664 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 2 8 



which stood on the site of the present city of Montreal — a name which 

 perpetuates that given to the hill upon which the native town then 

 ^tood, Mont Royal. 



As one result of the early expeditions, and undoubtedly there were 

 many of which no record is now available, it became known to the 

 people of Europe that America was occupied by many native tribes 

 who spoke different languages, whose villages differed in foiTn and 

 appearance, and whose manners and customs were influenced to a 

 marked degree by their natural environments. Some had well- 

 developed tribal organizations, were comparatively sedentary, and 

 occupied sites where frail bark habitations had probably been reared 

 through many generations. Near many villages were rather exten- 

 sive gardens in which were raised varieties of beans, pumpkins, 

 quantities of corn, and other vegetables for food. Other tribes 

 were more roving and each year would travel long distances through 

 the forests or pass with their light canoes along the streams to reach 

 the hunting grounds where game was more plentiful and more easily 

 taken than in the vicinity of their villages. In many localities the 

 entire village would seek the protection of the den,se forests against 

 the winter storms. During the frequent journeys away from their 

 more permanent settlements they would establish camps on the 

 banks of streams or in the vicinity of springs or lakes; the sites of 

 these small camps may now be recognized by the occurrence of a few 

 bits of broken pottery, chips of stone, or other camp refuse. 



A very careful estimate of the entire native population of that 

 part of the present United States which extends eastward from the 

 Mississippi to the Atlantic shows it to have been approximately 

 300,000, far les,s than that of manj^ cities now standing within the 

 same bounds. Certainly a small number of persons to have occu- 

 pied such a vast region, and as some parts were far more thickly 

 peopled than others wide stretches were without a human occupant 

 and were seldom visited except by roving bands of warriors bound 

 for the villages of their enemies or by hunters in quest of food. 



The many tribe.s are now known to have constituted several well- 

 defined linguistic groups, and of these, at the time of the coloniza- 

 tion, the Algonquian was evidently the most numerous. Tribes be- 

 longing to this family dominated the coastal plain from Carolina to 

 Labrador, and thus included the native people of Virginia and New 

 England so famed in the early history of the colonies. Kindred 

 tribes lived westward in the vicinity of Lake Michigan. Iroquoian 

 tribes of central New York, who by reason of their highly developed 

 tribal organization formed the league of the Iroquois, were practi- 

 cally surrounded by the Algonquians. The Cherokee were the most 

 important of the detached Iroquoian tribes and lived in the moun- 

 tainous region of western Carolina and eastern Tennessee and had as 



