and Senecas were younger associates. Each nation was a sovereign republic, divided again into clans, between which a slight subordination was scarcely perceptible. The clansmen dwelt in fixed places of abode, surrounded by fields of beans and of maize; each castle, like a New England town or a Saxon hundred, constituted a little democracy. There was no slavery, no favored caste. All men were equal. The union was confirmed by an unwritten compact; the congress of the sachems, at Onondaga, like the Witenagemots of the Anglo-Saxons, transacted all common business. Authority resided in opinion; law in oral tradition. Honor and esteem enforced obedience; shame and contempt punished offenders. The leading warrior was elected by the general confidence in his virtue and conduct; merit alone could obtain preferment to office; and power was as permanent as the esteem of the tribe. No profit was attached to eminent station, to tempt the sordid. As their brave men went forth to war, instead of martial instruments, they were cheered by the clear voice of their leader. On the smooth surface of a tree from which the outer bark had been peeled, they painted their deeds of valor by the simplest symbols. These were their trophies and their annals; these and their war-songs preserved the memory of their heroes. They proudly deemed themselves supreme among mankind; men excelling all others; and hereditary arrogance inspired their young men with dauntless courage. When Hudson, John Smith, and Champlain were in America together, the Mohawks had extended their strolls from the St. Lawrence to Virginia; half Long Island paid them tribute; and a Mohawk sachem was reverenced on Massachusetts Bay. The geographical position of their fixed abodes, including within their immediate sway the headlands not of the Hudson only, but of the rivers that flow to the Gulfs of Mexico and St. Lawrence, the Bays of Chesapeake and Delaware, opened widest regions to their canoes, and invited them to make their war-paths along the channels where New York and Pennsylvania are now perfecting the avenues of commerce. Becoming possessed of firearms by intercourse with the Dutch, they renewed their 1649. 1653 to 1655. 1672. merciless, hereditary warfare with the Hurons; and, in the following years, the Eries, on the south shore of the lake of which the naine commemorates their 1656 to existence, were defeated and extirpated. The Alleghany was next descended; and the tribes near Pittsburg, probably of the Huron race, leaving no monument but a name to the Guyandot River of Western Virginia, were subjugated and destroyed. In the east and in the west, fron the Kennebec to the Mississippi, the Abenakis as well as the Miamis and the remoter Illinois, could raise no barrier against the invasions of the Iroquois but by alliances with the French. But the Five Nations had defied a prouder enemy. At the commencement of the administration of Dongan, 1676. the European population of New France, which, in 1609 to 1615. 1679, amounted to eight thousand five hundred and fifteen souls, may have been a little more than ten thousand; the number of men capable of bearing arms was perhaps three thousand, about the number of warriors of the Five Nations. But the Iroquois were freemen; New France suffered from despotism and monopoly. The Iroquois recruited their tribes by adopting captives of foreign nations; New France was sealed against the foreigner and the heretic. For nearly fourscore years, hostilities had prevailed, with few interruptions. Thrice did Champlain invade the country of the Mohawks, till he was driven with wounds and disgrace from their wilderness fastnesses. The Five Nations, in return, at the period of the massacre in Virginia, attempted the destruction of New France. Though repulsed, they continued to defy the province and its allies, and, under the eyes of its governor, openly intercepted canoes destined for Quebec. The French authority was not confirmed by founding a feeble outpost at Montreal; and Fort Richelieu, at the mouth of the Sorel, scarce protected its immediate environs. Negotiations for peace led to no permanent result; and even the influence of the Jesuit missionaries, the most faithful, disinterested, and persevering of their order, could 1622. 1623. 1637. 1640. 1642. 1645. not effectually restrain the sanguinary vengeance of the barbarians. The Iroquois warriors scoured every wilderness to lay it still more waste; they thirsted for the blood of the few men who roamed over the regions between Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario. Depopulating the 1649. whole country on the Ottawa, they obtained an acknowledged superiority over New France, mitigated only by commercial relations of the French traders with the tribes that dwelt farthest from the Hudson. The colony was still in perpetual danger; and Quebec itself was besieged. A winter's invasion of the country of the Mohawks was useless. The savages disappeared, leaving their European adversaries to war with the wilderness. 1654. 1660. 1666. 