Algonquian peoples

“ It hence follows that the northern part of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan, and the most of New England were the first settled habitats, in the United States, of the Algonquian people. Prior to the Dakotan incursion, the Algonquian probably controlled areas farther south, especially in Minnesota, while the mainly uninhabited interior, i. e., the plains of the Missouri and of the upper Mississippi, were the fields over which for a long period of time all the surrounding nations sent war parties and hunters, but did not venture to make permanent settlements. ”

“ It is true that according to the map the Algonquian stock extends as far south on the Atlantic seaboard as North Carolina, but this southward expansion there is of later date and can be excluded from the discussion. Indeed, the whole Delaware confederacy, covering the Algonquian areas in New Jersey, New York, and some portions of New England as well as all of that in the stales of Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and the most of Illinois, can likewise be excluded, since, as will appear, their acquisition of those areas is of comparatively recent date. ”

“ The singular lack of tact displayed by Governor Kieft led to an Algonquian Indian uprising (1643-45) , which resulted in the death of sixteen hundred savages, but left the border settlements in ruins, and seriously checked colonial growth for several years. The Algonkins being enemies of the Iroquois, the friendship originally formed between the Dutch and the latter was not disturbed by this outbreak.
Attempts to foster colonization. ”

“ From the variety of its forms and combinations it is a more difficult language than the Algonquian. No European has fully mastered it.
No attempt has been made to correct record orthographies further than to give their probable missionary equivalents where they can be recognized. In many cases crude orthographies have converted them into unknown tongues. Imperfect as many of them are and without standing in aboriginal glossaries, they have become place names that may not be disturbed. ”

“ Algonquian Creation-Myth
In many other Indian mythologies we find the wind brooding over the primeval ocean in the form of a bird. In some creation-myths amphibious animals dive into the waters and bring up sufficient mud with them to form a beginning of the new earth. In a number of these tales no actual act of creation is recorded, but a reconstruction of matter only. The Algonquins relate that their great god Michabo, when hunting one day with wolves for dogs, was surprised to see the animals enter a great lake and disappear. ”

“ There are also several forms of the Sioux name, to the same effect as Kitchi-sibi. I am ignorant of any English name originally given as a genuine appellation, and not a translation or mere epithet, like "Father of Waters," and the like. It is text-book tradition that this phrase translates the Algonquian term; which tradition is too untrue and too popular to ever die—let it rest in peace, along with Washington's hatchet and Tell's apple. ”

“ Still, it is quite possible that the Shoshonean people were powerful and spread over a wide interior area from which they have never departed even during the prevalence of the glacial climates of the north.
The two great Indian families, however, in which we are most interested are the Algonquian and the Siouan. Let us notice the contrasts in their distribution. The Algonquian spreads over the northeastern part of the United States and Canada, with a small root lingering adjoining the Shoshonean in Colorado, but has no representative on the southeast Atlantic coast. ”

“ AKAIYAN. A brave; in Algonquian legend of the origin of the Beaver Medicine, 184-187
ALEUTIAN INDIANS. Custom of, resembles that of Asiatic tribe, 11
ALGON. A hunter; in the story of the Star-maiden, 152-156
ALGONQUIAN STOCK. An ethnic division of the American Indians, 24-27
ALGONQUINS. The name applied to members of the Algonquian stock, 24 n.; tribes and distribution of, 24-25; early history, 25; an advanced people, 26; costume of, 58; marriage-customs of, 73; creation-myth of, 107-108; belief of, respecting birds, 110; belief of, respecting lightning, 112; and the owl, 111 ”

“ If the Algonquian stock in any of its tribes is found to have constructed mounds, such as those characteristic of the Ohio mound-builders, it seems to have been only exceptional or sporadic, or may be attributed to adoption from their neighbors belonging either to the Iroquois or the Siouan stock. ”

“ Pertaining to or designating the most extensive of the linguistic families of North American Indians, their territory formerly including practically all of Canada east of the 115th meridian and south of Hudson's Bay and the part of the United States east of the Mississippi and north of Tennessee and Virginia, with the exception of the territory occupied by the northern Iroquoian tribes. There are nearly 100,000 Indians of the Algonquian tribes, of which the strongest are the Ojibwas (Chippewas) , Ottawas, Crees, Algonquins, Micmacs, and Blackfeet. ”

“ The entire composure with which we have been able to speak of Sacs and Foxes in our day and generation is the reverse of the frame of mind which many persons now living can recall as having been once theirs, before the final subjugation of these capricious, turbulent, and enterprising tribes in trans-Mississippian territory. They are Algonquian Indians who can be traced in blood from Lake Ontario westward, along the gauntlet they ran from Ontarian Canada to the final burying-grounds of their hatchets in Iowa, Kansas, and the Indian Territory. ”

“ The Algonquins had been for generations the victims of the Iroquois Confederacy, and only when the French had guaranteed them immunity from the attacks of their hereditary enemies did they set their faces to the east once more, to court repulse a second time at the hands of the English settlers. Tall and finely proportioned, the Algonquins were mainly a sedentary and agricultural people, growing maize and wild rice for their staple foods. Indeed, more than once were the colonists of New England saved from famine by these industrious folk. ”

“ This aroused the Algonquins, who, seeing a man that had been so bold as to kill in their own cabins another to whom they had given liberty and treated as one of themselves, were carried away with passion; and some, more excited than the rest, advanced, and, unable to restrain or control their wrath, killed the man in question. Nevertheless they had no ill feeling at all towards the nation as a whole, and did not extend their purposes beyond the audacious one, who, they thought, fully deserved what he had wantonly earned. ”

