In
some groups the history is too vague to indicate this tendency with
certainty; in others the tendency is clear. Perhaps the best example is
found in the Cegiha, which divided into two great branches, the stronger
of which threw off minor branches in the Osage and Kansa, and afterward
separated into the Omaha and Ponka, while the feebler branch also ramified
widely; and only less notable is the example of the Winnebago trunk, with
its three great branches in the Iowa, Oto, and Missouri. This strong
divergent tendency in itself suggests rapid, perhaps abnormally rapid,
growth in the stock; for it outran and partially concealed the tendency
toward convergence and ultimate coalescence which characterizes demotic
phenomena.
The half-dozen eastern stocks occupying by far the greater part of North
America contrast strongly with the half-hundred local stocks covering the
Pacific coast; and none of the strong Atlantic stocks is more
characteristic, more sharply contrasted with the limited groups of the
western coast, or better understood as regards organization and
development, than the great Siouan stock of the northern interior. There
is promise that, as the demology of aboriginal America is pushed forward,
the records relating to the Siouan Indians and especially to their
structure and institutions will aid in explaining why some stocks are
limited and others extensive, why large stocks in general characterize the
interior and small stocks the coasts, and why the dominant peoples of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were successful in displacing the
preexistent and probably more primitive peoples of the Mississippi valley.
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