CANADA, A TYPICAL EACE OF AMEEICAN ABOEIGINES. 67 



by Cartier when lie first entered the St. Lawrence. They were absolutely ignorant of 

 metallurgy ; and notwithstanding the abundance of pure native copper accessible to them, 

 they cannot be said even to have attained to that rudimentary stage of métallurgie art which 

 for Europe is spoken of as its " Copper Age." Copper was to them no more than a 

 malleable stone, which they fashioned into axes and knives with their stone hammers. 

 Their pottery was of the most primitive crudeness, hand-fashioned by their women 

 without the aid of the potter's wheel. The grass or straw-plaiting of their basket-work 

 might seem to embody the hint of the weaver's loom ; but the products of the chase 

 furnished them with skins of the bear and deer, suiiicient for all purposes of clothing. 

 They had advanced in no degree beyond the condition of the neolithic savage of Europe's 

 Stone Age, when at the close of the fifteenth century they were abruptly brought into con- 

 tact with its cultured arts. The gifted historian, Mr. Francis Parkman, who has thrown so 

 fascinating an interest over the story of their share in the long protracted struggle of the 

 French and English colonists of North America, says of them : " Among all the barbarous 

 nations of the continent the Iroqviois stand paramount. Elements which among other 

 tribes were crude, confused, and embryotic, were among them systematized and concreted 

 into an established polity. The Iroquois was the Indian of Indians. A thorough savage, 

 yet a finished and developed savage. He is perhaps an example of the highest elevation 

 which man can reach without emerging from his primitive condition of the hunter." 

 Yet with this high estimate of the race as preeminent among Red Indian nations, he 

 adds: " That the Iroquois, left under their institutions to work out their destiny undis- 

 turbed, would ever have developed a civilization of their own, I do not believe." ^ They 

 had not, in truth, taken the first step in such a direction ; and, were it not for the evi- 

 dence which language supplies, it would be conceivable that they, and the whole 

 barbarian nations of America, of which they are a type, were Mongol intruders of a later 

 date than the Northmen of the tenth century ; who, it seems far from improbable, encoun- 

 tered only the Eskimo of the Labrador coast, or their more southern congeners, then 

 extending considerably to the south of the St. Lawrence. The prevalence of a brachy- 

 cephalic type of head among southern Indian tribes, while dolichocephalic characteristics 

 are common to the Eskimo and to the Huron-Iroquois and other northern Indian nations, 

 lends some countenance to the idea of the latter being the product of an intermixture of 

 Ked Indian and Eskimo blood. The head-forms, however, though both long, differ in 

 other respects ; and there is a like divergence apparent on comparing the bones of the face, 

 with a corresponding difference in their physiognomy. 



Dr. Latham, as already noted, finds in the Iroquois one of the most typical families of 

 the North American race, and Mr. Parkman styles them " the Indian of the Indians." 

 The whole Huron-Iroquois history illustrates their patient, politic diplomacy, their devo- 

 tion to hunting and to war. But their policy gave no comprehensive aim to wars which 

 reduced their numbers, and threatened their very existence as a race. Throughout the 

 entire period of any direct knowledge of them by Europeans, there is constant evidence 

 of the rise of feuds between members of the common stock, due in part, indeed, to their 

 becoming involved in the rivalries of French and English colonists, but also traceable to 

 hereditary animosities perpetuated through many generations. The strongly marked 



' The Jesuits in North America, p. 47. 



