Algonquin

The term Algonquin Indians, also spelled Algonquian and Algonkin, is used to describe both a specific group of Indians and an entire language group. During the colonial period Algonquin-speaking Indians lived from the Atlantic coast to the Colorado Rockies and from northern Canada to South Carolina. Among the major groups who spoke Algonquin languages were the Narragansett, Wampanoag, Powhatan, and Ojibwa Indians. When English boats landed at Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth, Indians belonging to the Algonquin language group met them in each case. The specific group of Indians called Algonquin, the subject of this entry, lived in the Ottawa Valley in southern Canada.

Before Europeans arrived in North America, Algonquin Indians engaged in a wide range of social and economic activities, guided in part by the environment in which they lived. During the warm summer months, the Algonquin gathered into a large community and focused their activities around eishing and agriculture. Although the cool temperatures and marginal soil of the Ottawa Valley made it difficult to rely on farming as a significant subsistence activity, the Algonquin in southern areas grew corn, beans, and squash. During the winter the communities dispersed into smaller hunting groups. Contrary to the popular image of Indian societies as egalitarian utopias, various forms of stratification marked Algonquin society. A strict gender division of labor determined the activities of men and women. Men typically hunted, fished, and cleared agricultural fields, while women planted and tended the crops, gathered roots and nuts, and looked after the children. The right to use specific hunting lands was passed patrilineally, from father to son, although in some Algonquin tribes kinship was traced matrilineally.

During the early 17th century the Algonquin expertise in hunting made them ideal allies in the burgeoning eur trade, and they became an important trading partner with the French. Economic competition between the Iroquois Indians and the Algonquin exacerbated preexisting tensions and escalated into full-scale war. When the Iroquois virtually shut down the St. Lawrence River as a trade route into the interior of Canada, the Algonquin acted as brokers between the French and the Huron Indians. At first the strategy worked well, and the Algonquin prospered under the new arrangement by exchanging French trade goods for Huron corn. Soon, however, they were caught up in the complex diplomatic and military struggles that marked the fur trade around the Great Lakes. Eliminated as brokers when the French began to trade directly with the Huron, the Algonquin attempted to maintain their economic prominence by negotiating with Dutch traders in the 1620s. This maneuver upset the Mohawk Indians, an Iroquois tribe that had established a trade relationship with the Dutch upon their arrival in the Hudson River Valley in 1609.

War broke out once again as each side sought to defend their access to the European goods they had increasingly come to see as vital to their very existence. In 1645 the French convened a peace conference that temporarily eased the violence, but sporadic fighting continued throughout the 17th century. When England and France engaged in a series of imperial wars in the 18th century, the Algonquin fought alongside the French. After the French loss of Canada in the Seven Years’ War, the Algonquin signed a peace treaty with the British in 1760. During the American Revolution the Algonquin fought with the British against the rebellious colonists and once again found themselves on the losing side. Eventually, the Algonquin, like other Native groups, were relegated to reservations.

Further reading: Bruce Trigger, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Northeast (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1978); Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

—Melanie Perreault

Alice (1686-1802) historian

The woman whose only name is Alice was both a slave in Pennsylvania and an oral historian of earliest Philadelphia. She was born in Philadelphia in 1686 and died in 1802 at the incredible age of 116. Perhaps Alice was the daughter of two members from the fateful cargo of 150 Africans, the first who entered Philadelphia in 1684. The few words written about her reveal a woman of “dignified deportment” who was “so careful to keep to the truth, that her veracity was never questioned; her honesty also was unimpeached.” Alice recalled Philadelphia’s “wilderness, and when the Indians (its chief inhabitants) hunted wild game in the woods, while the panther, the wolf, and the beasts of the forest were prowling about.” She observed Philadelphia’s growth and population increase, and she personally knew William Penn, James Logan, and other early Philadelphia luminaries. At the age of 10 she was taken to Dunk’s Ferry, where for 40 years she collected ferry fees for her owner, whose name remains unknown. Deeply religious but illiterate, she “lament[ed] that she was not able to read [the Bible].” Yet, at the age of 95 she could be seen riding at full gallop to worship at Christ Church. At 96 her sight began to fail, but this did not deter her from fishing by rowing herself to the middle of the stream and returning with “a handsome supply of fish for her master’s table.” This remarkable woman, whose story is unfortunately incomplete, probably remained enslaved throughout her entire life.

Further reading: Anonymous, Eccen-tric biography, or, Memoirs of remarkable female characters, ancient and modern including potentates, statesmen, divines, historians, naval and military heroes, philosophers, lawyers, impostors, poets, painters, players, dramatic writers, misers, &c. (Worcester, Mass.: Isaiah Thomas, Jr., 1804); Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

—Leslie Patrick