VIII. _Salish, Sahaptin and Kootenay Tribes._
The tribes of the Valley of the Columbia, of whom those above named represent the principal stocks, are without the gentile organization. Our distinguished philologists, Horatio Hale and the late George Gibbs, both of whom devoted special attention to the subject, failed to discover any traces of the system among them. There are strong reasons for believing that this remarkable area was the nursery land of the Ganowánian family, from which, as the initial point of their migrations, they spread abroad over both divisions of the continent. It seems probable, therefore, that their ancestors possessed the organization into gentes, and that it fell into decay and finally disappeared.
The Comanches of Texas, together with the Ute tribes, the Bonnaks, the Shoshonees, and some other tribes, belong to this stock. Mathew Walker, a Wyandote half-blood, informed the author, in 1859, that he had lived among the Comanches, and that they had the following gentes:
1. Wolf. 2. Bear. 3. Elk. 4. Deer. 5. Gopher. 6. Antelope.
If the Comanches are organized in gentes, there is a presumption that the other tribes of this stock are the same.
This completes our review of the social system of the Indian tribes of North America, north of New Mexico. The greater portion of the tribes named were in the Lower Status of barbarism at the epoch of European discovery, and the remainder in the Upper Status of savagery. From the wide and nearly universal prevalence of the organization into gentes, its ancient universality among them with descent in the female line may with reason be assumed. Their system was purely social, having the gens as its unit, and the phratry, tribe and confederacy as the remaining members of the organic series. These four successive stages of integration and re-integration express the whole of their experience in the growth of the idea of government. Since the principal Aryan and Semitic tribes had the same organic series when they emerged from barbarism, the system was substantially universal in ancient society, and inferentially had a common origin. The punaluan group, hereafter to be described more fully in connection with the growth of the idea of the family, evidently gave birth to the gentes, so that the Aryan, Semitic, Uralian, Turanian and Ganowánian families of mankind point with a distinctiveness seemingly unmistakable to a common punaluan stock, with the organization into gentes engrafted upon it, from which each and all were derived, and finally differentiated into families. This conclusion, I believe, will ultimately enforce its own acceptance, when future investigation has developed and verified the facts on a minuter scale. Such a great organic series, able to hold mankind in society through the latter part of the period of savagery, through the entire period of barbarism, and into the early part of the period of civilization, does not arise by accident, but had a natural development from pre-existing elements. Rationally and rigorously interpreted, it seems probable that it can be made demonstrative of the unity of origin of all the families of mankind who possessed the organization into gentes.