INTRODUCTION.

NATIVE TRIBES.


DIVISIONS.--THE ALGONQUINS.--THE HURONS.--THEIR HOUSES.--
FORTIFICATIONS.--HABITS.--ARTS.--WOMEN.--TRADE.--FESTIVITIES.--
MEDICINE.--THE TOBACCO NATION.--THE NEUTRALS.--THE ERIES.--
THE ANDASTES.--THE IROQUOIS.--SOCIAL AND POLITICAL ORGANIZATION.--
IROQUOIS INSTITUTIONS, CUSTOMS, AND CHARACTER.--
INDIAN RELIGION AND SUPERSTITIONS.--THE INDIAN MIND.


America, when it became known to Europeans, was, as it had long been,
a scene of wide-spread revolution. North and South, tribe was giving
place to tribe, language to language; for the Indian, hopelessly
unchanging in respect to individual and social development, was, as
regarded tribal relations and local haunts, mutable as the wind. In
Canada and the northern section of the United States, the elements of
change were especially active. The Indian population which, in 1535,
Cartier found at Montreal and Quebec, had disappeared at the opening of
the next century, and another race had succeeded, in language and customs
widely different; while, in the region now forming the State of New York,
a power was rising to a ferocious vitality, which, but for the presence
of Europeans, would probably have subjected, absorbed, or exterminated
every other Indian community east of the Mississippi and north of the
Ohio.

The vast tract of wilderness from the Mississippi to the Atlantic,