While we know our northern friends may not feel it, in the South, Spring is
here. So we thought we'd share a few of our gardening sites appropriate
for this time of the year. Along with gardening, there's grilling, and getting
ready to diet so that you can fit back into that bathing suit this summer!
To gauge accurately the
amount of Indian blood in the veins of the white population of the
American continent and to determine to what extent the surviving
aborigines have in them the blood of their conquerors and supplanters
is impossible in the absence of scientific data. But there is reason
to believe that intermixture has been much more common than is
generally assumed. The Eskimo of Greenland and the Danish traders and
colonists have intermarried from the first, so that in the territory
immediately under European supervision hardly any pure natives remain.
The marriages (of Danish fathers and Eskimo mothers) have been very
fertile and the children are in many respects an improvement on the
aboriginal stock, in the matter of personal beauty in particular.
According to Packard ( Beach, Ind. Miscel., 69, 1877)
the last fall-blood Eskimo on Belle Isle Straight, Labrador, was in
1859 the wife of an Englishman at Salmon bay. The Labrador
intermixture has been largely with fishermen from Newfoundland of
English descent.
Some of the
Algonquian tribes of Canada mingled
considerably with the Europeans during the French period, both in the
east and toward the interior. In recent years certain French-Canadian
writers have unsuccessfully sought to minimize this intermixture. In
the Illinois-Missouri region these alliances were favored by the
missionaries from the beginning of the 18th century. As early as 1693
a member of the La Salle expedition married the daughter of the chief
of the Kaskaskia. Few French
families in that part of the country are free from Indian blood. The
establishment of trading posts at Detroit, Mackinaw, Duluth, etc.,
aided the fusion of races. The spread of the activities of the
Hudson's Bay Company gave rise in the Canadian Northwest to a
population of mixed bloods of considerable historic importance, the
offspring of Indian mothers and Scotch, French, and English fathers.
Manitoba, at the time of its admission into the dominion, had some
10,000 mixed bloods, one of whom, John Norquay, afterward became
premier of the Provincial government. Some of the employees of the fur
companies who had taken Indian wives saw their descendants flourish in
Montreal and other urban centers. The tribes that have furnished the
most mixed-bloods are the Cree and
Chippewa, and next the
Sioux, of
northwest Canada; the Chippewa,
Ottawa, and related tribes of the
great lakes; and about Green Bay, the
Menominee.
Toward the
Mississippi and beyond it were a few
Dakota and
Blackfoot
mixed-bloods. Harvard (Rep. Smithson. Inst., 1879)
estimated the total number in 1879 at 40,000. Of these about 22,000
were in United States territory and 18,000 in Canada. Of 15,000
persons of Canadian-French descent in Michigan few were probably free
from Indian blood. Some of the French mixed-bloods wandered as far as
the Pacific, establishing settlements of their own kind beyond the
Rocky Mountains. The first wife of the noted ethnologist Schoolcraft
was the daughter of an Irish gentleman by a Chippewa mother, another
of whose daughters married an Episcopal clergyman, and a third a
French-Canadian lumberer. Although some of the English colonies
endeavored to promote the intermarriage of the two races, the, only
notable case in Virginia is that of
Pocahontas
(q. v. ) and John Rolfe. The Athapascan and other tribes of the
extreme northwest have intermixed but little with the whites, though
there are Russian mixed-bloods in Alaska. In British Columbia and the
adjoining parts of the United States are to be found some
mixed-bloods, the result of intermarriage of French traders and
employees with native women.
Some intermixture of captive white blood exists among
the Apache,
Comanche,
Kiowa, and other raiding tribes along the
Mexican and Texas border, the children seeming to inherit superior
industry. The Pueblos, with the notable exception of the Lagunas, have
not at all favored intermarriage with Europeans. The modern Siouan
tribes have intermarried to some extent with white Americans, as some
of their slid in early days with the French of Canada. The Five
Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma--Cherokee,
Choctaw,
Chickasaw,
Creeks,
and Seminole, have a large element of white blood, some through so,
called squaw-men, some dating back to British and French traders
before the Revolution. In the Cherokee Nation especially nearly all
the leading men for a century have been more of white than of Indian
blood, the noted John Ross himself being only one-eighth Indian.
Mooney (19th Rep. B. A. E., 83, 1900) considers
that much of the advance in civilization made by the Cherokee has been
"due to the intermarriage among there of white men, chiefly traders of
the ante-Revolutionary period, with a few Americans from the back
settlements." Most of this white blood was of good Irish, Scotch,
American, and German stock.
Under the former laws of the Cherokee Nation anyone who
could prove the smallest proportion of Cherokee blood was rated as
Cherokee, including many of one-sixteenth, one-thirty-second, or less
of Indian blood. In 1905 the Cherokee Nation numbered 36,782 citizens.
Of these, about 7,000 were adopted whites, Negroes, and Indians of
other tribes, while of the rest probably not one-fourth are of even
approximately pure Indian blood. Some of the smaller tribes removed
from the east, as the Wyandot (Hurons) and
Kaskaskia, have not now a
single full-blood, and in some tribes, notably the Cherokee and
Osage,
the jealousies from this cause have led to the formation of rival
full-blood and mixed-blood factions.
During the Spanish domination in
the southeast Atlantic region intermixture perhaps took place, but not
much; in Texas, however, intermarriage of whites and Indians was
common. The peoples of Iroquoian stock have a large admixture of white
blood, French and English,
both from captives taken during the wars of the 17th and 18th
centuries and by the process of adoption, much favored by them.
Such
intermixture contains more of the combination of white mother and
Indian father than is generally the case. Some English-Iroquois
intermixture is still in process in Ontario. The
Iroquois of St Regis,
Caughnawaga, and other agencies can hardly boast an Indian of pure
blood. According to the Almanach Iroquois for 1900, the blood of
Eunice Williams, captured at Deerfield, Mass., in 1704, and adopted
and married within the tribe, flows in the veins of 125 descendants at
Caughnawaga; Silas Rice, captured at Marlboro, Mass., in 1703, has
1,350 descendants; Jacob Hill and John Stacey, captured near Albany in
1755, have, respectively, 1,100 and 400 descendants. Similar cases are
found among the New York Iroquois. Dr Boas (Pop. Sci. Mo.,
xlv, 1894)
has made an anthropometric study of the mixed bloods, covering a large
amount of data, especially concerning the Sioux and the eastern
Chippewa. The total numbers investigated were 647 men and 408 women.
As compared with the Indian, the mixed-blood, so far as investigations
have shown, is taller, men exhibiting greater divergence than women.
A large proportion of Negro blood exists in many tribes, particularly
in those formerly residing in the Gulf states, and among the remnants
scattered along the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts southward. The
Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma, having been slaveholders and
surrounded by Southern influences, generally sided with the South in
the Civil war. On being again received into friendly relations with
the Government they were compelled by treaty to free their slaves and
admit them to equal Indian citizenship. In 1905 there were 20,619 of
these adopted Negro citizens in these five tribes, besides all degrees
of admixture in such proportions that the census takers are frequently
unable to discriminate.
The Cherokee as a body have refused to
intermarry with their Negro citizens, but among the Creeks and the
Seminole intermarriage has been very great. The Pamunkey,
Chickahominy,
Marshpee,
Narraganset, and Gay Head remnants have much
Negro blood, and conversely there is no doubt that many of the
broken coast tribes have been completely absorbed into the Negro
race.
See Croatan Indians,
Métis,
Popular fallacies.
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