So much has been written about the American Indians that we need not discuss them at length. They were misnamed Indians by Columbus, who supposed the land he had discovered to be India. At the time of his arrival not more than two hundred thousand of them lived east of the Mississippi, though they were doubtless far more numerous West and South. Whence they came, or whether, if this was a human deed at all, they or another race now extinct drove out the Mound-builders, none can tell. Of arts the red man had but the rudest. He made wigwams, canoes, bone fish-hooks with lines of hide or twisted bark, stone tomahawks, arrow-heads and spears, clothing of skins, wooden bows, arrows, and clubs. He loved fighting, finery, gambling, and the chase. He domesticated no animals but the dog and possibly the hog. Sometimes brave, he was oftener treacherous, cruel, revengeful. His power of endurance on the trail or the warpath was incredible, and if captured, he let himself be tortured to death without a quiver or a cry. Though superstitious, he believed in a Great Spirit to be worshipped without idols, and in a future life of happy hunting and feasting. Whether, at the time of which we now speak, the Indians were an old race, already beginning to decline, or a fresh race, which contact with the whites balked of its development, it is difficult to say. Their career since best accords with the former supposition. In either case we may assume that their national groupings and habitats were nearly the same in 1500 as later, when these became accurately known. In the eighteenth century the Algonquins occupied all the East from Nova Scotia to North Carolina, and stretched west to the Mississippi. At one time they numbered ninety thousand. The Iroquois or Five Nations had their seat in Central and Western New York. North and west of them lived the Hurons or Wyandots. The Appalachians, embracing Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles and a number of lesser tribes, occupied all the southeastern portion of what is now the United States. West of the Mississippi were the Dakotas or Sioux. Since the white man's arrival upon these shores, very few changes have occurred among the brute inhabitants of North America. A few species, as the Labrador duck and the great auk, have perished. America then possessed but four animals which had appreciable economic value; the dog, the reindeer at the north, which the Mound-builders used as a draft animal but the Indians did not, and the llama and the paco south of the equator. Every one of our present domestic animals originated beyond the Atlantic, being imported hither by our ancestors. The Indians of the lower Mississippi Valley, when De Soto came, had dogs, and also what the Spaniards called hogs, perhaps peccaries, but neither brute was of any breed now bred in the country. A certain kind of dogs were native also to the Juan Fernandez and the Falkland Islands.