CANADA, A TYPICAL RACE OP AMEEICAISr ABORIGINES. 71 



sarage. War was their pastime ; and they were over ready to welcome the call to arms. 

 La Salle came iu contact with them on the discovery of the Illinois ; and Captain John 

 Smith, the fonnder of Virginia, encountered their canoes on the Chesapeake Bay bear- 

 ing a band of Iroqnois warriors to the territories of the Powhattan confederacy. They 

 were then, as ever, the same fierce marauders, intolerant of equality with any neighbouring 

 tribe. The Susquehannocks experienced at their hands the same fate as the Alligéwi. 

 The Lenapes, Shawnoes, Nauticokes, Unamis, Delawares, Munsees, and Manhattans, were 

 successively reduced to the condition of dependent tribes. Even the Canarse Indians of 

 Long Island were not safe from their vengeance ; and their power seems to have been 

 dreaded throughout the whole region from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. 



It thus appears probable that in remote centuries, before the discovery of America 

 by European voyagers, the region extending westward from the Labrador coast to Lake 

 Ontario, if not, indeed, to Lake Huron, had been in occuj^ation by those who claimed to be 

 autochthones ; though we have now no other knowledge of this than what may be deduced 

 from their own traditions of migration and war. But though thus maintaining a haughty 

 predominancy ; so far as their arts afford any evidence of progress, they were in their 

 infancy. The country occupied b}r them, except in so far as it was overgrown with the 

 forest, was well adapted for agriculture ; and the Irocjuois and Hurons alike compared 

 favourably with the Algonkins in their agricultural industry. But this work was entirely 

 carried on by the women, while the share of the men in the joint provision of food 

 was the product of the chase. The beautiful region was still so largely under forest that 

 it must have afforded abundant resources' for the hunter ; but it furnished no facilities 

 for the inauguration of a copi^er or bronze age, such as the shores of Lake Sujperior in vain 

 offered to its Algonkin nomads. Of metallic ores they had no knowledge ; and Mobile 

 they doubtless x^rized the copper brought occasionally from Lake Superior, copper imple- 

 ments are rare in the region which they occupied. Their old alliance with the Algonkins 

 of the great copper region had long come to an end ; and when they came under the 

 notice of the French and English colonists, the Algonkins had joined with the Hurons 

 as the most powerfixl and implacable foes of the Iroquois confederacy. 



In the ancient warfare in which Algonkins and Huron-Iroc|uois are found united 

 against the nation of the great river valleys, we see evidences of a conflict between 

 widely distinct stocks of northern and southern origin. It is an antagonism between 

 well-defined dolichocephalic and brachycephalic races. In the dolichocephalic Iroquois 

 or Huron, we have the highest type of the forest savage ; no nomad, but maintaining as 

 his own the territory of his fathers, and building palisaded towns for the secure shelter 

 of his peoiîle. The brachycephalic Mound-Builder, on the other hand, may still survive 

 in one or other of the members of the semi-civilized village communities of New Mexico 

 or Arizona. But if such attempts at the interpr(>tation of native traditions have any 

 value, they carry us back to pre-Columbian centuries, and tell of long protracted strife, 

 until what may at first have been no more than the aggressions of wild northern races, 

 tempted by the resources of an industrious agricultural community, became a war of 

 extermination. The elaborately constructed forts of the Moiind-Builders, no less abundant 

 throughout the Ohio Valley than their curious geometrical earthworks, prove the skill 

 and determination with which the aggressors were withstood, it may be through suc- 

 cessive generations before their final overthrow. 



