divided between them. Resting on the bond of kin as its cohesive principle, the gens afforded to each individual member that personal protection which no other existing power could give.
After enumerating the rights, privileges, and obligations of its members, it will be necessary to follow the gens in its organic relations to a phratry tribe and confederacy, in order to find the uses to which it was applied, the privileges which it conferred, and the principles which it fostered. The gentes of the Iroquois will be taken as the standard exemplification of this institution in the Ganowánian family. They had carried their scheme of government from the gens to the confederacy, making it complete in each of its parts, and an excellent illustration of the capabilities of the gentile organization in its archaic form.
When discovered the Iroquois were in the Lower Status of barbarism, and well advanced in the arts of life pertaining to this condition. They manufactured nets, twine, and rope from filaments of bark; wove belts and burden straps, with warp and woof from the same materials; they manufactured earthen vessels and pipes from clay mixed with silicious materials and hardened by fire, some of which were ornamented with rude medallions; they cultivated maize, beans, squashes, and tobacco in garden beds, and made unleavened bread from pounded maize, which they boiled in earthen vessels;[1] they tanned skins into leather, with which they manufactured kilts, leggins, and moccasins; they used the bow and arrow and war-club as their principal weapons; used flint-stone and bone implements, wore skin garments, and were expert hunters and fishermen. They constructed long joint tenement houses, large enough to accommodate five, ten, and twenty families, and each household practiced communism in living, but they were unacquainted with the use of stone or adobe-brick in house architecture, and with the use of the native metals. In mental capacity and in general advancement they were the representative branch of the Indian family north of New Mexico. General F. A. Walker has sketched their military career in two paragraphs: "The career of the Iroquois was simply terrific. They were the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the continent."[2]
