SwANTONl INDIANS OF THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES 641 



situated on the left of the river [Mississippi] as one went up, on a bluff or eleva- 

 tion about thirty feet high. . . . They have their cleared lands or fields behind 

 the village, which are about a league wide by a league and a half long, in which 

 they harvest a quantity of corn, pumpkins, melons, sunflower seeds, beans, and 

 other similar things, as also a great quantity of peaches and plums. They have 

 the same advantages in hunting as the others, but they are not as favorably 

 situated for fishing, since the water of this great river is almost always disturbed 

 and muddy. According to what I was able to learn, four hundred warriors might 

 be drawn from this village and three hundred from the others. (Margry, 

 1875-86, vol. 3, p. 462.) 



Le Sueur describes the same dome-shaped structures, but he says 

 there was but a single fire in each. La Harpe, in 1722, counted 41 

 cabins in the village of Zautoouys (Otsote) and estimated tliat it con- 

 tained 330 persons. He tells us that the bank of the river here had 

 ai] elevation of about 2 feci:. Ougapa was at an isolated spot on the 

 west bank of the Mississippi, and its lands might "have a front of a 

 quarter of a league on the river and a depth of three leagues, very 

 good land all cleared." Tourima and Tongigua stood at distances 

 of a league, and the three together La Harpe estimated to have popu- 

 lation of 400 (Margry, 1875-86, vol. 6, p. 365) . 



SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 



General Features 



Professor Speck has made known to anthropologists the hunting 

 territory system of the Algonquian Indians of the far north, and he 

 and his pupils have traced this down into New England and Penn- 

 sylvania. In the Gulf region generally, as we shall see, each town 

 controlled the land immediately about it, but there is no evidence that 

 the more distant territories of the tribe were parceled up in this way, 

 though the data are so scanty that such a possibility cannot be ignored. 

 The following quotation from Strachey, which has already been given 

 but may here be repeated, comes nearest to giving us information as 

 to the condition of affairs in the tidewater region of Virginia : 



Every weroance knoweth his owne meeres and lymitts to fish, fowle, or hunt 

 in (as before said), but they hold all of their great weroance Powhatan, unto 

 whome they pay eight parts of ten tribute of all the comodities which their 

 country yeldeth, as of wheat, pease, beanes, eight measures of ten of all sorts 

 of skyns, and furrs eight of ten; and so he robbes the people, in effect, of all they 

 have, even to the deare's skyn wherewith they cover them from cold, in so much 

 as they dare not dresse yt and put yt on untill he have scene yt and refused yt, 

 for which he commaundeth they dare not disobey in the least thinge. ( Strachey, 

 1849, p. 81.) [See also p. 644 herein.] 



We also know from the marriage customs as described by Spel- 



man that residence was patrilocal, a decidedly Algonquian feature. 



Of course, the absolutism of Powhatan was something almost un- 



464735 — 46 42 



