Algonquin people

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Indians with whom the French explorers first came in contact were of the Algonquin family. Under different tribal names this race spread itself over the Atlantic seaboard from Carolina to Hudson's Bay, and farther west than the Great Lakes. In the comparatively small area now forming northern New York lived the Iroquois, or Five Nation Indians, who, like the Helvetii of old, out-stripped all the other tribes in valour, and at the time of the arrival of the Europeans were engaged in reducing their Algonquin foes to subjection. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At the present day, the traveller, perchance, may find them pitching their bark lodges along the beach at Mackinaw, spearing fish among the rapids of St. Mary’s, or skimming the waves of Lake Superior in their birch canoes.
Of all the members of the Algonquin family, those called by the English the Delawares, by the French the Loups, and by themselves Lenni Lenape, or Original Men, hold the first claim to attention; for their traditions declare them to be the parent stem whence other Algonquin tribes have sprung. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Above all, he cannot read the English version of the Bible.
23d. A friend asked me to furnish him an aboriginal name for a new town. I gave him the choice of several. He selected Algonac. In this word the particle ac, is taken from ace, land or earth; and its prefixed dissyllable Algon, from the word Algonquin. This system, by which a part of a word is made to stand for, and carry the meaning of a whole word, is common to Indian compound substantives. Thus Wa-we-a-tun-ong, the Algonquin name for Detroit, is made up from the term wa-we, a roundabout course, atun a channel, and ong, locality. ”

“ Yes, I have heard that the Algonquins stand even closer to you than your Hurons here. They are more than brothers. Indeed, it is said that your Count Frontenac calls them his children. Well, they did you credit. It took ten of them to silence Goodman Ellwood's musket, but they butchered him in the end. If you find a scalp with long silky white hair, monsieur, it belongs to John Ellwood. Value it, and nail it among your trophies, for it cost you the lives of a full half-dozen Algonquin braves. ”

“ 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." ”

“ They are a tall, active, shrewd, lithe, energic race. Parties of them have been engaged as voyagers and hunters, within modern times, and led in the prosecution of the fur trade into the remote forests of the north-west. In these positions, they have manifested a degree of energy, hardihood, and skill in the chase, far beyond that possessed by native, unreclaimed tribes. The Algonquin women, at the Lake of Two Mountains, make very ingenious basket and bead work, in which the dyed quills of the porcupine, and various coloured beads of European manufacture, are employed. ”

“ We look down on the mountains,
This is the Song of the Mountains.
And there is a similar strange charm in many another song of the Algonquin (New England) Red Indians, whose legends and traditions, orally chanted from generation to generation, have been saved from oblivion by the literal translations of Professor Dyneley Prince and the late Charles Leland. [1] They constitute an uncommonly interesting bit of aboriginal literature, and of a race now so rapidly perishing that “in fifty years there will be hardly a single representative left.” ”

“ I had an Iroquois prisoner last year whom I delivered to you. Here is a pipe that I give you to give to the Iroquois if you wish, so that we may smoke together when we meet.
The Algonquins: I do not have any prisoners to deliver to you, my father. The Algonquin is one of your children who has always clung to you, and who will be there as long as he lives. I pray the Master of Life that what you do here today will endure. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There has always been intercourse between Greenland and Labrador, and in this latter country we find the first Algonquin Indians. Even at the present day there are men among the Micmacs and Passamaquoddies who have gone on their hunting excursions even to the Eskimo. ”

“ Now for the first time the Algonquin notices that others in the same cabin are putting their heads together and talking in low voices. The very air seems full of mystery. The busy ones have dropped their accustomed occupations, and the idle ones have ceased their noisy talk and their games. All are wondering at the strange news from the Indian capital, telling of the unaccountable disappearance of the Frenchmen who formed the little colony at Onondaga. ”

“ I have thus passed in brief review the more prominent of the Algonquin tribes; those whose struggles and sufferings form the theme of the ensuing History. In speaking of the Iroquois, some of the distinctive peculiarities of the Algonquins have already been hinted at. It must be admitted that, in moral stability and intellectual vigor, they are inferior to the former; though some of the most conspicuous offspring of the wilderness, Metacom, Tecumseh, and Pontiac himself, owned their blood and language. ”

