“Home” was not, therefore, a village of fixed location to which one might have sentimental or ancestral attachments, but a spacious area, a territorial zone within which clusters of dwellings could shift location, fields could be cultivated and abandoned, and satellite hamlets erected overnight. The cultivation of fields did not bind one to the land. Though there were some groups, like the Lenapes and the Eastern Abenakis on the Maine coast, who were hunters and gatherers, horticulture was crucial for the survival of most of these people, but the cultivation of the soil was superficial. The land, which was worked by the women assisted by the children, was not plowed but simply scratched and punctured, with sticks and shells. The crops were planted together in hummocks formed amid surviving trees, stumps, and half-burned roots; the beans grew in twists around the cornstalks, and the squash and other gourds appeared helter-skelter alongside patches of weeds. Seemingly wild tangles of growths, these were in fact produce gardens, which provided a high percentage of the Indians’ caloric intake and much of the bulk of their consumption. But the cultivation of these fields, which were not renewed or fertilized but in time abandoned, did not engage one’s pride or challenge one’s skills. And it did not confine one’s attention or limit one’s sense of spatial horizons.18
For village life and horticulture occupied only a part of the Indians’ yearly cycle. After the early fall harvests, the villagers began moving off to inland hunting camps, where they spent at least the early part of the winter, leaving behind only a small cadre of elders and children to maintain the original site. The pattern of these movements varied from region to region. A typical New England sequence was two long sojourns in interior camps from mid-October to mid-March and then four or five short trips to coastal fishing camps between May and September. Some more sedentary horticulturists divided their lives between main villages and outlying farmsteads, from both of which groups moved out to special camps for fishing, fowling, and hunting.19
The hunting camps were widely scattered. The range of a single community’s winter dispersal could cover large spaces. Individual family units of both the Western Abenakis, in present-day Vermont, and the Delawares occupied hunting territories estimated at two hundred square miles each, informally divided into subareas, some for immediate use, some reserved, to prevent the depletion of game. A more precise measure—of the Iroquois hunting territories, based on careful estimates of the annual consumption of deer meat and deer skins on the one hand and deer herd densities on the other—reveals similarly that a village of two hundred inhabitants required for survival a hunting area of 272 square miles, or approximately 175,000 acres.20
Though particular hunting areas were identified with particular peoples and incursions of any kind could touch off wars, there were no formal, linear boundaries, which in any case could not have restrained hunters on active chases. There were only rough natural demarcations like recognizable environmental zones (forest types, drainage areas) or at best hills or mountain ranges or “systems of trails related to watercourses,” often separated by buffer zones. Rivers, for example, which often served as important borders, were also centers of community life, with housing clustered on both banks. But they were nevertheless part of a system of inexact but effective territorial parameters in a world that did not know possession.21
No one possessed—“owned”—land. “Ownership”—exclusive possession, with the publicly approved right to sell as a commodity or otherwise alienate and use as one saw fit—was unknown. Land was held and used communally, by the “larger corporate groups, and ultimately the tribe, that discharge a proprietary or controlling function over territory and thus resources.” The “ownership” of the land that communities were collectively entitled to control and use was vested in their sachems and those who advised them, but these leaders were only symbolic owners of collective rights in which individuals shared. Individuals possessed only things they used—farming tools, hunting equipment, cooking utensils. Similarly what they possessed of the land was what they could use of it. They had no private and absolute rights in the land, only rights of use derived from membership in the group—rights that were never exclusive, were commonly shared with others, and were impermanent. There were no permanent private property boundaries: a market in real estate was inconceivable. There was only access to the wealth that the land contained. Since most groups were structured and statuses differed, individuals played different roles in the life of the community and enjoyed different degrees of wealth, but their affluence or eminence bore no relation to the land as such. They engaged with it as they did with the air, the lakes, and the sea—freely, as part of their total environment, physical and spiritual. And like the rest of their environment, the land was familiar to them. Within its wide and vague boundaries the territory they inhabited and controlled was well known, well mapped in their mind’s eye; its terrain features, its dangers, and its strange numinous places—caves, whirlpools, deep springs, huge hollow trees: thresholds of other worlds—were registered in tribal lore and contemporary experience.22
