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For convenience of discussion, Indian tribal land may be divided
into three classes: First, the land occupied by the villages;
second, the land actually employed in agriculture; third, the land
claimed by the tribe but not occupied, except as a hunting ground.
Village sites.—The amount of land taken
up as village sites varied considerably in different parts of the
country. It varied also in the same tribe at different times. As a
rule, the North American Indians lived in communal houses of
sufficient size to accommodate several families. In such cases the
village consisted of a few large structures closely grouped
together, so that it covered very little ground. When territory was
occupied by warlike tribes, the construction of rude palisades
around the villages and the necessities of defense generally tended
to compel the grouping of houses, and the permanent village sites of
even the more populous tribes covered only a very small area. In the
case of confederated tribes and in the time of peace the tendency
was for one or more families to establish more or less permanent
settlements away from the main village, where a livelihood was more
readily obtainable. Hence, in territory which had enjoyed a
considerable interval of peace the settlements were in the nature of
small agricultural communities, established at short distances from
each other and extending in the aggregate over a considerable extent
of country. In the case of populous tribes the villages were
probably of the character of the Choctaw towns described by Adair.4
“The barrier towns, which are next to the Muskohge and Chikkasah
countries, are compactly settled for social defense, according to
the general method of other savage nations; but the rest, both in
the center and toward the Mississippi, are only scattered
plantations, as best suits a separate easy way of living. A
stranger might be in the middle of one of their populous, extensive
towns without seeing half a dozen houses in the direct course of his
path.” More closely grouped settlements are described by Wayne in
American State Papers, 1793, in his account of an expedition down
the Maumee Valley, where he states that “The margins of the Miamis
of the Lake and the Au Glaize appear like one continuous village for
a number of miles, nor have I ever beheld such immense fields of
corn in any part of America from Canada to Florida.” Such a chain of
villages as this was probably highly exceptional; but even under
such circumstances the village sites proper formed but a very small
part of the total area occupied.
From the foregoing considerations it will be seen that the amount of
land occupied as village sites under any circumstances was
inconsiderable.
Agricultural land.—It is
practically impossible to make an accurate estimate of the relative
amount of land devoted to agricultural purposes by any one tribe or
by any family of tribes. None of the factors which enter into the
problem are known to us with sufficient accuracy to enable reliable
estimates to be made of the amount of land tilled or of the products
derived from the tillage; and only in few cases have we trustworthy
estimates of the population of the tribe or tribes practicing
agriculture. Only a rough approximation of the truth can be reached
from the scanty data available and from a general knowledge of
Indian methods of subsistence.
The practice of agriculture was chiefly limited to the region south
of the St. Lawrence and east of the Mississippi. In this region it
was far more general and its results were far more important than is
commonly supposed. To the west of the Mississippi only comparatively
small areas were occupied by agricultural tribes and these lay
chiefly in New Mexico and Arizona and along the Arkansas, Platte,
and Missouri Rivers. The rest of that region was tenanted by
non-agricultural tribes—unless indeed the slight attention paid to
the cultivation of tobacco by a few of the west coast tribes,
notably the Haida, may be considered agriculture. Within the first
mentioned area most of the tribes, perhaps all, practiced
agriculture to a greater or less extent, though unquestionably the
degree of reliance placed upon it as a means of support differed
much with different tribes and localities.
Among many tribes agriculture was relied upon to supply an
important—and perhaps in the case of a few tribes, the most
important—part of the food supply. The accounts of some of the early
explorers in the southern United States, where probably agriculture
was more systematized than elsewhere, mention corn fields of great
extent, and later knowledge of some northern tribes, as the Iroquois
and some of the Ohio Valley tribes, shows that they also raised corn
in great quantities. The practice of agriculture to a point where
it shall prove the main and constant supply of a people, however,
implies a degree of sedentariness to which our Indians as a rule had
not attained and an amount of steady labor without immediate return
which was peculiarly irksome to them. Moreover, the imperfect
methods pursued in clearing, planting, and cultivating sufficiently
prove that the Indians, though agriculturists, were in the early
stages of development as such—a fact also attested by the imperfect
and one-sided division of labor between the sexes, the men as a rule
taking but small share of the burdensome tasks of clearing land,
planting, and harvesting.
It is certain that by no tribe of the United States was agriculture
pursued to such an extent as to free its members from the practice
of the hunter’s or fisher’s art. Admitting the most that can be
claimed for the Indian as an agriculturist, it may be stated that,
whether because of the small population or because of the crude
manner in which his operations were carried on, the amount of land
devoted to agriculture within the area in question was
infinitesimally small as compared with the total. Upon a map colored
to show only the village sites and agricultural land, the colors
would appear in small spots, while by far the greater part of the
map would remain uncolored.
