238 BUBEiAU OF AMEKICAN ETTES^OLOGY [Bull. 137 



than justice has been done. A superfluity of possessions has been 

 even more deadly in its effects on Indian character than white indiffer- 

 ence and neglect, but it was perhaps inevitable that in the case of the 

 Indians, as in our own case, we should confound well-being and 

 wealth. 



In the above quotations, attempts will have been noted to assign 

 separate characteristics to various tribes. Without doubt there was 

 some basis for these apparent differences, but I do not believe that 

 one of them was attributable to anything more profound than diver- 

 gence in past history, in custom, and in usage. 



THE INFLUENCE OF LANGUAGE " 



In the preceding section it was stated that most apparent differ- 

 ences in character were probably owing to customs and institutions, 

 that is they were the cumulative effects of past history. The best way 

 in which to determine what tribes have been subjected to greater en- 

 vironmental variations and what tribes to less is by comparing their 

 physical types and their languages, but, as we have seen, the physical 

 types are so much interwoven that it is doubtful whether we can 

 gather much valuable information from a comparison of them. Upon 

 the whole, we do appear to have indications that the tribes to the 

 north of our particular area, those known as Algonquians, represented 

 an aboriginal group which had a long history independent of any 

 effective influence from the Gulf tribes, and the same may be said 

 in general of the latter, though there are many that represent hybrids 

 of the two and may prove to be cultural hybrids as well. 



With language it should be far different, because language is the 

 principal medium by means of which all other cultural traits are 

 borrowed and perpetuated, and when cultural traits pass from one 

 tribe to another, there is considerable likelihood that words or other 

 linguistic phenomena will pass at the same time. It is probable that, 

 in most cases, language is more conservative than other cultural char- 

 acters and the borrowings are relatively less, yet we might expect to 

 find some evidence of such borrowings. For that reason it is of pri- 

 mary importance to establish as accurate a linguistic classification as 

 possible. 



At the time when this section was first known to Europeans, by 

 far the greatest part of it was occupied by tribes speaking lan- 

 guages belonging to what Powell designated the Muskhogean lin- 

 guistic family. This embraces all but two or three of the best- 

 known historic tribes, including the Choctaw and Chickasaw of 

 Mississippi, the Creek Indians of Alabama and Georgia, with their 

 later descendants the Seminole, the now extinct Apalachce of Flor- 



• See discussions in Swanton, 1911, 1917, and 1922. 



