6 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
divided between them. Resting on the bond of kin as its cohesive prin- 
ciple, the gens afforded to each individual member that personal protection 
which no other existing power could give. 
After enumerating the rights, privileges, and obligations of its members, 
it will be necessary to follow the gens in its organic relations to a phratry 
tribe and confederacy, in order to find the uses to which it was applied, the 
privileges which it conferred, and the principles which it fostered. The 
gentes of the Iroquois will be taken as the standard exemplification of this 
institution in the Ganowdnian family. They had carried their scheme of 
government from the gens to the confederacy, making it complete in each 
of its parts, and an excellent illustration of the capabilities of the gentile 
organization in its archaic form. 
When discovered the Iroquois were in the Lower Status of barbarism, 
and well advanced in the arts of life pertaining to this condition. They 
manufactured nets, twine, and rope from filaments of bark; wove belts and 
burden straps, with warp and woof from the same materials; they manu- 
factured earthen vessels and pipes from clay mixed with silicious materials 
and hardened by fire, some of which were ornamented with rude medallions; 
they cultivated maize, beans, squashes, and tobacco in garden beds, and 
made unleavened bread from pounded maize, which they boiled in earthen 
vessels; * they tanned skins into leather, with which they manufactured kilts, 
leggins, and moccasins; they used the bow and arrow and war-club as their 
principal weapons; used flint-stone and bone implements, wore skin gar- 
ments, and were expert hunters and fishermen. They constructed long 
joint tenement houses, large enough to accommodate five, ten, and twenty 
families, and each household practiced communism in living, but they were 
unacquainted with the use of stone or adobe-brick in house architecture, 
and with the use of the native metals. In mental capacity and in general 
advancement they were the representative branch of the Indian family 
north of New Mexico. General F. A. Walker has sketched their military 
career in two paragraphs: “The career of the Iroquois was simply terrific. 
They were the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the continent.”+ 
* These loaves or cakes were about six inches in diameter and an inch thick. 
+ North American Review, April No., 1873, p. 370, Note. 
