only scientific method. 

 The greatest of living historians has given to this method the weight 

 of his authority. The latest revision of Bancroft's " History of the 

 United States " (1887) comprises a succinct but minutely accurate enu- 

 meration of the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. He finds that 

 there is " no method of grouping them into families but by their lan- 

 guages" ; and he has accordingly named and classed the various groups 

 according to their linguistic relations, as fixed by the best authorities. 

 But the profoundest scholar can not be complete in all specialties. It 

 did not occur to the illustrious historian that the distinction of lan- 

 guage was significant of a similar distinction in character and customs ; 

 and thus, in his subsequent general description of the Indians, he has, 

 like many other writers, been induced to ascribe to them common 

 usages and traits to a greater extent than the facts will fairly warrant. 

 It is true that similar surroundings, together with close intercourse 

 continued for ages, had made a certain superficial resemblance among 

 the various groups of American aborigines within the earlier limits of 

 the United States ; but more careful inquiry discloses the radical un- 

 likeness, as decided in many other characteristics as in language. It 

 was inevitable that a special acquaintance with the tribes of the far- 

 extended Algonkin family, with which the English colonists were first 

 and longest in contact, should have colored all their ideas of the In- 

 dians. Thus the native habitation which Bancroft describes with his 

 usual graphic clearness — but ascribing it to all the tribes — was simply 

 the slight and temporary shelter of the restless Algonkin rovers. " With 

 long poles fixed in the ground, and bent toward each other at the top, 

 covered with birch or chestnut bark, and hung on the inside with em- 

 broidered mats, having no door but a loose skin, no hearth but the 

 ground, no chimney but an opening in the roof, the wigwam was 

 quickly constructed and as easily removed." Widely unlike this flimsy 

 Algonkin tent was the permanent " long-house " of the Huron-Iroquois 

 towns — a regularly-framed dwelling, having firm sidewalls and raft- 

 ered roof, and sometimes extended to the length of a hundred feet, 



