children than of those of a stranger.
Among the better classes of Indians, children are often affianced to
each other, even at the age of a few months. These engagements are
sacred, and never broken.

The Indians in general have very severe laws against murder, and they
are pretty much alike among the tribes; they are divided into two
distinct sections--murder committed in the nation and out of the nation.

When a man commits a murder upon his own people, he runs away from his
tribe, or delivers himself to justice. In this latter case, the nearest
relation of the victim kills him openly, in presence of all the
warriors. In the first case, he is not pursued, but his nearest
relation is answerable for the deed, and suffers the penalty, if by a
given time he has not produced the assassin. The death is
instantaneous, from the blow of a tomahawk. Often the chief will
endeavour to make the parties smoke the pipe of peace; if he succeeds,
all ends here; if not, a victim must be sacrificed. It is a stern law,
which sometimes brings with its execution many great calamities.
Vengeance has often become hereditary, from generation to generation;
murders have succeeded murders, till me of the two families has deserted
the tribe.

It is, no doubt, owing to such circumstances that great families, or
communities of savages bearing the same type and speaking the same
tongue, have been subdivided into so many distinct tribes. Thus it has
been with the Shoshones, whose emigrant families have formed the
Comanches, the Apaches, and the Arrapahoes. The Tonquewas have since
sprung from the Comanches, the Lepans and the Texas from the Apaches,
and the Navahoes from the Arrapahoes. The Texas are now extinct.
Formerly there was a considerable tribe of Indians, by the name of
Texas, who have all disappeared, from continual warfare. Among the
Nadowessies or Dahcotahs, the subdivision has been still greater, the
same original tribe having given birth to the Konsas, the Mandans, the
Tetons, the Yangtongs, Sassitongs, Ollah-Gallahs, the Siones, the Wallah
Wallahs, the Cayuses, the Black-feet, and lastly the Winnebagoes.

The Algonquin species, or family, produced twenty-one different tribes;
the Micmacs, Etchemins, Abenakis, Sokokis, Pawtucket, Pokanokets,
Narragansets, Pequods, Mohegans, Lenilenapes, Nanticokes, Powatans,
Shawnees, Miamis, Illinois, Chippewas, Ottawas, Menomonies, Sacs, Foxes,
and the Kickapoos, which afterwards subdiv