Iroquois Confederacy, the
Was originally composed of five related families or nations of
Indians, in the present
State of New York.
These were called, respectively, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas.
Tradition says the confederacy was founded by
Hiawatha, the incarnation of wisdom, at about the beginning of the fifteenth century.
He came from his celestial home and dwelt with the Onondagas, where he taught the related tribes the knowledge of good
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living.
Fierce warriors approached from the north, slaying everything human in their path.
Hiawatha advised a council.
It was held on the bank of
Onondaga Lake.
Representatives of each nation were there.
Under his direction a league was formed, and each canton was assigned its appropriate place in it. They gave it a name signifying “they form a cabin,” and they fancifully called the league “The long House.”
The eastern door was kept by the Mohawks, and the western by the Senecas, and the council-fire was with the Onondagas, at their metropolis, a few miles south of the site of the city of
Syracuse.
By common consent, a chief of the Onondagas, called Atatarho, was made the first president of the league.
The
Mohawks, on the east, were called “the door.”
The confederacy embraced within its territory the present
State of New York north and west of the Kaatzbergs and south of the
Adirondack group of mountains.
The several nations were subdivided into tribes, each having a heraldic insignia, or totem. Through the totemic system they maintained a tribal union, and exhibited a remarkable example of an almost pure democracy in government.
Each canton or nation was a distinct republic, independent of all others in relation to its domestic affairs, but each was bound to the others of the league by ties of honor and general interest.
Each had an equal voice in the general council or congress, and possessed a sort of veto power, which was a guarantee against despotism.
After the Europeans came, the sachem, or civil head of a tribe, affixed his totem—such as the rude outlines of a
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Atatarho.1 |
wolf, a bear, a tortoise, or an eagle—to every public paper he was required to sign.
It was like a monarch affixing his
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seal.
Each of the original Five Nations was divided into three tribes, those of the Mohawks being designated as the Tortoise or Turtle, the
Bear, and the
Wolf.
These totems consisted of representations of those animals.
These were sometimes exceedingly rude, but were sufficient to denote the tribe of the signer; as, No. 1, appended to the signature of Little Hendrick, a Mohawk chief, represents his totem—a
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No. 1: totem of little Hendrick, a Mohawk chief: a turtle. |
turtle; No. 2, appended to the signature of Kanadagea, a chief of the
Bear tribe, represents a bear lying on his back; and No. 3 is the signature of Great Hendrick, of the
Wolf tribe, the rude representation of that animal appearing at the end of his signature.
As each confederated union was divided into tribes, there were thirty or forty sachems in the league.
These had inferior officers under them, and the civil power was widely distributed.
Office
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No. 2: totem of Kanadagea, a chief of the bear tribe: a bear lying on his back. |
was the reward of merit alone; malfeasance in it brought dismissal and public scorn.
All public services were compensated only by public esteem.
The powers and duties of the president of the league were similar to those conferred and imposed upon the
chief magistrate of our republic.
He had authority to assemble a congress of representatives; had a cabinet of six advisers, and in the council he was a moderator.
There was no coercive power, excepting public opinion, lodged anywhere.
The military dominated the civil power in the league.
The chiefs derived their authority from the people, and they sometimes, like the Romans, deposed civil officers.
The army was composed wholly of volunteers, and conscription was impossible.
Every able-bodied man was bound to do military duty, and he who shirked it incurred everlasting disgrace.
The ranks were always full.
The recruiting-stations were the war-dances.
Whatever was done in civil councils was subjected to review by the soldiery, who had the right to call councils when they pleased, and approve or disapprove public measures.
The matrons formed a third and powerful party in the legislature of the league.
They had a right to sit in the councils, and there exercise the veto power on the subject of a declaration of war, and to propose and demand a cessation of hostilities.
They were pre-eminently peace-makers.
It was no reflection upon the courage of warriors if, at the call of the matrons, they withdrew from the war-path.
These women wielded great influence in the councils, but they modestly delegated the duties of speech-making to some masculine orator.
With these
Indians, woman was man's coworker in legislation—a thing unheard of among civilized people.
So much did the
Iroquois reverence the “inalienable rights of man,” that they never made slaves of their fellow-men, not even of captives taken in war. By unity they were made powerful; and to prevent degeneracy, members of a tribe were not allowed to intermarry with each other.
Like the Romans, they caused their commonwealth to expand by annexation and conquest.