They knew the land, however spacious, because it lay within their grasp. Villages and tribes in these broad regions were bound together by efficient communication systems. The Powhatans, dominant over almost all of the Virginia plain from the Rappahannock south to North Carolina and west to the Piedmont and its hostile tribes, could move quickly over the entire six thousand square miles of their territory by means of the rivers that flowed eastward into Chesapeake Bay and the complex of footpaths and tributaries leading north and south that linked the rivers into a single network. Similarly, the river system of Pennsylvania and western New York—formed by the Susquehanna, Delaware, and Allegheny rivers and their contributing streams—constituted a transportation system that covered thousands of square miles, from Lakes Ontario and Champlain south to Chesapeake Bay and west to the Allegheny Mountains. Between these rivers, brooks, and creeks, as between the rivers in the Virginia plain, forest pathways formed intricate grids that rendered the whole region familiar: “eastern Pennsylvania and all of New York were linked into one great system of intercourse by canoe and trails through the valleys.” A modern scholar has identified 131 separate Indian paths within the present state of Pennsylvania, a communication system certainly more elaborate and efficient than that of eighteenth-century Scotland and probably than those of the rural areas of most of western Europe.23
These were east-coast networks, but they were not isolated on the coast. They were linked, by footpaths and rivers that ran through and around the Blue Ridge and Appalachian mountains, to an arterial system in the backcountry and the farther west. The central highway—later called the Great Catawba War Path, or the Iroquois, Cherokee, or Tennessee Path—began at the Allegheny River in western New York and ran south through western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In effect, through its lateral linkages, it extended from Canada to Florida and west into the Mississippi Valley.24 How wide in the end the extent of the coastal Indians’ geographical awareness was, what sense they had of ultimate spatial magnitudes, is difficult to discover. But they were well aware that their hunting parties traveled one hundred miles or more in normal course, that warriors from Iroquoia regularly raided their enemies in North Carolina, who as regularly reciprocated, and that trade goods traveled great distances, by successive relays. Most of the copper ornaments that the Atlantic coastal and southern Indians prized were known to be produced by the Ottawas who lived near the Great Lakes, and conversely most of the marine shell beads treasured by Appalachian tribes and Iroquois peoples in the north and west were products of craftsmen working on the Atlantic beaches, especially those in the Chesapeake Bay area, who sent their goods northward up the Susquehanna River and its tributaries, through intermediaries like the Massawomecks in western Pennsylvania and New York. The Mohawks and Oneidas in upstate New York had access to Atlantic salmon, and it was common practice for the Wabanakis in the maritime provinces of Canada to send war parties on
coastal sea voyages to southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The sources of Ontario’s most exotic trade goods were particularly far-flung: slaves and marine shells from Florida and the lower Mississippi, copper from Lake Superior, and volcanic glass and pipestone from the Dakotas and Wyoming. Beyond those far-distant rims of common experience lay remote realms, imagined, legendary worlds that blended into the invisible universe of spirits that ruled the Indians’ everyday lives.25
Major Indian trails leading west and north from Chesapeake Bay
Click here to see a larger image.
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Thus their lives were played out in open, spacious landscapes, and their long-distance travel and trade, generous hospitality to friendly strangers, and regular adoption of war captives led to a sense of cosmopolitanism and to genetic intermixing as well.26 Yet these were village people, born into small communities and keenly aware of parochial identities and local cultural differences. Any sense of themselves as “Indians”—that is, as members of a single vast racial group distinct from any other—was inconceivable. The differences among them mattered greatly, however well they were able to tolerate and absorb them, and the differences in some respects were extreme.
