I. The Algonquians were the most numerous, holding the greater portion of the country from the unoccupied "debatable land" of Kentucky northward to Hudson Bay, and from the Atlantic westward to the Mississippi. Among their tribes were the Narragansetts and Mohicans. These savages were rude in life and manners, were intensely warlike, depended for subsistence chiefly on hunting and fishing, lived in rude wigwams covered with bark, skins, or matted reeds, practised agriculture in a crude fashion, and were less stable in their habitations than the Southern Indians. They have made a larger figure in our history than any other family, because through their lands came the heaviest and most aggressive movement of white population. Estimates of early Indian populations necessarily differ, in the absence of accurate knowledge, but it is now known that the numbers were never so great as was at first estimated. The colonists on the Atlantic seaboard found a native population much larger than elsewhere existed, for the Indians had a superstitious, almost a romantic, attachment to the seaside; and fish-food abounded there. Back from the waterfalls on the Atlantic slope,--in the mountains and beyond,--there were large areas destitute of inhabitants; and even in the nominally occupied territory the villages were generally small and far apart. A careful modern estimate is that the Algonkins at no time numbered over ninety thousand souls, and possibly not over fifty thousand. Sidenote: The Iroquois. II. In the heart of this Algonquian land was planted an ethnic group called the Iroquois, with its several distinct branches, often at war with each other. The craftiest, most daring, and most intelligent of Red Indians, yet still in the savage hunter state, the Iroquois were the terror of every native band east of the Mississippi, and eventually pitted themselves against their white neighbors. The five principal tribes of this family--Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, all stationed in pallisaded villages south and east of Lakes Erie and Ontario--formed a loose confederacy, styled by themselves "The Long House," and by the whites "The Five Nations," which firmly held the waterways connecting the Hudson River and the Great Lakes. The population of the entire group was not over seventeen thousand,--a remarkably small number, considering the active part they played in American history, and the control which they exercised over wide tracts of Algonquian territory. Later they were joined by the Tuscaroras from North Carolina, and the confederacy was thereafter known as "The Six Nations." Sidenote: The Southern Indians.