36 A SYNOPSIS OF THE INDIAN TRIBES. [iNTROD. from those three sources, with the addition of some words supplied by the mutilated remnant of a comparative vocabula- ry compiled by Mr. Jefferson, in the library of the Philosophi- cal Society of Philadelphia. The vocabulary of the Massa- chusetts Indians is taken from Eliot's Grammar, (including the words extracted by M. Duponceau from Elliot's translation of the Bible,) and from Josiah Cotton's valuable vocabulary. A specimen from Wood's "Prospect of New England" has been added. The words not found in Roger Williams's Key of the Narraganset Language, have been supplied from a recent vo- cabulary, taken by General Treat, and communicated by the late Enoch Lincoln. There is no doubt respecting the great similarity of those three dialects ; and that the Indians from Saco River to the Hudson, spoke, though with many varieties, what may be considered as the same language, and one of the most extensively spoken amongst those of the Algonkin- Lenape Family. There may have been some exaggeration in the accounts of the Indian population of New England. In proportion as they are separated from us by time or distance, the Indians are uni- formly represented as more numerous than they appear when belter known. Gookin, who wrote in 1674, states that the Pequods were said to have been able in former times to raise four thousand warriors, reduced in his time to three hundred men. These had indeed been conquered and partly destroyed or dis- persed in the war of 1637. But, according to the accounts of that war, the number of their warriors could not at that time have amounted to one thousand.* The Narragansets, who were reckoned in former times, as ancient Indians said, to amount to five thousand warriors, did not in his time amount to one thousand. As the only wars in which they had been engaged before the year 1674, from the first European settlement in New England, were the usual ones with other Indians, such a great diminution within that period appears highly improbable. With respect to the other three great nations, to wit, the Wam- panoags, the Massachusetts, and the Pawtuckets, Gookin esti- mates their former number to have been in the aggregate nine thousand warriors. He states the population of the two last in his own time, at five hundred and fifty men, besides women
- Seven hundred, on the arrival of the British. Holmes's Memoir,
1 Maes. Hist. Coll. Vol. IX. pp. 75-99.