Modern scholars identify two large language groups among the eastern woodlands peoples, Algonquians and Iroquois, the former dominant along the Atlantic coast from the Canadian Maritimes to North Carolina and irregularly but not very deeply inland, the latter prevalent in an irregular inland band stretching south from the eastern Great Lakes and the Mohawk Valley through western Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake Piedmont to central North Carolina and Tennessee. But as living languages the similarities within these two major blocs are largely technical and theoretical. Evolving unselfconsciously over centuries, following the movement and spread of peoples along the river routes and major valley trails, the two stem languages had branched out into separate dialects; eighteen have been identified among the eastern Algonquians, sixteen among the Iroquois.
The result, as these innovations spread and became stable, was geographical patterns of graduated distinctions such that most sublanguages or dialects were recognizable to their immediate neighbors, especially within separate river drainages, but less and less familiar to those more distant from them. So Munsee, spoken in the upper Delaware and lower Hudson drainages, was similar but not identical to Unami, spoken by people of the lower Delaware region. Similarly the thirty tribes of Powhatan’s empire in Virginia spoke different Algonquian dialects, but most, having developed in close association with each other along adjacent river valleys, found their languages mutually intelligible. Not all, however: geographical proximity did not always in itself create linguistic kinships. The language of the defiant Chickahominies, who lived in the midst of the Powhatans’ territory, and that of the Nansemonds, just to the south, may have differed from that of the regional majority. Even more different to the Powhatans was the language of their bitter enemies in the nearby Piedmont—the Manahoacs and Monacans; their speech was probably Siouan, one of several dialects of a language system extending south through the Atlantic backcountry, but it may have been an Algonquian dialect of such ancient origin and such isolated development as to be foreign to people only a few miles to the east. So too Cherokee, a language spoken by Iroquois people in the inland southeast, was as different from the rest of the surrounding Iroquois languages, experts report, as Romanian is from Spanish or Icelandic from Dutch.27
Language, in its differentiated forms, reinforced and helped shape boundaries that determined group identities. These were local people; they knew who they were and where they belonged. They lived as family bands and “tribes”—that is, closely interacting, coresidential clusters who shared not only dialects but also distinctive patterns of behavior and sets of deeply meaningful symbols. Their group names reflect, in complex ways, their sense of separate identity. Lenape is a self-definition that means “our men” or “real, common,” or “original people”; Onondaga means “people of the hill”; Powhatan means “town at the falls”; Abenaki means “dawnland people” or “easterners.” Of four autonomous groups that lived along the Delaware River, the northernmost, at the New York–New Jersey border, were Minsi or Minisinks (“people of the stony country”); the next, just to the south, were the Unalimi (“people up the river”); next, the Unami (“people down the river”); and finally, those at the mouth of Delaware Bay, the Unalachtigo (“people near the ocean”). So they were known, by themselves and by others. But tribal nomenclature could work in several dimensions: internal and external identifications could differ. The Mohawks, in their own Iroquoian dialect, called themselves “people of the flint,” but Mohawk itself is a south coastal word that means, in Narragansett, “man-eaters,” in Unami “cannibal monsters.” The Oneidas identified themselves as “people of the erected stone,” but within the Iroquois League they were referred to as “they of the big tree.” The Senecas called themselves “people of the great hill,” but the Oneidas called them “bird people” and the Munsees “red-tailed hawks.”28
Names, either self-referential or external, set groups apart, but names were only the outer expressions of social and behavioral differences. The Powhatans’ world was hierarchical, centralized, and structured in three tiers: towns grouped into chiefdoms dominated by a paramount chiefdom. While it was not a vertically integrated authority system (Powhatan’s personal authority was neither complete, consistent, nor everywhere compelling, and he, and the lesser rulers, were beholden to the priests), the district chiefs had life-and-death power. A hierarchy of ascribed statuses was elaborately expressed in dress, ritual, and various signs of affluence, and the flourishing horticultural and hunting economy was dominated by a savage tribute system that resulted in an elitist redistribution of resources that was arbitrary with respect to need or productivity. Powhatan, the paramount chief, had created an “empire” by military force, but like other, smaller, less stable, and less well-organized groupings, the peripheries of his domain remained fluid, likely to dissipate in loyalty and merge with alien groups. So Powhatan was frequently at war to keep his power intact, raiding and punishing those who resisted his authority, and annihilating whole tribes when they could not be disciplined.29
