The Bureau of American Ethnology 371 



cause language is the key to all other 

 activities; and the wisdom of the choice 

 was soon demonstrated by practical ap- 

 plication of the classification — for it 

 was found that tribes speaking related 

 languages were so nearly alike in arts, 

 industries, social organization, and be- 

 lief as to live together in harmony, 

 w^hile, if their languages were unlike, 

 their other activities, especialh^ their 

 beliefs, were so incongruous as to pre- 

 vent harmonious association. 



Under the linguistic classification, the 

 aborigines of America north of north- 

 ern-central Mexico were classified, early 

 in the present decade, in about seven 

 hundred and sixty tribes, grouped in 

 sixty stocks; and the later researches 

 have served to establish and somewhat 

 to extend this classification. 



The discrimination of the tribes and 

 the linguistic stocks to which they may 

 be assigned has afforded means for trac- 

 ing the history and elucidating the 

 movements of the aborigines with con- 

 siderable success; and this phase of the 

 work has received especial attention 

 during the last two years. The most 

 instructive example is afforded by the 

 tribes of the Siouan stocks: Gathering 

 on the southern Atlantic coast probably 

 three to five centuries before Columbus, 

 the parent tribes drifted northward 

 along the coast, and spread slowly in- 

 land; leaving the main coast along the 

 middle Atlantic estuaries, the^^ followed 

 Chesapeake and other ba3'S into the in- 

 terior, gradualh' abandoning piscatory 

 habits, and developing agriculture in 

 connection with the chase; the inland 

 invasion brought them in contact with 

 the buffalo, and a considerable part of 

 the people followed this eas}' game west- 

 ward across the Appalachian moun- 

 tains, and down the westward-flowing 

 rivers to the Mississippi, whence they 

 spread still farther westward, becoming 

 the buffalo Indians par excellence of the 

 northern plains. Meantime they in- 

 creased, both by normal growth and by 

 the absorption of weaker tribes and 



tribal remnants ; they spread over an 

 area several of hundred thousand square 

 miles, and developed a number of tribal 

 federations, the most noted being the 

 Dakota confederacy of six or seven 

 great tribes. Quite similar appears to 

 have been the growth of the Algon- 

 quian-speaking peoples, w^ho" occupied 

 the Atlantic coast north of the Siouan 

 tribes, and pushed inland along various 

 rivers from the Susquehanna to the St. 

 Uawrence, and drifted thence westward 

 along the Great Lakes and over the 

 plains adjacent, displacing or absorbing 

 alien tribes, and forming various con- 

 federacies as they spread over the vast 

 interior territory. Similar, too, save 

 in extent of migration, was the growth 

 of the Iroquois confederacy which, 

 within the period of three to five cen- 

 turies terminated by white .settlement, 

 pursued a career of assimilation in which 

 they extended territorial holding, ab- 

 sorbed a large but unknown number of 

 inimical tribes, pressed hard against 

 neighboring Siouan and Algonquian peo- 

 ples, and developed one of the be,st or- 

 ganized and best known of the native 

 American confederacies, the famous 

 Iroquois League. These examples il- 

 lustrate the demotic development and 

 geographic history of the aborigines of 

 ea;stern America; a growth and history 

 which may be summed in the statement 

 that the greater peoples represented b}^ 

 the principal linguistic stocks appear to 

 have originated on the coast and spread 

 inland, acquiring a crude agriculture, 

 creating elaborate social institutions, 

 and developing intelligence to a degree 

 corresponding to the esthetic and in- 

 dustrial and social growth. 



Quite different are the conditions on 

 the Pacific coast, where nine-tenths of 

 the aboriginal linguistic stocks are con- 

 centrated in one-tenth of the area; here 

 the peoples are subsedentary (or lim- 

 ited in range), generally of restricted 

 social organization, and of specialized 

 or localized industries and arts, while 

 the intelligence is of correspondingly 



