in these savages the fine roots of human nature, which are entirely corrupted
in civilized nations....Living in common, without disputes, content with
little, guiltless of avarice... it is impossible to find people more patient,
more hospitable, more affable, more liberal, more moderate in their lan-
guage. In fine, all our fathers and the French who have lived with the savages
consider that life flows on more gently among them than with us.And far to the west, in 1766, when Jonathan Carver visited the Dakota
tribes of the Mississippi, he observed, “No people are more hospitable, kind,
and free than the Indians.” About the same time, James Adair remarked of
the southern tribes, the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and confeder-
ated Creek tribes, “They are so hospitable, kind-hearted, and free, that they
would share with those of their own tribe the last part of their own provi-
sions, even to a single ear of corn.... To be narrow-hearted, especially to
those in want, to any of their own family, is accounted a great crime, and to
reflect scandal on the rest of the tribe.”
With such widespread sharing of attitudes and customs, there must
have been much movement among Indian societies. Indians, as Paul A. W.
Wallace has written, “laced our hills and valleys with a complex system of
paths which not only drew local communities together but spread out into
a vast continental network.” On the waterways, Indians used dugout canoes
to move from one settlement to another. Their lack of wheeled vehicles,
animal-borne transport, or watercraft larger than canoes caused Indian
societies to be economically localized, but despite this limitation they cer-
tainly had extensive contacts.
One of the things eastern Indians shared among themselves, in a way
similar to West African societies, was money in the form of seashells. Having
access to the “mines,” the beds along the coast, gave some Indians the kind
of advantage that access to gold or silver gave the Spaniards. And just as
Europeans divided their money into higher-value gold and lesser-value silver
and copper, so the Indians divided theirs: wompompeagwas worth three
times as much as the more common roanoke.So widespread was the use that
colonists employed it in their trade with Native Americans, as European
traders did with African states.Wampumpeag,orpeagas it was sometimes
known, was also legal tender among whites in New England for small sums
20 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA