blow of a tomahawk. Often the chief will endeavour to make the parties
smoke the pipe of peace; if he succeeds, all ends here; If not, a victim
must be sacrificed. It is a stern law, which sometimes brings with its
execution many great calamities. Vengeance has often become hereditary,
from generation to generation; murders have succeeded murders, till one
of the two families has deserted the tribe.

It is, no doubt, owing to such circumstances that great families, or
communities of savages bearing the same type and speaking the same
tongue, have been subdivided into so many distinct tribes. Thus it has
been with the Shoshones, whose emigrant families have formed the
Comanches, the Apaches, and the Arrapahoes. The Tonquewas have since
sprung from the Comanches, the Lepans and the Texas[11] (now extinct)
from the Apaches, and the Navahoes from the Arrapahoes. Among the
Nadowessies or Dacotahs, the subdivision has been still greater, the
same original tribe having given birth to the Konsas, the Mandans, the
Tetons, the Yangtongs, Sassitongs, Ollah-Gallahs, the Siones, the Wallah
Wallahs, the Cayuses, the Black-feet, and lastly the Winnebagoes.

[Footnote 11: Formerly there was a considerable tribe of Indians, by the
name of Texas, who have all disappeared, from continual warfare.]

The Algonquin species, or family, produced twenty-one different tribes:
the Micmacs, Etchemins, Abenakis, Sokokis, Pawtuckets, Pokanokets,
Narragansets, Pequods, Mohegans, Lenilenapes, Nanticokes, Powatans,
Shawnees, Miamis, Illinois, Chippewas, Ottawas, Menomonies, Sacs, Foxes,
and the Kickapoos, which afterwards subdivided again into more than a
hundred nations.

But, to return to the laws of murder:--It often happens that the nephew,