The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century | Page 4

New York, from the Hudson to
the Genesee. Southward lay the Andastes, on and near the Susquehanna;
westward, the Eries, along the southern shore of Lake Erie, and the
Neutral Nation, along its northern shore from Niagara towards the
Detroit; while the towns of the Hurons lay near the lake to which they
have left their name.
[ To the above general statements there was, in the first half of the
seventeenth century, but one exception worth notice. A detached
branch of the Dahcotah stock, the Winnebago, was established south of
Green Bay, on Lake Michigan, in the midst of Algonquins; and small
Dahcotah bands had also planted themselves on the eastern side of the
Mississippi, nearly in the same latitude.
There was another branch of the Iroquois in the Carolinas, consisting of
the Tuscaroras and kindred bands. In 1716 they were joined to the Five
Nations. ]
Of the Algonquin populations, the densest, despite a recent epidemic
which had swept them off by thousands, was in New England. Here
were Mohicans, Pequots, Narragansetts, Wampanoags, Massachusetts,
Penacooks, thorns in the side of the Puritan. On the whole, these
savages were favorable specimens of the Algonquin stock, belonging to
that section of it which tilled the soil, and was thus in some measure
spared the extremes of misery and degradation to which the wandering
hunter tribes were often reduced. They owed much, also, to the bounty
of the sea, and hence they tended towards the coast; which, before the
epidemic, Champlain and Smith had seen at many points studded with
wigwams and waving with harvests of maize. Fear, too, drove, them
eastward; for the Iroquois pursued them with an inveterate enmity.
Some paid yearly tribute to their tyrants, while others were still subject
to their inroads, flying in terror at the sound of the Mohawk war-cry.
Westward, the population thinned rapidly; northward, it soon
disappeared. Northern New Hampshire, the whole of Vermont, and

Western Massachusetts had no human tenants but the roving hunter or
prowling warrior.
We have said that this group of tribes was relatively very populous; yet
it is more than doubtful whether all of them united, had union been
possible, could have mustered eight thousand fighting men. To speak
further of them is needless, for they were not within the scope of the
Jesuit labors. The heresy of heresies had planted itself among them; and
it was for the apostle Eliot, not the Jesuit, to essay their conversion.
[ These Indians, the Armouchiquois of the old French writers, were in a
state of chronic war with the tribes of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.
Champlain, on his voyage of 1603, heard strange accounts of them. The
following is literally rendered from the first narrative of that heroic, but
credulous explorer.
"They are savages of shape altogether monstrous: for their heads are
small, their bodies short, and their arms thin as a skeleton, as are also
their thighs; but their legs are stout and long, and all of one size, and,
when they are seated on their heels, their knees rise more than half a
foot above their heads, which seems a thing strange and against Nature.
Nevertheless, they are active and bold, and they have the best country
on all the coast towards Acadia."--Des Sauvages, f. 84.
This story may match that of the great city of Norembega, on the
Penobscot, with its population of dwarfs, as related by Jean Alphonse. ]
Landing at Boston, three years before a solitude, let the traveller push
northward, pass the River Piscataqua and the Penacooks, and cross the
River Saco. Here, a change of dialect would indicate a different tribe,
or group of tribes. These were the Abenaquis, found chiefly along the
course of the Kennebec and other rivers, on whose banks they raised
their rude harvests, and whose streams they ascended to hunt the moose
and bear in the forest desert of Northern Maine, or descended to fish in
the neighboring sea.
[ The Tarratines of New-England writers were the Abenaquis, or a
portion of them. ]
Crossing the Penobscot, one found a visible descent in the scale of
humanity. Eastern Maine and the whole of New Brunswick were
occupied by a race called Etchemins, to whom agriculture was
unknown, though the sea, prolific of fish, lobsters, and seals, greatly
lightened their miseries. The Souriquois, or Micmacs, of Nova Scotia,

closely resembled them in habits and condition. From Nova Scotia to
the St. Lawrence, there was no population worthy of the name. From
the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, the southern border of the
great river had no tenants but hunters. Northward, between the St.
Lawrence and Hudson's Bay, roamed the scattered hordes of the
Papinachois, Bersiamites, and others, included by the French under the
general name of Montagnais. When,