“ Abnaki, Algonquin, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Conoy, Cree, Delaware, Fox, Illinois, Kickapoo, Mahican, Massachuset, Menominee, Miami, Micmac, Mohegan, Montagnais, Montauk, Munsee, Nanticoke, Narraganset, Nauset, Nipmuc, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Pamlico, Pennacook, Pequot, Piankishaw, Pottawotomi, Powhatan, Sac, Shawnee, Siksika, Wampanoag, Wappinger. The present number of the Algonquian stock is about 95,600, of whom about 60,000 are in Canada and the remainder in the United States. ”

“ The language which they speak is singular, for no white man has ever yet been known to acquire it; but this may probably be attributed to their understanding the Algonquin, in which they and the Winebagos transact all conferences with the whites or other nations ”

“ This story is told by La Potherie, I. 299, and, more briefly, by Perrot, 107. La Potherie, writing more than half a century after the time in question, represents the Iroquois as habitually in awe of the Algonquins. In this all the contemporary writers contradict him.
This is but one of several stories that tradition has preserved of his exploits; and, with all reasonable allowances, it is certain that the crafty and valiant Algonquin was the model of an Indian warrior. That which follows rests on a far safer basis. ”

“ A few young ladies sat in groups, and chatted and ate candies, or read and ate candies while one young man, in white flannels and a straw hat waited upon them with stools and wraps and drinks of water, and magazines, fetching and carrying in a most abject manner. There was always a sad dearth of young men on the Inverness, except on a public holiday; but as the girls said, they could always depend on Alf. He was Algonquin's one young gentleman of leisure, and beside having a great deal of money to spend on ice-cream and bon-bons, had also an unlimited amount of good nature to spend with it. ”

“ He viewed his impatient guest a moment with gravity, and added, "yes, much further."
"And you trust her all alone?"
"She is an Algonquin maiden. She fears nothing."
"And why is an Algonquin superior to a Huron, for instance?" The young man, leaning idly back, and caressing the Indian dog of the chief, pursued his questions without any definite purpose, but merely to draw out his reserved-looking host.
"Why is the fleet deer that spurns the soil better than the dull ox that tills it? Or why is the eagle better than the hen that picks up corn in your doorway? ”

“ These Iroquois having had the best of the fight and reduced the Algonquins since our discovery of this country, principally because their pride giving us apprehension about their large number, they would not arm themselves until a long time after the Dutch had armed the Iroquois, made war and ruined all the other nations who were not nearly so warlike as the Algonquin, and after the war, diseases came on that killed those remaining ”

“ 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 ”

“ Many were driven west by the latter and later became known as Ottawa. The French missionaries at work among the Algonquins early in the 17th century found their language to be the key to the many Indian dialects now included by philologists under the general term “Algonquian stock.” The chief tribes included in this stock were the Algonquin, Malecite, Micmac, Nascapi, Pennacook, Fox, Kickapoo, Delaware, Cheyenne, Conoy, Cree, Mohican, Massachuset, Menominee, Miami, Misisaga, Mohegan, Nanticoke, Narraganset, Nipmuc, Ojibway, Ottawa, Pequot, Potawatami, Sac, Shawnee and Wampanoag. ”

“ Algonquin is a poor artist, who paints lovely sunsets and things, nights, and cuts cordwood during the day, struggling to win a competence so that he can sue for the hand of Sciataca, the wealthy daughter of a plumber.
She does not love him much, and treats him coldly; but he perseveres till one of his exquisite pictures is egorly snapt up by a wealthy man at $2. ”

“ It does not help the "opposition" to point out that Algonquin legends, declare that their ancestors came from the west. Even so, they came from the Pacific coast, where Eskimo Shamanism exists in its most decided forms. But in any case it cannot be denied that in the red Indian mythology of New England, and of Canada and New Brunswick, we have a collection of vigorous, icy, powerful legends, like those of a strong northern race, while those of the middle continent, or Chippewa, are far feebler and gentler. ”

“ And she replied, laughing, "Because they were all begotten (or born) in the night-time, but you are a child of the day and of light." [Footnote: There is probably an allusion in this to the Wabanaki, or Children of Light; that is, the Algonquin. This story was told me by Noel Josephs, a Passamaquoddy. I have been told by an old Passamaquoddy woman that the descendants of Pook-jin-skwess were the 'Nmmok-skwess. This stealing the white boy is related in another tale more folly. It may refer to the early dark Eskimo.]
How Glooskap became friendly to the Loons, and made them his Messengers. ”