ALGON'QUIAN STOCK. The most widely extended and most important Indian linguistic stock of North America, formerly occupying nearly the whole area (with the exception of that occupied by the Iroquoian tribes) stretching from Labrador to the Rocky Mountains in the north, and extending southward to Pamlico Sound on the coast, and to the Cumberland River in the interior. It included several hundred tribes and sub-tribes speaking probably forty distinct languages, besides a large number of dia lects. Both linguistic and traditional evidence point to the north Atlantic coast, from the St. John to the Delaware River, as the region from which the various cognate tribes migrated west ward and southward. From the fact that the earliest settlements in Canada, New England. New York, New Jersey, and Virginia were all made within the Algonquian area, the history of these tribes is better known, and their languages have been more studied, than those of any others north of Mexico. For full two centuries they
opposed the advance of the white man step by step, under such leaders as Opechancano, Philip, Pontiac, and Tecumseh, with the final and inev itable result of defeat, suppression, and swift decay. The number of the Algonquian stock (1902) is about S2.000 souls, of whom about 43,000 are in the United States, the remainder being in Canada, with the exception of a few hundred refugees in Mexico.
The principal Algonquian tribes were the Al gonquin, Amalecite, I1koae. Naseopi, Cree, Ab naki, Pennacook, Massachuset, Wampanoag, Nar raganset, Mohegan, Mahican, .Montauk, Lenape or Delaware, Nanticoke, Powhatan, Pamlico, Shawano, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Menominee, Potawa tami, Sack, Fox, Kickapoo, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, and Arapaho. See these titles; also INDIANS.