northeasterly along the Atlantic coast until it reached
the confines of Labrador, and northwesterly through the region of the
Great Lakes and as far as the Churchill river[41] to the west of
Hudson's Bay. In other words, the Algonquins were bounded on the south
by the Maskoki,[42] on the west by the Dakotas, on the northwest by the
Athabaskans, on the northeast by Eskimos, and on the east by the ocean.
Between Lake Superior and the Red River of the North the Crees had their
hunting grounds, and closely related to them were the Pottawatomies,
Ojibwas, and Ottawas. One offshoot, including the Blackfeet, Cheyennes,
and Arrapahos, roamed as far west as the Rocky Mountains. The great
triangle between the upper Mississippi and the Ohio was occupied by the
Menomonees and Kickapoos, the Sacs and Foxes, the Miamis and Illinois,
and the Shawnees. Along the coast region the principal Algonquin tribes
were the Powhatans of Virginia, the Lenape or Delawares, the Munsees or
Minisinks of the mountains about the Susquehanna, the Mohegans on the
Hudson, the Adirondacks between that river and the St. Lawrence, the
Narragansetts and their congeners in New England, and finally the
Micmacs and Wabenaki far down East, as the last name implies. There is a
tradition, supported to some extent by linguistic evidence,[43] that the
Mohegans, with their cousins the Pequots, were more closely related to
the Shawnees than to the Delaware or coast group. While all the
Algonquin tribes were in the lower period of barbarism, there was a
noticeable gradation among them, the Crees and Ojibwas of the far North
standing lowest in culture, and the Shawnees, at their southernmost
limits, standing highest.

[Footnote 41: Howse, _Grammar of the Cree Language_, London,
1865, p. vii.]

[Footnote 42: Except in so far as the Cherokees and Tuscaroras,
presently to be mentioned, were interposed.]

[Footnote 43: Brinton, _The Lenape and their Legends_, p. 30.]

[Sidenote: Huron-Iroquois family of tribes.]

We have observed the Dakota tribes pressing eastward against their
neighbours and sending out an offshoot, the Winnebagos, across the
Mississippi river. It has been supposed that the Huron-Iroquois group of
tribes was a more remote offshoot from the Dakotas. This is very
doubtful; but in the thirteenth or fourteenth century the general trend
of the Huron-Iroquois movement seems to have been eastward, either in
succes