Had they remained undiscovered by the Europeans a century longer the
Confederacy might have embraced the whole continent, for the Five Nations had already extended their conquests from the
Great Lakes to the
Gulf of Mexico, and were the terror of the other tribes east and west.
For a long time the
French in
Canada, who taught them the use of fire-arms, maintained a doubtful struggle against them.
Champlain found
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No. 3: totem of Great Hendrick, of the Wolf tribe, a Wolf. |
them at war against the
Canada Indians from
Lake Huron to the
Gulf of St. Lawrence.
He fought them on
Lake Champlain in 1609; and from that time until the middle of that century their wars against the
Canada Indians and their French allies were fierce and dis-
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tressing.
They made friends of the
Dutch, from whom they obtained firearms; and they were alternately at war and peace with the
French for about sixty years. The latter invaded the cantons of the league, especially after the Five Nations became allied with the
English, who, as masters of New York, used their dusky neighbors to carry out their designs.
The
Iroquois, meanwhile, carried their conquests almost to
Nova Scotia on the east, and far towards the
Mississippi on the west, and subdued the Susquehannas in
Pennsylvania.
In 1649 they subdued and dispersed the Wyandottes in the
Huron country.
Some of the fugitives took refuge among the Chippewas; others fled to
Quebec, and a few were incorporated in the
Iroquois Confederacy.
The
Wyandottes were not positively subdued, and claimed and exercised sovereignty over the
Ohio country down to the close of the eighteenth century.
Then the Five Nations made successful wars on their eastern and western neighbors, and in 1655 they penetrated to the land of the Catawbas and Cherokees.
They conquered the Miamis and Ottawas in 1657, and in 1701 made incursions as far as the
Roanoke and
Cape Fear rivers, to the land of their kindred, the Tuscaroras.
So determined were they to subdue the
Southern tribes that when, in 1744, they ceded a part of their lands to
Virginia, they reserved a perpetual privilege of a war-path through the territory.
A French invasion in 1693, and again in 1696, was disastrous to the league, which lost one-half of its warriors.
Then they swept victoriously southward early in the eighteenth century, and took in their kindred, the Tuscaroras, in
North Carolina, when the
Confederacy became known as the Six Nations.
In 1713 the
French gave up all claim to the
Iroquois, and after that the
Confederacy was generally neutral in the wars between
France and
England that extended to the
American colonies.
Under the influence of
William Johnson, the
English Indian agent, they went against the
French in 1755, and some of them joined
Pontiac in his conspiracy in 1763.
When the Revolution broke out, in 1775, the
Iroquois, influenced by the Johnson family, adhered to the crown, excepting the Oneidas.
Led by
Brant and savage Tories, they desolated the
Mohawk,
Cherry, and
Wyoming valleys.
The
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country of the
Western Iroquois, in turn, was desolated by
General Sullivan in 1779, and
Brant retaliated fearfully on the frontier settlements.
At the close of the war the hostile
Iroquois, dreading the vengeance of the exasperated
Americans, took refuge in
Canada, excepting the Oneidas and Tuscaroras.
By treaties, all the lands of the Six Nations in New York passed into the possession of the white people, excepting some reservations on which their descendants still reside.
In the plenitude of their
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Attack on an Iroquois Fort (from an old print). |
power the
Confederacy numbered about 15,000; they now number about 13,000, distributed at various points in
Canada and the
United States.
In 1899 there were 2,767 Senecas, 549 Onondagas, 161 Cayugas, 270 Oneidas, and 388 Tuscaroras in
New York State; 1,945 Oneidas in
Wisconsin; and 323 Senecas in
Indian Territory.
Like the other
Indians of the continent, the
Iroquois were superstitious and cruel.
They believed in witches as firmly as did Cotton
Mather and his
Puritan brethren in
New England, and they punished them in human form as fiercely as Henry VIII., or the rulers and the Gospel ministers at
Salem in later times.
Their “medicine men” and “prophets” were as expert deceivers as the priests, oracles, and jugglers of civilized men. They tortured their enemies in retaliation for kindred slain with almost as refined cruelty as did the ministers of the
Holy Inquisition the enemies of their opinions; and they lighted fires around their more eminent prisoners of war, in token of their power, as bright and hot as those kindled by enlightened Englishmen around Joan of Arc as a sorceress, or Bishops Latimer and Ridley as believers in what they thought to be an absurdity.
