Such family groups were what we call _clans_,
and so far as is known they were the earliest form in which civil
society appeared on the earth. Among all wandering or partially
settled tribes the clan is to be found, and there are ample
opportunities for studying it among our Indians in North America. The
clan usually has a chief or head-man, useful mainly as a leader in
wartime; its civil government, crude and disorderly enough, is in
principle a pure democracy.
[Sidenote: The _mark_ and the _tun_.]
When our ancestors first became acquainted with American Indians, the
most advanced tribes lived partly by hunting and fishing, but partly
also by raising Indian corn and pumpkins. They had begun to live in
wigwams grouped together in small villages and surrounded by strong rows
of palisades for defence. Now what these red men were doing our own
fair-haired ancestors in northern and central Europe had been doing some
twenty centuries earlier. The Scandinavians and Germans, when first
known in history, had made considerable progress in exchanging a
wandering for a settled mode of life. When the clan, instead of moving
from place to place, fixed upon some spot for a permanent residence, a
village grew up there, surrounded by a belt of waste land, or somewhat
later by a stockaded wall.
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