French Pathfinders in North America | Page 9

common. For instance,
the land of a tribe was not divided among individual owners, but {36}
belonged to the whole tribe, and no part of it could be bartered away
without the entire tribe's consent. A piece might be temporarily
assigned to a family to cultivate, but the ownership of it remained in the
whole tribe. This circumstance tended more than anything else to
prevent the possibility of any man's raising himself to kingly power.
Such usurpations commonly rest upon large accumulations of private
property of some kind. But among a people not one of whom owned a
single rood of land, who had no flocks and herds, nor any domestic
animals whatever, except dogs, and among whom the son inherited
nothing from his father, there was no chance for anybody to gain
wealth that would raise him above his fellows.
Thus we see that an Indian tribe was in many respects an ideal republic.
With its free discussion of all matters of general interest; with authority
vested in a body of the fittest men; with the only valuable possession,
land, held by the whole tribe as one great family; in the entire absence
of personal wealth; and with the unlimited opportunity for any man
possessing the qualities that Indians admire to raise himself to influence,
there really was a condition of affairs very like {37} that which
philosophers have imagined as the best conceivable state of human
society for preserving individual freedom.
Even the very houses of the Indians were adapted to community-life.

They were built, not to shelter families, but considerable groups of
families. One very advanced tribe, the Mandans, on the upper Missouri,
built circular houses. But the most usual form, as among the Iroquois,
was a structure very long in proportion to its width. It was made of
stout posts set upright in the earth, supporting a roof-frame of light
poles slanting upward and fastened together at their crossing. Both
walls and roof were covered with wide strips of bark held in place by
slender poles secured by withes. Heavy stones also were laid on the
roof to keep the bark in place. At the top of the roof a space of about a
foot was left open for the entrance of light and the escape of smoke,
there being neither windows nor chimneys. At either end was a door,
covered commonly with a skin fastened at the top and loose at the
bottom. In the winter-season these entrances were screened by a porch.
In one of these long houses a number of families lived together in a
way that carried out in {38} all particulars the idea of one great
household. Throughout the length of the building, on both sides, were
partitions dividing off spaces a few feet square, all open toward the
middle like wide stalls in a stable. Each of these spaces was occupied
by one family and contained bunks in which they slept. In the aisles,
between every four of these spaces, was a fire which served the four
families. The number of fires in a lodge indicated, quite nearly, the
number of persons dwelling in it. To say, for instance, a lodge of five
fires, meant one that housed twenty families.
This great household lived together according to the community-idea.
The belongings of individuals, even of individual families, were very
few. The produce of their fields of corn, beans, pumpkins, and
sunflowers was held as common property; and the one regular meal of
the day was a common meal, cooked by the squaws and served to each
person from the kettle. The food remaining over was set aside, and each
person might help himself to it as he had need. If a stranger came in,
the squaws gave him to eat out of the common stock. In fact, Indian
hospitality grew out of this way of living in common. A single family
would frequently have been "eaten out of {39} house and home," if it
had needed to provide out of its own resources for all the guests that
might suddenly come upon it.

We are apt to think of the Indian as a silent, reserved, solitary being.
Nothing could be further from the truth. However they may appear in
the presence of white men, among themselves Indians are a very jolly
set. Their life in such a common dwelling as has been described was
intensely social in its character. Of course, privacy was out of the
question. Very little took place that was not known to all the inmates.
And we can well imagine that when all were at home, an Indian lodge
was anything else than a house of silence. Of a winter evening, for
instance, with the fires blazing brightly, there was a vast deal of
boisterous hilarity, in which