After enumerating the rights, privileges, and obligations of its
members, it will be necessary to follow the gens in its organic
relations to a phratry tribe and confederacy, in order to find the
uses to which it was applied, the privileges which it conferred, and
the principles which it fostered. The gentes of the Iroquois will be
taken as the standard exemplification of this institution in the
Ganowaman family. They had carried their scheme of government from
the gens to the confederacy, making it complete in each of its parts,
and an excellent illustration of the capabilities of the gentile
organization in its archaic form.

When discovered the Iroquois were in the Lower Status of barbarism,
and well advanced in the arts of life pertaining to this condition.
They manufactured nets, twine, and rope from filaments of bark, wove
belts and burden straps, with warp and woof from the same materials,
they manufactured earthen vessels and pipes from clay mixed with
silicious materials and hardened by fire, some of which were
ornamented with rude medallions, they cultivated maize, beans,
squashes, and tobacco in garden beds, and made unleavened bread from
pounded maize, which they boiled in earthen vessels, [Footnote:
These loaves or cakes were about six inches in diameter and an inch
thick] they tanned skins into leather, with which they manufactured
kilts leggins, and moccasins, they used the bow and arrow and
war-club as their principal weapons, used flint-stone and bone
implements, wore skin garments, and were expert hunters and
fishermen They constructed long joint tenement houses large enough
to accommodate five, ten, and twenty families, and each household
practiced communism in living, but they were unacquainted with the
use of stone or adobe brick in house architecture, and with the use