time they had reduced to a tributary condition most of the Algonquin
tribes, even to the Mississippi river. Some writers have spoken of the
empire of the Iroquois, and it has been surmised that, if they had not
been interfered with by white men, they might have played a part
analogous to that of the Romans in the Old World; but there is no real
similarity between the two cases. The Romans acquired their mighty
strength by incorporating vanquished peoples into their own body
politic.[50] No American aborigines ever had a glimmering of the process
of state-building after the Roman fashion. No incorporation resulted
from the victories of the Iroquois. Where their burnings and massacres
stopped short of extermination, they simply took tribute, which was as
far as state-craft had got in the lower period of barbarism. General
Walker has summed up their military career in a single sentence: "They
were the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the continent."[51]

[Footnote 48: Morgan, _League of the Iroquois_, p. 12.]

[Footnote 49: All except the distant Tuscaroras, who in 1715
migrated from North Carolina to New York, and joining the
Iroquois league made it the Six Nations. All the rest of the
outlying Huron-Iroquois stock was wiped out of existence before
the end of the seventeenth century, except the remnant of
Hurons since known as Wyandots.]

[Footnote 50: See my _Beginnings of New England_, chap. i.]

[Footnote 51: F. A. Walker, "The Indian Question," _North
American Review_, April, 1873, p. 370.]

[Sidenote: Horticulture must be distinguished from field agriculture.]

[Sidenote: Perpetual warfare.]

The six groups here enumerated--Dakota, Mandan, Pawnee, Maskoki,
Algonquin, Iroquois--made up the great body of the aborigines of North
America who at the time of the Discovery lived in the lower status of
barbarism. All made pottery of various degrees of rudeness. Their tools
and weapons were of the Neolithic type,--stone either polished or
accurately and artistically chipped. For the most part they lived in
stockaded villages, and cultivated maize, beans, pumpkins, squashes,
sunflowers, and tobacco. They depended for subsistence partly upon such
vegetable products, partly upon hunting and fishing, the women generally
attending to the horticulture, the men to the chase. _Horticulture_ is
an appropriate designation for this sta