t 1,100. Squier, on the other hand, was
content with 400.[32] The discrepancy arises from the fact that where
one scholar sees two or three distinct languages another sees two or
three dialects of one language and counts them as one; it is like the
difficulty which naturalists find in agreeing as to what are species and
what are only varieties. The great number of languages and dialects
spoken by a sparse population is one mark of the universal prevalence of
a rude and primitive form of tribal society.[33]

[Footnote 32: Winsor, "Bibliographical Notes on American
Linguistics," in his _Narr. and Crit. Hist._, vol. i. pp.
420-428, gives an admirable survey of the subject. See also
Pilling's bibliographical bulletins of Iroquoian, Siouan, and
Muskhogean languages, published by the Bureau of Ethnology.]

[Footnote 33: _Excursions of an Evolutionist_, pp. 147-174.]

[Sidenote: Tribes in the upper status of savagery.]

The lowest tribes in North America were those that are still to be found
in California, in the valley of the Columbia river, and on the shores of
Puget Sound. The Athabaskans of Hudson's Bay were on about the same
level of savagery. They made no pottery, knew nothing of horticulture,
depended for subsistence entirely upon bread-roots, fish, and game, and
thus had no village life. They were mere prowlers in the upper status of
savagery.[34] The Apaches of Arizona, preeminent even among red men for
atrocious cruelty, are an offshoot from the Athabaskan stock. Very
little better are the Shoshones and Bannocks that still wander among
the lonely bare mountains and over the weird sage-brush plains of Idaho.
The region west of the Rocky Mountains and north of New Mexico is thus
the region of savagery.

[Footnote 34: For a good account of Indians in the upper status
of savagery until modified by contact with civilization, see
Myron Eells, "The Twana, Chemakum, and Klallam Indians of
Washington Territory," _Smithsonian Report_, 1887, pp.
605-681.]

[Sidenote: The Dakota family of tribes.]

Between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic coast the aborigines, at
the time of the Discovery, might have been divided into six or seven
groups, of which three were situated mainly to the east of the
Mississippi river, the others mainly to the west of it. All were in the
lower period of barbarism. Of the western groups, by far t