68 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
sit." We here find among the Virginia Indians at the epoch of their dis- 
covery long-houses very similar to the long-houses of the Iroquois, with 
the same evidence of a large household. It may safely be taken as a rule 
that every Indian household in the aboriginal period, whether large or small, 
lived from common stores. 
Mr. Caleb Swan, who visited the Creek Indians of Georgia in 1790, 
found the people living in small houses or cabins, but in clusters, each 
cluster being occupied by a part of a gens or clan. He remarks that ‘the 
smallest of their towns have from ten to forty houses, and some of the 
largest from fifty to two hundred, that are tolerably compact. These houses 
stand in clusters of four, five, six, seven, and eight together. * * * 
Each cluster of houses contains a clan or family of relations who eat and 
live in common.”” Here the fact of several families uniting on the princi- 
ple of kin, living in a cluster of houses, and practicing communism, is 
expressly stated. 
James Adair, writing still earlier of the southern Indians of the United 
States generally, remarks in a passage before quoted, as follows: ‘I have 
observed, with much inward satisfaction, the community of goods that pre- 
vailed among them. * * * And though they do not keep one promiscu- 
ous common stock, yet it is to the very same effect, for every one has his 
own family or tribe, and when any one is speaking either of the individuals 
or habitations of his own tribe, he says, ‘He is of my house,’ or, ‘It is my 
house.’”? 
It is singular that this industrious investigator did not notice, 
what is now known to be the fact, that all these tribes were organized in 
gentes and phratries. It would have rendered his observations upon their 
usages and customs more definite. Elsewhere he remarks further that ‘for- 
merly the Indian law obliged every town to work together in one body, in 
sowing or planting their crops, though their fields were divided by proper 
marks, and their harvest is gathered separately. The Cherokees and Mus- 
cogees [Creeks] still observe that old custom, which is very necessary for 
74 
such idle people.”* They cultivated, like the Iroquois, three kinds of maize, 
1 Smith’s Hist. Va., Richmond ed., 1519, i, 160. 
? Schoolcraft’s Hist. Cond. and Pros. of Indian Tribes. vol. v. 262. 
3 History of the American Indians, p. 17. 
‘Ib., p. 430. 
