THE ORIGINAL HOME OF THE TRIBES.

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connection with the conflict, occupied the Upper Valley and spread themselves far to the north and east above the great Lakes and along the Atlantic, inclosing the diminished Huron-Iroquois tribes-reduced by so long and so great a war to a remnant-on all sides.

If these traditions contain a germ of truth, the burden of the contest occurred in the northern basin of the Valley, the conquered remnant escaping south, but, unwilling to trust themselves so near a warlike and pitiless foe, there organized an emigration in a body to their ancient homes in the southwest. Apparently, the Mobilian tribes, who were afterwards found in the Gulf States and along the Lower Mississippi, wandered from the Rocky Mountain region bordering Northern Mexico after the departure of the Mound Builders. This is indicated by some of their traditions, which describe a long series of travels from west to east, in which they were harassed by branches of the fierce Dacotahs or Sioux for many years. The high plateau north of Mexico, and the upper Rocky Mountain regions, seem to have been as prolific in hardy and savage tribes as Northern Europe during the later Roman period. Mexican traditions almost uniformly point to the north as the original home of her wild tribes, and those of the eastern and central part of the United States indicate as clearly a flow of immigration from the west.

The Natchez were the only people of the lower Valley who showed any signs of connection with the more civilized regions of the southwest. It is said that in their form of government, their religious system and their language, they differed radically from all the surrounding tribes, and that, in many respects, they bore the appearance of being a degenerate offshoot of the ancient Mexicans. Their traditions are also stated, by some authorities, to have distinctly affirmed their emigration from Mexico. They were so early extinguished, as a tribe, that they have not been as fully studied as the other races.

The structure and affinities of language are usually the most certain monuments of the pre-historic experiences of a people, and commonly furnish numerous suggestions and details of great value. By this means the ancient derivation, the wanderings, the relationships, and the gradual progress of a race in civilization, far back in the pre-historic ages, may sometimes be made out. The languages of American Indians, however, have quite baffled the researches of the student of the past, and wholly refused, as yet, to give up the secret of their origin. They contain few or no traces of an ancient civilization, or of a gradual formation by the mingling of two or more languages of distinct origin, as do so many of those of the Old World. Apparently, they had passed through the hands of no more civilized generations and ages than those of the people who employed them in modern times. Simplicity and want of culture evidently characterized the people who originated them, from the earliest times. No remodeling has produced irregularities of form, or omissions and condensations to render the expression more brief and less cumbersome. Their testimony seems to prove that they sprang directly from the powers and needs of primitive men who ever after maintained them in their original completeness and simplicity, adding no discordant elements and pruning off no unnecessary and cumbersome exhuberance. Indian language, therefore, in the judgment of the best recent authorities, unites with Indian manners, customs and monuments, in suggesting that if they were not originated on this continent they separated from the parent stock while in its infantile and undeveloped state, and that the Wild Hunter races are not a degenerate offshoot of a more civilized people.

The Indian tribes of the Valley, east of the Mississippi, were classed, by their affinities of language, as Mobiliansincluding the Creeks or Muscogees, Choctaws and Chickasaws -the Uchees and Natchez; the Cherokees; and the Algonquins, who occupied most of the upper Valley. Branches of

THE LOCATION OF TRIBES IN THE VALLEY.

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Iroquois tribes occupied the headwaters of the Ohio and the southern shore of Lake Erie, nearly to the western boundary of the State of Ohio. The Missouri and its tributaries, from far up in British America to Texas, was occupied by the Dacotahs, whose lands extended east to, and sometimes beyond, the upper Mississippi. One tribe of this stock was settled on Lake Michigan. Texas is said to have been occupied along the coast by offshoots of the Shoshone race, whose principal tribes dwelt in and about the great Utah Basin. North and northwest Texas belonged to the Comanches. The great Valley and its borders could not fail to be a pleasant residence for these Children of Nature. Its forests, prairies and streams supplied all their wants, and its mild skies saved them from the suffering experienced by dwellers in a more rigorous climate.

These various distinct nationalities or classes of tribes of the Valley, so distributed, must have made their appearance there very long before they were visited by Europeans. The divergence of language among the widespread branches of one stock required the lapse of many centuries of local separation. Few legends were current in regard to their original settlement in the Valley, and we can not place unreserved confidence in those few. There were few popular and general traditions of their original migration from other regions. They had buried unnumbered generations of their fathers here, and the memory of their origin had retreated, at least for the multitudes, into the thick darkness of the distant past. Changes in habits and manners had been few and unimportant. The tribes of the Valley generally cultivated corn and some other vegetables, without, in any instance, renouncing their habits as hunters, or making any important advance toward civilization. The tendency to an almost exclusively physical life, which is indicated by the distribution of the brain in the whole race, appeared in the history of all the tribes-under the warmer sun, the briefer and milder winter

and prolific soil of the South, as well as in the more rigorous climate and scantier vegetation of the North. The Southern tribes, indeed, did not need to wander so far, and had, or might have had, more permanent homes, with their greater abundance of resources in a smaller space, but, at least when the epoch of English settlement arrived, they were not very appreciably different from the rest. They were incapable, it appears, of improving their fairer opportunity of making a real progress. Such as they must have been when their forefathers conquered the Mound Builders, they were, substantially, when the Star of Civilization rose out of the Atlantic to introduce the dawn of a new era.

CHAPTER II.

DISCOVERY AND EXPLORATION BY THE SPANIARDS.

Columbus lifted the veil that concealed the New World from the Old in the last part of the fifteenth century; but it was nearly three centuries later that the people for whom the Valley had been reserved appeared to take permanent possession. The Spanish discoverers were fresh from the conquest of the Moors, and overflowing with the spirit of romantic enterprise and religious zeal which that crusade had awakened. The great discoverer had been in his grave but a few years, his followers were scarcely yet firmly settled in possession of the beautiful and productive tropical islands lying between North and South America, and they were still ignorant of the gold and silver of Mexico and Peru that were soon to draw them like vultures to their prey, when the vicinity of Florida attracted them to examination, without, however, offering any of the substantial rewards to these high-born freebooters which they especially sought.

Yet they gathered some marvelous tales from the simple natives and a hint of the great interior Valley which would probably have led to speedy exploration, and possibly to settlement, had not the booty to be gained in more southern regions soon drawn their attention away. Still, several abortive expeditions in various parts of Florida were undertaken, and the wealth of the unfortunate Mexicans and Peruvians only deferred more vigorous explorations. The sixteenth century was distinguished in the annals of the Valley as the period of Spanish exploration, as the seventeenth was for French discovery and settlement, and the eighteenth for the