—_——7 
THE MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. iy le} 
in the first of these instances are not contradictory, for our author is 
speaking of manufactures when he says the men do “nothing, ete.;” 
and it is possible, in that latitude, for a man to raise a crop of corn and 
work it well too, and yet spend the most of his time hunting and 
fighting. To admit this however is to credit the old chronicler with 
a degree of refinement in the use of language to which he is believed to 
have been an utter stranger. In the second instance, there is no room 
for any such compromise. The two statement conflict, and can not be 
reconciled by any amount of verbal hair spitting. In neither case, be it 
observed, do the facts justify the inference that the field-work was left 
exclusively to the women, as that conclusion is manifestly impossible, 
so long as it is admitted that the men took any part in the labor, be it 
ever so small, at any stage of the process; and yet it is precisely upon 
these and similar statements that this conclusion is based. Without 
stopping now to inquire into the rationale of these contradictions, some- 
times only apparent, but often very real, it will be sufficient to say that 
they have not sprung from any wish to mislead, but have rather grown 
out of the fact that when these old writers began to generalize, they 
fell into the common error of failing to make du allowance for the 
many exceptions to the rule they were laying down. In all such cases 
the true way out of the difficulty is not to accept one statement to the 
exclusion of the other; neither will it aid us to offset one by the other, 
and so reject both, but rather we ought to qualify the general couelu- 
sion by the exceptions, and thus bring it within the bounds marked 
out by the facts. Believing this to be the true method of pursuing 
this investigation, it will be incumbent on me to examine into the his- 
tory of each tribe or group of tribes separately, in order to find out 
whether the men, ?@. ¢., the warriors, took any part in the field-work, 
and if so, to what extent. If, in the course of the inquiry, it should be 
shown that, in any tribe, at any time, the men did take some part in 
this work, no matter how insignificant it may have been, then it is 
evident that at that time, in that particular tribe, the field-work was 
not left exclusively to the women, whatever may be said to the con- 
trary by the author who tells the story. It must not however be for- 
gotten that although this statement as to the actual condition of a 
large majority of the tribes living east of the Mississippi and south of 
the St. Lawrence is believed to be true, yet it is not denied that there 
were many instances in which this labor was practically left to the 
women, owing to the fact that the men were away from home hunting 
or fighting. This fact was unfortunately of frequent recurrence; but 
as it was the result of an accidental and not of a permanent condition 
of affairs, it would hardly be fair to ascribe it to the existence of any 
custom or to any belief in the derogatory character of the work. 
Beginning with the Hurons, of Canada, we find that in A. D. 1535 a 
band of the Iroquois branch of that family was living in the stockaded 
H. Mis. 334, pt. 1——33 
