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The tribes were situated in that picturesque and fruitful region which
stretches westward from the head-waters of the Hudson to the Genesee.
The Mohawks, or Caniengas--as they should properly be called--possessed
the Mohawk River, and covered Lake George and Lake Champlain with their
flotillas of large canoes, managed with the boldness and skill which,
hereditary in their descendants, make them still the best boatmen of the
North American rivers.
West of the Caniengas the Oneidas held the small river and lake which bear
their name, the first in that series of beautiful lakes, united by
interlacing streams, which seemed to prefigure in the features of nature
the political constitution of the tribes who possessed them.
West of the Oneidas, the imperious Onondagas, the central and, in some
respects, the ruling nation of the League, possessed the two lakes of
Onondaga and Skeneateles, together with the common outlet of this inland
lake system, the Oswego River, to its issue into Lake Ontario.
Still proceeding westward, the lines of trail and river led to the long
and winding stretch of Lake Cayuga, about which were clustered the towns
of the people who gave their name to the lake; and beyond them, over the
wide expanse of hills and dales surrounding Lakes Seneca and Canandaigua,
were scattered the populous villages of the Senecas, more correctly styled
Sonontowanas or Mountaineers.
Such were the names and abodes of the allied nations, members of the
far-famed Kanonsionni, or League of United Households, who were destined
to become for a time the most notable and powerful community among the
native tribes of North America.
The region which has been described was not, however, the original seat of
those nations. They belonged to that linguistic family which is known to
ethnologists as the Huron-Iroquois stock. This stock comprised the Hurons
or Wyandots, the Attiwandaronks or Neutral Nation, the Iroquois, the
Eries, the Andastes or Conestogas, the Tuscaroras, and some smaller bands.
The tribes of this family occupied a long, irregular area of inland
territory, stretching from Canada to North Carolina.
The northern nations were all clustered about the great lakes; the
southern bands held the fertile valleys bordering the head-waters of the
rivers which flowed from the Allegheny mountains. The languages of all
these tribes showed a close affinity. There can be no doubt that their
ancestors formed one body, and, indeed, dwelt at one time (as has been
well said of the ancestors of the Indo-European populations), under one
roof.
There was a Huron-Iroquois "family-pair," from which all these tribes were
descended. In what part of the world this ancestral household resided is a
question which admits of no reply, except from the me-rest conjecture. But
the evidence of language, so far as it has yet been examined, seems to
show that the Huron clans were the older members of the group; and the
clear and positive traditions of all the surviving tribes, Hurons,
Iroquois and Tuscaroras, point. to the lower St. Lawrence as the earliest
known abode of their stock.
Here the first explorer, Cartier, found Indians of this stock at Hochelaga
and Stadaconé, now the sites of Montreal and Quebec. Centuries before his
time, according to the native tradition, the ancestors of the
Huron-Iroquois family had dwelt in this locality, or still further east
and nearer to the river's mouth.
As their numbers increased, dissensions arose. The hive swarmed, and band
after band moved off to the west and south.
As they spread, they encountered people of other stocks, with whom they
had frequent wars. Their most constant and most dreaded enemies were the
tribes of the Algonkin family, a fierce and restless people, of northern
origin, who everywhere surrounded them. At one period, however, if the
concurrent traditions of both Iroquois and Algonkins can be believed,
these contending races for a time stayed their strife, and united their
forces in an alliance against a common and formidable foe.
This foe was the nation, or perhaps the confederacy, of the Alligewi or
Talligewi, the semi-civilized "Mound-builders" of the Ohio Valley, who
have left their name to the Allegheny river and mountains, and whose vast
earthworks are still, after half-a-century of study, the perplexity of
archeologists.
A desperate warfare ensued, which lasted about a hundred years, and ended
in the complete overthrow and destruction, or expulsion, of the Alligewi.
The survivors of the conquered people fled southward, and are supposed to
have mingled with the tribes which occupied the region extending from the
Gulf of Mexico northward to the Tennessee river and the southern spurs of
the Alleghenies.
Among these tribes, the Choctaws retained, to recent times, the custom of
raising huge mounds of earth for religious purposes and for the sites of
their habitations, a custom which they perhaps learned from the Alligewi;
and the Cherokees are supposed by some to have preserved in their name
(Tsalaki) and in their language indications of an origin derived in part
from the same people. Their language, which shows, in its grammar and many
of its words, clear evidence of affinity with the Iroquois, has drawn the
greater portion of its vocabulary from some foreign source.
