gether, and then covering them with bark or skins.
Sometimes the dwellings had rudely framed sides and roofs covered with
layers of elm bark. Usually these structures were fifteen or twenty feet
wide by 100 feet long. At each end was a door. Along each side were ten
or twelve stalls, in each of which lived a family, so that one house
held twenty or more families. Down the middle at regular intervals were
fire pits where the food was cooked, the smoke escaping through holes in
the roof.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, Vol. I., pp. 17,
18.]

[Illustration: Buffalo-skin lodge]

%59. Clans and Tribes.%--All the families living in such a house
traced descent from a common female ancestor, and formed a clan. Each
clan had its own name,--usually that of some animal, as the Wolf, the
Bear, or the Turtle,--its own sachem or civil magistrate, and its own
war chiefs, and owned all the food and all the property, except weapons
and ornaments, in common. A number of such clans made a tribe, which had
one language and was governed by a council of the clan sachems.

[Illustration: Seneca long house]

%60. The Three Indian Races.%--With slight exceptions, the tribes
living east of the Mississippi are divided, by those who have studied
their languages, into three great groups:

1. The Muskhogees, who lived south of the Tennessee River and comprised
the Creek, the Seminole, the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw tribes.

2. The Iroquoian group, which occupied the country from the Delaware and
the Hudson to and beyond the St. Lawrence and Lakes Ontario and Erie,
besides isolated tracts in North Carolina and Tennessee. The chief
tribes were the Iroquois proper,--forming a confederacy in central New
York known as the Five Nations (Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas,
and Mohawks),--the Hurons, the Eries, the Cherokees, and the Tuscaroras.

[Illustration: Moccasin]

3. The Algonquian group, which occupied the rest of what is now the
United States east of the Mississippi, besides the larger part of
Canada. In this group were the Mohegans, Pequots, and Narragansetts of
New England; the Delawares; the Powhatans of Virginia; the Shawnees of
the Ohio valley, and many others living around the Great Lakes.

[Illustration: Flint Hatchet]

%61. Weapons and Implements and Clothing.%--All of these tribes had
made some progress towards civilization. They used pottery and
ornamental pipes of clay. They raised beans and squas