368 ANISTJAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION,, 1942 



Cartier's voyage up the St. Lawrence Kiver in 1535, they had struck 

 an adjustment, as it were, with the nonagricultural Algonkians who 

 bordered them west, north, and east, an adjustment not unlike that 

 between the nomadic desert dwellers of Arabia and the settled vil- 

 lagers on the fringe of the deserts. The Algonkians, that is to say, 

 hunted and trapped along the lakes and rivers, transporting their 

 birchbark wigwams on toboggans during the winter months and in 

 birchbark canoes during the summer, roasting their meat and fish or 

 cooking it in portable birchbark kettles, but, generally speaking, keep- 

 ing to themselves and avoiding the Iroquoians of the lowlands, though 

 they did occasionally exchange a few furs with them for such luxuries 

 as tobacco and corn. The Iroquoians, for their part, peacefully cul- 

 tivated the fields near their clusters of shedlike huts, and their men 

 hunted and fished in the vicinity while the women harvested the crops, 

 manufactured clay cooking vessels, and performed numerous other 

 tasks incidental to a settled village life. 



Even in the sixteenth century, long before any European had pene- 

 trated inland as far as Ontario, Breton, Basque, and Portuguese 

 fishermen and fur traders had disturbed this adjustment. They had 

 upset the native economy by introducing iron tools and weapons, and 

 by creating an unlimited market for furs, particularly for beaver, 

 which led to the denudation of the game in certain districts and to 

 widespread movements of the native population for trade and hunt- 

 ing. Trade rivalries and encroachments on the hunting grounds of 

 others then engendered intertribal warfare that was aggravated by 

 the introduction of firearms ; and the Iroquoians of the St. Lawrence 

 Valley and southward became bitter foes of the Algonkians who sur- 

 rounded them on three sides, and of their own brethren in Ontario. 

 Differences in the social and political organization immediately as- 

 serted their influence. The well-integrated Iroquois tribes federated 

 for mutual protection (creating the well-known Five, later Six, Na- 

 tions), submitted to the rule of an elected council and to the discipline 

 of military chiefs, and through their military valor and skillful diplo- 

 macy during the colonial wars won for themselves ample farming 

 lands and a semiautonomous status when those wars ended. On 

 the other hand, the nomadic Algonkians, who lacked any close tribal 

 organization but wandered from one hunting and trapping gromid 

 to another in small, semileaderless bands, proved incapable of uniting 

 or of exercising great influence in the conflict between the French 

 and English for supremacy on this continent ; and, being a negligible 

 factor, they were pushed more and more to one side by the ever-in- 

 creasing flood of whites. 



Nevertheless, even these Algonkians encountered alleviating condi- 

 tions such as were lacking to the Indians over the greater part of 

 western Canada, who did not come into close contact with Europeans 



