f language, and not by special racial or physical
characteristics. The Eskimo, Dacotah, Mandan, Pawnee, and Muskoki
groups have no immediate connection with this Canadian story, although
we shall meet representatives of these natural divisions in later
chapters when we find the French in the Northwest, and on the waters of
the Missouri and Mississippi. The Algonquins and Huron-Iroquois
occupied the country extending, roughly speaking, from Virginia to
Hudson's Bay, and from the Mississippi to the Atlantic. The Algonquins
were by far the most numerous and widely distributed. Dialects of
their common language were heard on the Atlantic coast all the way from
Cape Fear to the Arctic region where the Eskimo hunted the seal or the
walrus in his skin kayak. On the banks of the Kennebec and Penobscot
in Acadia we find the Abenakis, who were firm friends of the French.
They were hunters in the great forests of Maine, where even yet roam
the deer and moose. The Etchemins or Canoemen, inhabited the country
west and east of the St. Croix River, which had been named by De Monts.
In Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, and Prince Edward Island, we see the
Micmacs {115} or Souriquois, a fierce, cruel race in early times, whose
chief, Membertou, was the first convert of the Acadian missionaries.
They were hunters and fishermen, and did not till the soil even in the
lazy fashion of their Algonquin kindred in New England. The climate of
Nova Scotia was not so congenial to the production of maize as that of
the more southern countries. It was the culture of this very prolific
plant, so easily sown, gathered, and dried, that largely modified and
improved the savage conditions of Indian life elsewhere on the
continent. It is where the maize was most abundant, in the valley of
the Ohio, that we find relics of Indian arts--such as we never find in
Acadia or Canada.

On the St. Lawrence, between the Gulf and Quebec, there were wandering
Algonquin tribes, generally known as Montagnais or Mountaineers, living
in rude camps covered with bark or brush, eking a precarious existence
from the rivers and woods, and at times on the verge of starvation,
when they did not hesitate at cannibalism. Between Quebec and the
Upper Ottawa there were no village communities of any importance; for
the _Petite Nation_ of the river of that name was only a small band of
Algonquins, living some distance from the Ottawa. On the Upper Ottawa
we meet with the nation of