NEW-ENGLAND TRIBES. xxi 



Of the Algonquin populations, the densest, despite a 

 recent epidemic which had swept them off hy thousands, 

 was in New England. Here were Mohicans, Pequots, 

 Narragan setts, Wampanoags, Massachusetts, Penacooks, 

 thorns in the side of the Puritan. On the whole, these 

 savages were favorable specimens of the Algonquin stock, 

 belonging to that section of it which tilled the soil, and 

 was thus in some measure spared the extremes of misery 

 and degradation to which the wandering hunter tribes 

 were often reduced. They owed much, also, to the 

 bounty of the sea, and hence they tended towards the 

 coast ; which, before the epidemic, Champlain and Smith 

 had seen at many points studded with wigwams and 

 waving with harvests of maize. Fear, too, drove them 

 eastward ; for the Iroquois pursued them with an invet- 

 erate enmity. Some paid yearly tribute to their tyrants, 

 while others were still subject to their inroads, flying in 

 terror at the sound of the Mohawk war-cry. Westward, 

 the population thinned rapidly ; northward, it soon dis- 

 appeared. Northern New Hampshire, the whole of 

 Vermont, and Western Massachusetts had no human 

 tenants but the roving hunter or prowling warrior. 



We have said that this group of tribes was relatively 

 very populous ; yet it is more than doubtful whether all 

 of them united, had union been possible, could have 

 mustered eight thousand fighting men. To speak fur- 

 ther of them is needless, for they were not within the 

 scope of the Jesuit labors. The heresy of heresies had 

 planted itself among them ; and it was for the apostle 

 Eliot, not the Jesuit, to essay their conversion. ^ 



Dahcotah bands had also planted themselves on the eastern side of the 

 Mississippi, nearly in the same latitude. 



There was another branch of the Iroquois in the Carolinas, consisting 

 of the Tuscaroras and kmdred bands. In 1715 they were joined to the 

 Five Nations. 



1 These Indians he ArmouchicLUois of the old French writers, were 