The Powhatans’ world was “one of the most complex societies … then extant in eastern North America.” But other peoples in southern Virginia and northern North Carolina (the Nansemonds and Chowans, for example) had something of the same sociocultural structure, while still others in the same general region (the Tuscaroras, Nottoways, and Meherrins) were essentially egalitarian, their distinctions achieved not ascribed, their decisions arrived at by consensus, and their goods shared or pooled. The Lenapes, who lived just to the north of the Virginia plain, along the lower Delaware River and its tributaries, were pacific people, neither horticulturists nor enterprising hunters but foragers, who lived in small unprotected kinship bands scattered along the river terraces. Their economy was primitive, their social and political order egalitarian, their unplanned villages scarcely more than temporary encampments of family units entirely lacking in central authority. To the north of them—in the more densely populated area of northern New Jersey, the lower Hudson River valley, western Long Island, and southern New England—were more sophisticated people. They lived in well-organized villages, or in dispersed farmsteads surrounded by fields; they cultivated gardens that stretched out into the countryside, and maintained consensual governments, independent of regional coordination or central domination. The Shinnecocks of Long Island were radically egalitarian—at times almost anarchically democratic. Still farther north, in the thinly populated maritime region of northern New England reaching into southeastern Canada and Nova Scotia, were Eastern Abenaki tribes closely identified with the coastal rivers and streams on which they were entirely dependent. They were peaceable, riverine fisher folk, hunters and gatherers; their political organization was as undeveloped as their economy. Subsisting largely on fish supplemented by wild plants an
d game, they lived in a primitive survivors’ world distinctly different from that of the tribes to the west—the prosperous villagers who lived on the floodplains of the Connecticut River valley, the Mahican fishermen, horticulturists, and hunters in relatively secure palisaded villages built on hilltops along the upper Hudson River valley, and the Western Abenakis in present-day New Hampshire and Vermont. The last, whose settlements centered on the Champlain valley and for whom horticulture was a mere supplement to hunting and gathering, had a civil chief and a war chief, a Great Council of chiefs and elders, and a General Council to decide on questions of war. And still farther to the west—west of the Hudson and Catskill divide—was the contrasting world of the Iroquois.30
The five tribes in the Mohawk Valley and the Finger Lakes district of western New York who had joined in the late fifteenth century to form the nonaggression coalition known as the Iroquois League—the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas—were politically the most sophisticated people in the eastern woodlands and militarily the most powerful and the most feared. Fierce warriors perpetually organized for war, whose savage treatment of captives created terror wherever it was known, the Iroquois were the scourge of their neighbors and rivals. The Western Abenakis’ panic fear of the Iroquois tribe closest to them, the Mohawks, has been described as “almost psychotic”; the Hurons might realistically have anticipated that one day the neighboring Iroquois would utterly destroy them.
The Iroquois League’s ten populous towns and associated hamlets were bustling, well-organized, and well-fortified communities, constructed not at river edges but on hilltops, from which all approaches could be seen. The major towns were surrounded by two or three rings of palisades—solid barriers of upright logs enclosing two to sixteen acres—constructed within outer ranks of ditches and earth mounds and complete with inner galleries and weapons platforms. In each of these spacious, fortified compounds were several dozen longhouses, bark-covered structures with arched roofs, some two hundred feet long and twenty feet high, built in parallel rows. Each such dwelling was divided into family compartments, with raised sleeping platforms and ample storage space, the whole interior heated by fireplaces located at regular intervals. And beyond the town walls and barriers were fields of the staple crops—corn, beans, and squash—cultivated by women and children. English visitors understandably called these compounds “castles.”
The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 Page 3