the whole of North America.

Not only had nobody the title and office of a king among the Indians;
nobody had anything like kingly authority. Rulership was not vested in
any one man, but in the council of chiefs. This feature, of course,
was very democratic. And there was another that went much further in
the same direction: almost all property was held in common. For
instance, the land of a tribe was not divided among individual owners,
but {36} belonged to the whole tribe, and no part of it could be
bartered away without the entire tribe's consent. A piece might be
temporarily assigned to a family to cultivate, but the ownership of it
remained in the whole tribe. This circumstance tended more than
anything else to prevent the possibility of any man's raising himself
to kingly power. Such usurpations commonly rest upon large
accumulations of private property of some kind. But among a people not
one of whom owned a single rood of land, who had no flocks and herds,
nor any domestic animals whatever, except dogs, and among whom the son
inherited nothing from his father, there was no chance for anybody to
gain wealth that would raise him above his fellows.

Thus we see that an Indian tribe was in many respects an ideal
republic. With its free discussion of all matters of general interest;
with authority vested in a body of the fittest men; with the only
valuable possession, land, held by the whole tribe as one great family;
in the entire absence of personal wealth; and with the unlimited
opportunity for any man possessing the qualities that Indians admire to
raise himself to influence, there really was a condition of affairs
very like {37} that which philosophers have imagined as the best
conceivable state of human society for preserving individual freedom.

Even the very houses of the Indians were adapted to community-life.
They were built, not to shelter families, but considerable groups of
families. One very advanced tribe, the Mandans, on the upper Missouri,
built circular houses. But the most usual form, as among the Iroquois,
was a structure very long in proportion to its width. It was made of
stout posts set upright in the earth, supporting a roof-frame of light
poles slanting upward and fastened together at their crossing. Both
walls and roof were covered with wide strips of bark held in place by
slender poles secured by withes. Heavy stones also were laid on the
roof to keep the bark in place. At