humble abodes, making villages for the tribes. These, being of frail structure, had left no vestige. But these supposed palatial residences are now believed to have answered to the Long Houses of the Iroquois, and to have been of communal use, — some of them capable of accommodating from five to eight hundred families. It is a further easy inference from the starting point of fact, to affirm that the “dirt lodges” of the Mandans, the caves of the Cliff Dwellers, and the Mounds of our western valleys bear witness to the same communal mode of life of our aborigines. It is supposed that those mounds of earth — a substitute for stone where it was not available for the purpose — were simply the base for the erection over them of dwellings of wood or bark, which have perished. This theory also suggests and favors a method for distinguishing several stages or types in savage life, between extreme barbarism and approximations towards civilization.
It would simply embarrass the mainly narrative purpose of this volume to attempt here any elaborate or even concise statement of the distribution, classification, organization, and designation by names or localities of our aboriginal tribes. Such information — not by any means always accordant — as special inquirers and writers on these intricate and perplexed themes have furnished, is easily accessible in our abounding literature of the subject. Very few of the names originally attached by the first Europeans here to the tribes earliest known to them are now in use. The same tribes were known by different appellations assigned to them by the French, the Dutch, and the English. There has been a steady increase of appellations for bands and tribes, as the whites have extended their intercourse and relations with them. Within the last two or three decades each year has added new titles on the lists of the Reports of the Indian Commissioners. Some of the earliest known tribes — as the Pamunkeys of Virginia, the Lenape of Pennsylvania, the Narragansetts, the Mohi-