This source is conjectured to have been the speech of the Alligewi. As the
Cherokee tongue is evidently a mixed language, it is reasonable to suppose
that the Cherokees are a mixed people, and probably, like the English, an
amalgamation of conquering and conquered races.
The time which has elapsed since the overthrow of the Alligewi is
variously estimated. The most probable conjecture places it at a period
about a thousand years before the present day. It was apparently soon
after their expulsion that the tribes of the Huron-Iroquois and the
Algonkin stocks scattered themselves over the wide region south of the
Great Lakes, thus left open to their occupancy. Our concern at present is
only with the first-named family.
The native tradition of their migrations has been briefly related by a
Tuscarora Indian, David Cusick, who had acquired a sufficient education to
become a Baptist preacher. and has left us, in his "Sketches of Ancient
History of the Six Nations," a record of singular value.
His confused and imperfect style, the English of a half-educated
foreigner, his simple faith in the wildest legends, and his absurd
chronology, have caused the real worth of his book, as a chronicle of
native traditions, to be overlooked.
Wherever the test of linguistic evidence, the best of all proofs in
ethnological questions, can be applied to his statements relative to the
origin and connection of the tribes, they are invariably confirmed. From
his account, from the evidence of language, and from various corroborating
indications, the course of the migrations may, it is believed, be traced
with tolerable accuracy. Their first station or starting point, on the
south side of the Lakes, was at the mouth of the Oswego river. Advancing
to the southeast the emigrants struck the Hudson river, and, according to
Cusick's story, followed its course southward to the ocean. Here a
separation took place.
A portion remained, and kept on their way toward the south; but the "main
company," repelled by the uninviting soil and the turbulent waste of
waves, and remembering the attractive region of valleys, lakes, and
streams through which they had passed, retraced their steps northward till
they reached the Mohawk river. Along this stream and the upper waters of
the Hudson they made their first abode; and here they remained until, as
their historian quaintly and truly records, "their language was altered."
The Huron speech became the Iroquois tongue, in the form in which it is
spoken by the Caniengas, or Mohawks. In Iroquois tradition, and in the
constitution of their league, the Canienga nation ranks as the "eldest
brother" of the family.
A comparison of the dialects proves the tradition to be well founded. The
Canienga language approaches nearest to the Huron, and is undoubtedly the
source from which all the other Iroquois dialects are derived. Cusick
states positively that the other "families," as he styles them, of the
Iroquois household, leaving the Mohawks in their original abode, proceeded
step by step to the westward. The Oneidas halted at their creek, the
Onondagas at their mountain, the Cayugas at their lake, and the Senecas or
Sonontowans, the Great Hill people, at a lofty eminence which rises south
of the Canandaigua lake. In due time, as he is careful to record, the same
result happened as had occurred with the Caniengas. The language of each
canton "was altered;" yet not so much, he might have added, but that all
the tribes could still hold intercourse, and comprehend one another's
speech.
A wider isolation and, consequently, a somewhat greater change of
language, befell the "sixth family." Pursuing their course to the west
they touched Lake Erie, and thence, turning to the southeast, came to the
Allegheny river. Cusick, however, does not know it by this name. He calls
it the Ohio,---in his uncouth orthography and with a locative particle
added, the Ouau-we-yo-ka,---which, he says, means "a principal stream, now
Mississippi."
This statement, unintelligible as at the first glance it seems, is
strictly accurate. The word Ohio undoubtedly signified, in the ancient
Iroquois speech, as it still means in the modern Tuscarora, not "beautiful
river," but "great river."[1] It was so called as being the main stream
which receives the effluents of the Ohio valley. In the view of the
Iroquois, this "main stream" commences with what we call the Allegheny
river, continues in what we term the Ohio, and then flows on in what we
style the Mississippi,---of which, in their view, the upper Mississippi is
merely an affluent. In Iroquois hydrography, the Ohio--the great river of
the ancient Alligewi domain--is the central stream to which all the rivers
of the mighty West converge.
This stream the emigrants now attempted to cross.
