269 



con gente blanca y de razon.*' 9 Notwithstand- 

 ing our impatience, we listened with interest 

 to the information given us by the worthy mis- 

 sionary. It confirmed all we had already heard 

 of the moral state of the natives of those coun- 

 tries. They live distributed in hordes of forty 

 or fifty, under a family government ; and re- 

 cognize a common chief (apoto, sibierene) only 

 at the moment when they make war against 

 their neighbours. The mistrust of these hordes 

 toward one another is so much stronger, as 

 those who live in the nearest neighbourhood 

 speak languages altogether different. In the 

 open plains, or the countries with savannahs, 

 the tribes are fond of choosing their habitations 

 from an affinity of origin, and a resemblance of 

 manners and idioms. On the table-land of 

 Tatary, as in North America, great families of 

 nations have been seen, united in several co- 

 lumns, to push their migrations across countries 

 little wooded, and easily traversed. Such were 

 the journeys of the Toltec and Aztec race in the 

 high plains of Mexico from the sixth to the 

 eleventh century of our era ; such probably was 

 also the movement of nations, by which the 

 petty tribes of Canada were grouped together, 

 the Mengwef, or five nations, the Algonquins 



* " With white and rational people." European self-love 

 usually opposes the gente de raton to the gente parda. 

 t Iroquois. 



