12 ' SIOUAN TRIBES OF THE EAST. [ethnology 



only with the destruction of the Timukua and the incorporation by the 

 Creek, within the historic period, of the last of the Uchi, leaving the 

 Muskhogean race supreme from Florida cape to the Combahee river in 

 South Carolina. This wave of invasion must necessarily have had its 

 effect on the Carolina tribes toward the north. The Yamasi of South 

 Carolina were of Muskhogean stock, and seem to have driven out a 

 preceding tribe of the Uchean race. 



It is useless to theorize on prehistoric migrations beyond the period 

 of coherent tradition. Within this period traditional and historical evi- 

 dence point out as the cradle of the Algonquian race the coast region 

 lying between Saint Lawrence river and Chesapeake bay. The tribes 

 occupying this central position — the Abnaki, the Mohegan, theLenape, 

 and the Nauticoke — regarded themselves as constituting one people, 

 and were conceded by tlie others to be the "grandfathers," or progen 

 itors, of the stock. From here, as their numbers increased, they sent 

 colonies nortliward along the coast, driving back the Eskimo, and prob 

 ably the Beothuk, Avestward and northwestward up the valley of the 

 Saint Lawrence and the lakes, and southward to occupy the coast of 

 Virginia and a part of Carolina, where, in conjunction with the Iroquoian 

 tribes, they expelled the Cherokee from the upper waters of the Ohio 

 and compelled them to take refuge in the mountain fastnesses on the 

 south. Most of these movements, although the subject of well-supported 

 tradition, belong to prehistoric times, but the advance of the Algon- 

 quian tribes into the northwest is comparatively modern. Since the 

 introduction of firearms, within the last two centuries, the Ojibwa 

 have driven the Sioux and Mmitari from central Wisconsin and Lake 

 Superior to beyond the Mississippi, while the Cree have swept the 

 whole country from Winnipeg to Great Slave lake, and the Blackfeet, 

 Cheyenne, and Arapaho have moved cut from the Saskatchewan and 

 Eed river and occupied the plains. 



But the great agents in the expulsion or extermination of the eastern 

 Siouan tribes were the confederate Iroquois of New York, With these 

 may be included the Tuskarora, who, though established on the Neuse 

 river in North Carolina, retained the clear tradition of their common 

 origin and were regarded as an outlying tribe of the confederacy with 

 which they afterward united as an integral part. From the very first 

 we find these pitiless destroyers making war on everything outside the 

 narrow limits of their confederacy, pursuing their victims on the one 

 hand to the very gates of Boston and on the other to the banks of 

 the Mississippi, and making their name a synonym for death and 

 destruction from Hudson bay to the Gulf of Mexico, Community of 

 blood or affinity of language availed not to turn aside their fury, 

 and the kindred Huron, Erie, and Conestoga suffered alike with the 

 Ottawa and the Illinois. When their warfare against the southern 

 tribes was inaugurated we do not know. It was probably continuous 

 with the expulsion of the Cherokee from the upper Ohio, and was m full 



