Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/214

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The Dakotan, or Siouan, family comprised the following Indian nations, arranged approximately in order of apparent derivation:

Huron Iroquois?
Hidatsa (and Crows)

having numerous subtribes, viz., Santee, Sisseton, Wahpeton, Yankton, Yanktonai, Teton, Blackfeet, Minneconjou, Ogalala, Ponka, Assiniboin, Akansea, Kansa and others.

The position above assigned to the Cherokee and Iroquois is conjectural, but is based on the statements of some authorities. Mr. Horatio Hale has sufficiently established the connection between the tongues of the Cherokee and the Iroquois, and Mr. Mooney has shown the relation between the Cherokee and the primitive tribes of the tongue in South Carolina. It may be that the alliance of the Iroquois with the Dakotan stock is so feeble that the two should be considered as separate stocks. But, for reasons that will appear, the Cherokee (Tselaki), the ancient Alligewi, seem to have had an ancestry which was cognate with that of the Dakota. It will be shown that they both moved from their pristine seat on the Atlantic coast in the Carolinas, where some archaic remnants of both tongues still continued in early American history.

The country occupied by the great Dakota stock, aside from the small tribes that remained near the Atlantic, was, in general, the "interior continental basin" so far as it lay west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains, with a broad tongue that extended into Canada so as to take in some of the waters that reach Hudson Bay, west of Lake Winnipeg. It covered the Missouri Valley except in its utmost upper reaches in the region of the Yellowstone Park, which belonged to the Shoshonean stock, and excepting also the valley of the Platte. It extended eastward in a narrow tongue, across the Mississippi, through southern Wisconsin to Lake Michigan, an anomalous geographic exception, the important significance of which will be referred to later. As to Minnesota, it was divided between the Algonquian and the Dakota stocks, the larger part being in possession of the Dakota. The Kilistino, an Algonquian tribe, were in the north and northeast, in the wooded region north of Lake Superior. Their