“ Our good steed has sped like an arrow through the thicket; our pursuers, my rival, thy father, thy brother, and all thy tribe, lie foiled and fainting far behind us. There is no longer footfall or shout in the wind; the voices of angry men, calling the Algonquin by names he never owned and whose ignominy he may not avenge, have long since expired on our ears like the voice of a dying cloud in the Moon of Thunder. ”

“ Behind one barricade of logs lay the French and Algonquins; behind another, the Iroquois; and woe betide the warrior who showed his head or dared to cross the open. All day the warriors kept up their cross fire. Thirteen Algonquins had perished, and the French were only waiting a chance to abandon the voyage. Luckily, that night was pitch-dark. The Algonquin leader blew a long low call through his birch trumpet. All hands rallied and rushed for the boats to cross the river. All the Frenchmen's baggage had been lost. Of the white adventurers every soul turned back but Groseillers and Radisson. ”

“ As regards legends and folk-lore, no one can read the Eskimo tales and those of this volume and not feel that the Algonquin is to the man of the icy north what the gypsy is to the Hindoo. As regards the early religion of both races, it is simply identical, and it is far too peculiar in its many similar details to have simply sprung up, as many might assume, from the common likeness in customs of all savages. For there is in both a great deal of "literary" culture, especially in the Algonquin, and it would be little less than miraculous that this too should have assimilated by chance. ”

“ Migrations, inter-marriages, political alliances, wholesale absorption of captives and desertions, however, make it impossible to fix the tribal limits with any degree of exactness; yet the Algonquins may be said to have roamed over the country from what is now Kentucky to Hudson Bay, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and perhaps beyond. ”

“ On account of the death of one man you will hazard the lives of ten thousand, and run the risk of being reduced to perpetual slavery. Although in fact one man was of great value, you ought to consider how he has been killed; it was not with deliberate purpose, nor for the sake of inciting a civil war. The Algonquins much regret all that has taken place, and if they had supposed such a thing would have happened, they would have sacrificed this Iroquois for the satisfaction of the Hurons. ”

“ When first discovered by settlers from Europe, the degrees of culture were found to vary in different tribes. The Algonquins, who were the ruling people previous to the arrival of the French, wholly despised it, and branded as plebeian their neighbours by whom it was practised. In general, the northern clans, and those near the mouth of the St. Lawrence, depended almost solely on hunting and fishing; and when these failed, they were reduced to dreadful extremities, being often obliged to depend on the miserable resource of that species of lichen called tripe de roche. ”

“ Eight Algonquins, in one of those fits of desperate valor which sometimes occur in Indians, entered at midnight a camp where thirty or forty Iroquois warriors were buried in sleep, and with quick, sharp blows of their tomahawks began to brain them as they lay. They killed ten of them on the spot, and wounded many more. The rest, panic-stricken and bewildered by the surprise and the thick darkness, fled into the forest, leaving all they had in the hands of the victors, including a number of Algonquin captives, of whom one had been unwittingly killed by his countrymen in the confusion. ”

“ But while the Algonquins have made no other use of it, but to trace consanguinity, or at least, remote affinities of families, and while they have also separated into wild independencies and tribes, who have assumed new tribal names, and wandered and crossed each other’s track and boundaries in a thousand ways, the Iroquois have turned it to account by assuming it as the very basis of their political and tribal bond. ”

“ They are set out in some proper place, especially near the tombs or in the dwelling-houses, and there the souls of the dead come and satisfy themselves. In North America, among Algonquins who held that one of a man’s two souls abides with the body after death, the provisions brought to the grave were intended for the nourishment of this soul; tribes would make offerings to ancestors of part of any dainty food, and an Indian who fell by accident into the fire would believe that the spirits of his ancestors pushed him in for neglecting to make due offerings. ”

“ The Agreskoui of the Hurons, and the Agreskouse of the Iroquois, are, in the opinion of these nations, the sovereign being, and god of war. These Indians do not give the same original to mankind with the Algonquins; for they do not ascend so high as the first creation. ”

“ The religious belief of the Algonquins—and the remark holds good, not of the Algonquins only, but of all the hunting tribes of America—is a cloudy bewilderment, where we seek in vain for system or coherency. Among a primitive and savage people, there were no poets to vivify its images, and no priests to give distinctness and harmony to its rites and symbols. To the Indian mind, all nature was instinct with deity. A spirit was embodied in every mountain, lake, and cataract ”

“ The pale-faced nation are not fit associates for an Algonquin maiden. Mother Earth has no love for them; they are quick to wash away her lightest finger-touch upon them. They are pale and lifeless as a rock over which the stream washes continually. Their men are afraid of the rain; their women of the sunshine."
"It is even so. The Wild Rose covers her head, and even her hands, when she leaves the house." ”

“ The Iroquois, for once mindful of a promise, came in a compact fleet, a hundred canoes strong, and they stalked about the island for days, naked, stark, gigantic, contemptuous of white and red men, of friend and foe alike. The scattered Algonquins, whose villages had been razed by these same savage warriors, came down by scores out of the Northern woods, along little, unknown streams, and over paths with which none but themselves were acquainted. ”

“ As well as the Indians of the Huron language who inhabit land to the South, where they till the land and winter wheat, horse-beans, pease, and other similar seeds to subsist; they are sedentary and the Algonquin follow fish and game.
However, this nation has always passed for the noblest, proudest and hardest to manage when prosperous. When the French came here the true Algonquin owned land from Tadoussac to Quebec, and I have always thought they were issued from the Saguenay. ”

“ These tribes are called Algonkins. Indians speaking languages belonging to one stock are generally related in blood. Besides the area already named, Algonkin tribes occupied New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, a part of Canada, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and other districts farther west. The Blackfeet, who were Algonkins, lived close to the Rocky Mountains. So you see that one linguistic family may occupy a great area. On the other hand, sometimes a single tribe, small in numbers and occupying only a little space, may have a language entirely peculiar. ”