Eskippakithiki, The Last Indian Town in Kentucky - The Filson ...

356 The Filson Club History .Quarterly [ Vol. 6
cans in the northwest; the Siouans in the west, in the Ohio and
Great Lakes valleys, and along the Atlantic slopes; the Muskhogeans
and Yuchians in the south; and the Iroquoians in the valleys
of the St. Lawrence, Hudson, and Susquehanna rivers, and
in the Carolina hills. The eastern Algonquian tribes best known
to us were the Algonkins, Pequots, Narragansetts, Mohicans,
Delawares, and Powhatans, listed from north to south along the
seaboard. They had a great effect on our early history, and from
them has been derived the notion most of us have of the Indian-bloodthirsty,
and low in culture--a nomad hunter whose squaw
does the hard work. In the west their best known tribes were the
Shawnees, Miamis, Ottawas, Illinois, Chippeways, Cheyennes,
and Crees. These were like their eastern kin in culture. From
Algonquian tongues have come our words squaw, papoose, wigwam,
caucus, tomahawk, moose, raccoon, opossum, Massachusetts,
Connecticut, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Wyoming,
Mississippi, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and many others.
The best known Iroquoian tribes were those of the Five Nations:
Mohawks or Iroquois, Cayugas, Oneidas, Onondagas, and
Seneeas, who were also called, collectively, the Iroquois, the Senecas,
the Confederacy, and the League, whose homes were in
New York; the Tuscaroras of North Carolina, who moved north
in the first half of the eighteenth century and joined the League,
causing it to be called thereafter the Six Nations; the Conestogas
of Maryland and Pennsylvania; the Hurons who, driven from the
north of Lake Erie by the Five Nations, became known to our
pioneers as Wyandots; and lastly the Cherokees, whose language
and customs were so unlike the other Iroquoians that they are
seldom thought of as the same. The Iroquoians have given us the
words Erie, Huron, Niagara, Quebec, Ontario, Ohio, Tennessee,
and Kentucky.
The eastern Siouans are but slightly known to the casual reader.
Their most noted tribe was the Catawba which, driven out of
the upper Ohio Valley by the Iroquois, about 1650, sett!ed in the
Carolinas. The Siouans were sedentary, great corn-growers, more
civilized than the Indians surrounding them, and were the builders
of the great earthworks and hill-forts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Iowa, Missouri, West Virginia, Kentueky,
Virginia, and Georgia. Their modern descendants, Sioux,
Omahas, Osages, Dakotas, Mandans, etc., are better known to us.