Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ... THE PEQUOTS, MOHICANS AND OTHER WESTERN TRIBES THE attention of the reader has aheady been called to the fact that Schoolcraft speaks of the "Wolf totem or Mohicans" as the first of the three clans of the Leni Lenapee or parent stock of the Algonquins to migrate from their ancestral hunting grounds, and that Gallatin thinks it was the only one to penetrate into strange lands. Whether either of these conjectures is right or wrong we do not certainly know, but Schoolcraft speaks with such positiveness of the identity of the "Wolfs" with the "Mahangins," as they seem to have been originally called, that it is probably safe to conclude that the Mohicans were of that totem and adopted as their national cognomen the name of the entire clan. If Gallatin is correct, we are, of course, led to the inevitable conclusion that all the tribes occupying the vast expanse of territory outlined in a preceding chapter, except those who continued to live around New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Eastern Pennsylvania, were originally Mahangins, who swept out to the north, the south, the east and the west in successive tides, and as they became separated from each other- formed separate federations, all closely related, but having a sufficiently distinct existence, so that in the development of their customs and their language they eventually differed so materially that it has required extensive research by linguists into the common roots of their various dialects, of which there are said to have been more than forty, to classify them properly. Whatever may have been the early scope of the name "Mahangin," at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Mohican was the name applied to a tribe of the Pequot nation as it was then called. If Schoolcraft's belief...