1672. By degrees the French made firmer advances; and a fort built at the outlet of Ontario, for the purpose, as was pretended, of having a convenient place for treaties, commanded the commerce of the lake. We have seen the Mohawks brighten the covenant 1673. chain that bound them to the Dutch. The English, on recovering the banks of the Hudson, confirmed without delay the Indian alliance, and, by the confidence with which their friendship inspired the Iroquois, increased the dangers that hovered over New France. 1682. 1683. The ruin which menaced Canada gave a transient existence to a large legislative council; and an assembly of notables was convoked by De la Barre, the governor-general, to devise a remedy for the ills under which the settlements languished. It marks the character of the colonists, that, instead of demanding civil franchises, they solicited a larger garrison from Louis XIV. 1683. The governor of New York had been instructed to preserve friendly relations with the French; but Dongan refused to neglect the Five Nations. From the French traders who were restrained' by a strict monopoly, the wild hunters of beaver turned to the English, who favored competition; and their mutual ties were strengthened by an amnesty of past injuries. Along the war-paths of the Five Nations, down the Sus quehannah, and near the highlands of Virginia, the proud Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga warriors had left bloody traces of their presence. The impending struggle with 1684. New France quickened the desire of renewing peace July 13. with the English; and the deputies from the Mohawks and the three offending tribes, soon joined by the Senecas, met the governors of New York and Virginia at Albany. To the complaints and the pacific proposals of Lord Howard of Effingham, Cadianne, the Mohawk orator, July 14. replied: "Sachem of Virginia, and you, Corlaer, sachem of New York, give ear, for we will not conceal the evil that has been done." The orator then rebuked the Oneidas, Onondagas, and Cayugas, for their want of faith, and gave them a belt of wampum, to quicken their memory. Then, turning to Effingham, he continued: "Great sachem of Virginia, these three beaver-skins are a token of our gladness that your heart is softened; these two, of our joy that the axe is to be buried. We are glad that you will bury in the pit what is past. Let the earth be trod hard over it; let a strong stream run under the pit, to wash the evil away out of our sight and remembrance, so that it never may be digged up. You are wise to keep the covenant chain bright as silver, and now to renew it and make it stronger. These nations are chain-breakers; we Mohawks," as he spoke he gave two beavers and a raccoon, "we Mohawks have kept the chain entire. The covenant must be preserved; the fire of love of Virginia and Maryland, and of the Five Nations, burns in this place: this house of peace must be kept clean. We plant a tree whose top shall touch the sun, whose branches shall be seen afar. We will shelter ourselves under it, and live in unmolested peace." At the conclusion of the treaty, each of the three offend ing nations gave a hatchet to be buried. "We bury none for ourselves," said the Mohawks, "for we have never broken the ancient chain." The axes were buried, and the offending tribes in noisy rapture chanted the song of peace. 1 1684. "Brother Corlaer," said a chief for the Onondagas and Cayugas, “your sachem is a great sachem; and Aug. 2. we are a small people. When the English came first to Manhattan, to Virginia, and to Maryland, they were a small people, and we were great. Because we found you a good people, we treated you kindly, and gave you land. Now, therefore, that you are great and we small, we hope you will pròtect us from the French. They are angry with us because we carry beaver to our brethren." The envoys of the Senecas soon arrived, and ex- Aug. 5. pressed their delight that the tomahawk was already buried, and all evil put away from the hearts of the English sachems. On the same day, a messenger from De la Barre appeared at Albany. But his complaints were unheeded. "We have not wandered from our paths," said the Senecas. "But when Onondio, the sachem of Canada, threatens us with war, shall we run away? Shall we sit still in our houses? Our beaver-hunters are brave men, and the beaverhunt must be free." The sachems returned to nail the arms of the Duke of York over their castles; a protection, as they thought, against the French, an acknowledgment, as the English deemed, of British sovereignty. Meantime, the rash and confident De la Barre, with six hundred French soldiers, four hundred Indian allies, four hundred carriers, and three hundred men for a garrison, advanced to the fort which stood near the outlet of the present Rideau Canal. But the exhalations of August on the marshy borders of Ontario disabled his army; and, after crossing the lake, and disembarking his wasted troops in the land of the Onondagas, he was compelled to solicit peace from the tribes whom he had designed to exterminate. The Mohawks, at the request of the English, refused to negotiate; but the other nations, jealous of English supremacy, desired to secure independence by balancing the French against the English. An Onondaga chief called Heaven to witness his resentment at English interference. "Onondio," he proudly exclaimed to the envoy of New York, "Onondio has for ten years been our father; Corlaer has long been our brother. But it is because we have |