skins.  Sometimes the dwellings had rudely framed sides and roofs covered with layers of elm bark.  Usually these structures were fifteen or twenty feet wide by 100 feet long.  At each end was a door.  Along each side were ten or twelve stalls, in each of which lived a family, so that one house held twenty or more families.  Down the middle at regular intervals were fire pits where the food was cooked, the smoke escaping through holes in the roof.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Read Parkman’s Conspiracy of Pontiac, Vol.  I., pp. 17, 18.]

[Illustration:  Buffalo-skin lodge]

%59.  Clans and Tribes.%—­All the families living in such a house traced descent from a common female ancestor, and formed a clan.  Each clan had its own name,—­usually that of some animal, as the Wolf, the Bear, or the Turtle,—­its own sachem or civil magistrate, and its own war chiefs, and owned all the food and all the property, except weapons and ornaments, in common.  A number of such clans made a tribe, which had one language and was governed by a council of the clan sachems.

[Illustration:  Seneca long house]

%60.  The Three Indian Races.%—­With slight exceptions, the tribes living east of the Mississippi are divided, by those who have studied their languages, into three great groups: 

1.  The Muskhogees, who lived south of the Tennessee River and comprised the Creek, the Seminole, the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw tribes.

2.  The Iroquoian group, which occupied the country from the Delaware and the Hudson to and beyond the St. Lawrence and Lakes Ontario and Erie, besides isolated tracts in North Carolina and Tennessee.  The chief tribes were the Iroquois proper,—­forming a confederacy in central New York known as the Five Nations (Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks),—­the Hurons, the Eries, the Cherokees, and the Tuscaroras.

[Illustration:  Moccasin]

3.  The Algonquian group, which occupied the rest of what is now the United States east of the Mississippi, besides the larger part of Canada.  In this group were the Mohegans, Pequots, and Narragansetts of New England; the Delawares; the Powhatans of Virginia; the Shawnees of the Ohio valley, and many others living around the Great Lakes.

[Illustration:  Flint Hatchet]

%61.  Weapons and Implements and Clothing.%—­All of these tribes had made some progress towards civilization.  They used pottery and ornamental pipes of clay.  They raised beans and squashes, pumpkins, tobacco, and maize, or Indian corn, which they ground to meal by rubbing between two stones.  For hunting they had bows, arrows with stone heads, hatchets of flint, and spears.  In summer they went almost naked.  In winter they wore clothing made from the skins of fur-bearing animals and the hides of buffalo and deer.  For navigating streams and rivers, lakes and bays, they constructed canoes of birch bark sewed together with thongs of deerskin and smeared at the joints with spruce-tree gum.