thousands of persons. Some of the clans of the Scotch
Highlands were quite large, and it would often have been a hopeless
puzzle to trace a relationship running back through many generations.
Still, every Cameron knew that he was related to all the other
Camerons, every Campbell to all the other Campbells, and he recognized
a clear duty of standing by every clansman as a brother in peace and in
war. We see thus that the clan organization grows naturally out of the
drawing together of men to strengthen themselves in the fierce struggle
of savage life. The clan is simply an extension of the family. The
family idea still runs through it, and kinship is the bond that holds
together all the members.

{21}

Now, this was just the stage of social progress that the Indians had
reached at the Discovery. Their society was organized on the basis of
the clan, and it bore all the marks of its origin.

Indians, however, have not any family names. Something, therefore, was
needed to supply the lack of a common designation, so that the members
of a clan might know each other as such, however widely they might be
scattered. This lack was supplied by the clan-symbol, called a
_totem_. This was always an animal of some kind, and an image of it
was often rudely painted over a lodge-entrance or tattooed on the
clansman's body. All who belonged to the clan of the Wolf, or the
Bear, or the Tortoise, or any other, were supposed to be descended from
a common ancestress; and this kinship was the tie that held them
together in a certain alliance, though living far apart. It mattered
not that the original clan had been split up and its fragments
scattered among several different tribes. The bond of clanship still
held. If, for example, a Cayuga warrior of the Wolf clan met a Seneca
warrior of the same clan, their totem was the same, and they at once
acknowledged each other as brothers.

{22}

Perhaps we might illustrate this peculiar relation by our system of
college fraternities. Suppose that a Phi-Beta-Kappa man of Cornell
meets a Phi-Beta-Kappa man of Yale. Immediately they recognize a
certain brotherhood. Only the tie of clanship is vastly stronger,
because it rests not on an agreement, but on a real blood relationship.

According to Indian ideas, a man and a woman of the same clan were too
near kindred to marry. Therefore a man must always seek a wife in some
other clan than his own; and thus each family contained memb