Hunting claims.—The great body of the
land within the area mapped which was occupied by agricultural
tribes, and all the land outside it, was held as a common hunting
ground, and the tribal claim to territory, independent of village
sites and corn fields, amounted practically to little else than
hunting claims. The community of possession in the tribe to the
hunting ground was established and practically enforced by hunting
laws, which dealt with the divisions of game among the village, or
among the families of the hunters actually taking part in any
particular hunt. As a rule, such natural landmarks as rivers, lakes,
hills, and mountain chains served to mark with sufficient accuracy
the territorial tribal limits. In California, and among the Haida
and perhaps other tribes of the northwest coast, the value of
certain hunting and fishing claims led to their definition by
artificial boundaries, as by sticks or stones.5
Such precautions imply a large population, and in such regions as
California the killing of game upon the land of adjoining tribes was
rigidly prohibited and sternly punished.
As stated above, every part of the vast area included in the present
map is to be regarded as belonging, according to Indian ideas of
land title, to one or another of the Indian tribes. To determine the
several tribal possessions and to indicate the proper boundary lines
between individual tribes and linguistic families is a work of great
difficulty. This is due more to the imperfection and scantiness
of available data concerning tribal claims than to the absence of
claimants or to any ambiguity in the minds of the Indians as to the
boundaries of their several possessions.
Not only is precise data wanting respecting the limits of land
actually held or claimed by many tribes, but there are other tribes,
which disappeared early in the history of our country, the
boundaries to whose habitat is to be determined only in the most
general way. Concerning some of these, our information is so vague
that the very linguistic family they belonged to is in doubt. In the
case of probably no one family are the data sufficient in amount and
accuracy to determine positively the exact areas definitely claimed
or actually held by the tribes. Even in respect of the territory of
many of the tribes of the eastern United States, much of whose land
was ceded by actual treaty with the Government, doubt exists. The
fixation of the boundary points, when these are specifically
mentioned in the treaty, as was the rule, is often extremely
difficult, owing to the frequent changes of geographic names and the
consequent disagreement of present with ancient maps. Moreover, when
the Indian’s claim to his land had been admitted by Government, and
the latter sought to acquire a title through voluntary cession by
actual purchase, land assumed a value to the Indian never attaching
to it before.
Under these circumstances, either under plea of immemorial occupancy
or of possession by right of conquest, the land was often claimed,
and the claims urged with more or less plausibility by several
tribes, sometimes of the same linguistic family, sometimes of
different families.
It was often found by the Government to be utterly impracticable to
decide between conflicting claims, and not infrequently the only way
out of the difficulty lay in admitting the claim of both parties,
and in paying for the land twice or thrice. It was customary for a
number of different tribes to take part in such treaties, and not
infrequently several linguistic families were represented. It was
the rule for each tribe, through its representatives, to cede its
share of a certain territory, the natural boundaries of which as a
whole are usually recorded with sufficient accuracy. The main
purpose of the Government in treaty-making being to obtain
possession of the land, comparatively little attention was bestowed
to defining the exact areas occupied by the several tribes taking
part in a treaty, except in so far as the matter was pressed upon
attention by disputing claimants. Hence the territory claimed by
each tribe taking part in the treaty is rarely described, and
occasionally not all the tribes interested in the proposed cession
are even mentioned categorically. The latter statement applies more
particularly to the territory west of the Mississippi, the data for
determining ownership to which is much less precise, and the
doubt and confusion respecting tribal boundary lines correspondingly
greater than in the country east of that river. Under the above
circumstances, it will be readily understood that to determine
tribal boundaries within accurately drawn lines is in the vast
majority of cases quite impossible.
Imperfect and defective as the terms of the treaties frequently are
as regards the definition of tribal boundaries, they are by far the
most accurate and important of the means at our command for fixing
boundary lines upon the present map. By their aid the territorial
possessions of a considerable number of tribes have been determined
with desirable precision, and such areas definitely established have
served as checks upon the boundaries of other tribes, concerning the
location and extent of whose possessions little is known.
For establishing the boundaries of such tribes as are not mentioned
in treaties, and of those whose territorial possessions are not
given with sufficient minuteness, early historical accounts are all
important. Such accounts, of course, rarely indicate the territorial
possessions of the tribes with great precision. In many cases,
however, the sites of villages are accurately given. In others the
source of information concerning a tribe is contained in a general
statement of the occupancy of certain valleys or mountain ranges or
areas at the heads of certain rivers, no limiting lines whatever
being assigned. In others, still, the notice of a tribe is limited
to a brief mention of the presence in a certain locality of hunting
or war parties.
Data of this loose character would of course be worthless in an
attempt to fix boundary lines in accordance with the ideas of the
modern surveyor. The relative positions of the families and the
relative size of the areas occupied by them, however, and not their
exact boundaries, are the chief concern in a linguistic map, and for
the purpose of establishing these, and, in a rough way, the
boundaries of the territory held by the tribes composing them, these
data are very important, and when compared with one another and
corrected by more definite data, when such are at hand, they have
usually been found to be sufficient for the purpose.
Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico, 1891
Linguistic
Families
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