They found, according to the native annalist, a rude bridge in a huge
grape-vine which trailed its length across the stream. Over this a part of
the company passed, and then, unfortunately, the vine broke. The residue,
unable to cross, remained on the hither side, and became afterwards the
enemies of those who had passed over. Cusick anticipates that his story of
the grape-vine may seem to some incredible; but he asks, with amusing
simplicity, "why more so than that the Israelites should cross the Red Sea
on dry land_" That the precise incident, thus frankly admitted to be of a
miraculous character, really took place, we are not required to believe.
But that emigrants of the Huron-Iroquois stock penetrated southward along
the Allegheny range, and that some of them remained near the river of that
name, is undoubted fact.
Those who thus remained were known by various names, mostly derived from
one root--Andastes, Andastogues, Conestogas, and the like--and bore a
somewhat memorable part in Iroquois and Pennsylvanian history. Those who
continued their course beyond the river found no place sufficiently
inviting to arrest their march until they arrived at the fertile vales
which spread, intersected by many lucid streams, between the Roanoke and
the Neuse rivers. Here they fixed their abode, and became the ancestors of
the powerful Tuscarora nation. In the early part of the eighteenth
century, just before its disastrous war with the colonies, this nation,
according to the Carolina surveyor, Lawson, numbered fifteen towns, and
could set in the field a force of twelve hundred warriors.
The Eries, who dwelt west of the Senecas, along the southern shore of the
lake which now retains their name, were, according to Cusick, an offshoot
of the Seneca tribe; and there is no reason for doubting the correctness
of his statement. After their overthrow by the Iroquois, in 1656, many of
the Eries were incorporated with the ancestral nation, and contributed,
with other accessions from the Hurons and the Attiwandaronks, to swell its
numbers far beyond those of the other nations of the confederacy.
To conclude this review of the Huron-Iroquois group, something further
should be said about the fortunes of the parent tribe, or rather congeries
of tribes,---for the Huron household, like the Iroquois, had become
divided into several septs. Like the Iroquois, also, they have not lacked
an annalist of their own race. A Wyandot Indian, Peter Doyentate Clarke,
who emigrated with the main body of his people to the Indian Territory,
and afterwards returned for a time to the remnant of his tribe dwelling
near Amherstburg, in Canada, published in 1870 a small volume entitled
"Origin and Traditional History of the Wyandots."
The English education of the writer, like that of the Tuscarora historian,
was defective; and it is evident that his people, in their many
wanderings, had lost much of their legendary lore. But the fact that they
resided in ancient times near the present site of Montreal, in close
vicinity to the Iroquois (whom he styles, after their largest tribe, the
Senecas), is recorded as a well-remembered portion of their history. The
flight of the Wyandots to the northwest is declared to have been caused by
a war which broke out between them and the Iroquois.
This statement is opposed to the common opinion, which ascribes the
expulsion of the Hurons from their eastern abode to the hostility of the
Algonkins. It is, however, probably correct; for the Hurons retreated into
the midst of the Algonkin tribes, with whom they were found by Champlain
to be on terms of amity and even of alliance, while they were engaged in a
deadly war with the Iroquois. The place to which they withdrew was a nook
in the Georgian Bay, where their strongly palisaded towns and
well-cultivated fields excited the admiration of the great French
explorer. Their object evidently was to place as. wide a space as possible
between themselves and their inveterate enemies. Unfortunately, as is well
known, this precaution, and even the aid of their Algonkin and French
allies, proved inadequate to save them.
The story of their disastrous overthrow, traced by the masterly hand of
Parkman, is one of the most dismal passages of aboriginal history.
The only people of this stock remaining to be noticed are the
Attiwandaronks, or Neutral Nation. They dwelt south of the Hurons, on the
northern borders of Lakes Erie and Ontario. They had, indeed, a few towns
beyond those lakes, situated east of the Niagara river, between the
Iroquois and the Eries. They received their name of Neutrals from the fact
that in the war between the Iroquois and the Hurons they remained at peace
with both parties.
This policy, however, did not save them from the fate which overtook their
Huron friends. In the year 1650 the Iroquois set upon them, destroyed
their towns, and dispersed the inhabitants, carrying off great numbers of
them, as was their custom, to be incorporated with their own population.
Of their language we only know that it differed but slightly from the
Huron.
Whether they were an offshoot from the Hurons or from the Iroquois is
uncertain. It is not unlikely that their separation from the parent stock
took place earlier than that of the Iroquois, and that they were thus
enabled for a time to avoid becoming embroiled in the quarrel between the
two great divisions of their race.
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