of its habitat.  The land basis is always present, in spite of Morgan’s artificial distinction between a theoretically landless societas, held together only by the bond of common blood, and the political civitas based upon land.[82] Though primitive society found its conscious bond in common blood, nevertheless the land bond was always there, and it gradually asserted its fundamental character with the evolution of society.

The savage and barbarous groups which in Morgan’s classification would fall under the head of societas have nevertheless a clear conception of their ownership of the tribal lands which they use in common.  This idea is probably of very primitive origin, arising from the association of a group with its habitat, whose food supply they regard as a monopoly.[83] This is true even of migratory hunting tribes.  They claim a certain area whose boundaries, however, are often ill-defined and subject to fluctuations, because the lands are not held by permanent occupancy and cultivation.  An exceptional case is that of the Shoshone Indians, inhabiting the barren Utah basin and the upper valleys of the Snake and Salmon Rivers, who are accredited with no sense of ownership of the soil.  In their natural state they roved about in small, totally unorganized bands or single families, and changed their locations so widely, that they seemed to lay no claim to any particular portion.  The hopeless sterility of the region and its poverty of game kept its destitute inhabitants constantly on the move to gather in the meager food supply, and often restricted the social group to the family.[84] Here the bond between land and tribe, and hence between the members of the tribe, was the weakest possible.

[Sidenote:  Land bond in hunter tribes.]

The usual type of tribal ownership was presented by the Comanches, nomadic horse Indians who occupied the grassy plains of northern Texas.  They held their territory and the game upon it as the common property of the tribe, and jealously guarded the integrity of their domain.[85] The chief Algonquin tribes, who occupied the territory between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, had each its separate domain, within which it shifted its villages every few years; but its size depended upon the power of the tribe to repel encroachment upon its hunting grounds.  Relying mainly on the chase and fishing, little on agriculture, for their subsistence, their relations to their soil were superficial and transitory, their tribal organization in a high degree unstable.[86] Students of American ethnology generally agree that most of the Indian tribes east of the Mississippi were occupying definite areas at the time of the discovery, and were to a considerable extent sedentary and agricultural.  Though nomadic within the tribal territory, as they moved with the season in pursuit of game, they returned to their villages, which were shifted only at relatively long intervals.[87]