USA > Pennsylvania > Luzerne County > Wilkes-Barre > A history of Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania : from its first beginnings to the present time, including chapters of newly-discovered early Wyoming Valley history, together with many biographical sketches and much genealogical material. Volume I > Part 15
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A-to-tar-ho.
* The inili- tary organization of the League seems to have been not only independent of the civil authority, but dominant of it. The military leaders were called chiefs. They derived their authority from the people, who recognized and rewarded their ability as warriors."
In the early days of the Iroquois Confederacy its members were commonly known to other Indians by the general name of "Mingoes" *- regardless of their tribal names and distinctions-and their Confederacy soon came to be called the "Five Nations." They rose rapidly in power and influence. One of the first results of their federal system was a universal spirit of aggression-a thirst for military glory and political
* In 1779. 1782 and 1832 certain Iroquois Indians-few in number-living on a branch of the Scioto River were officially denominated "Mingoes."
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aggrandizement, which made the old forests of America resound with human conflicts from New England to the Mississippi, and from the northern confines of the Great Lakes to the Tennessee and the hills of Carolina. The Five Nations never subjugated the Indians east of the Connecticut River, however.
The Five Nations were, indeed, entitled to respect, not only because of their fighting powers, but for their intelligence and long start toward civilization. They were by far the most advanced of the North American Indians. DeWitt Clinton denominated them "the Romans of the Western World."
"This empire of the Iroquois belongs not to remote antiquity, but is one of yester- day. When we have gone back 400 years everything beyond is shrouded in the dim twilight of Indian legend and scattered lore. In the centuries before our Revolutionary War this people had made a great deal of forgotten history on our continent. Among Indian races they had been supreme. They were master spirits, and the imperial nature of their ambition quite rivals that of many white races. With their seat of authority established in central New York they were masters of a domain which now forms many States. The territory over which they exercised their sway might well have been called an empire. Indeed, there was nothing boastful or unwarranted in their assump- tion of imperial rank for the chief man whom they chose to preside over them.
"The war-cry of this people was heard on the shores of the Mississippi and in Mexico. They went south as far as Georgia. When Capt. John Smith niet some of the Mohawks paddling about Chesapeake Bay, other Indians told him that the Mohawks made war on all the world .* North of the Aztec monarchy no people ever built up on this continent so powerful a political organization. It is believed that the conquests of the Iroquois reached to further limits than those of Greece, and that Rome herself did not much surpass them territorially.
"Theirs was not an Empire of the mind like Greece, of law and gold like Rome, but one purely of the sword, or the bow and arrow and the tomahawk. It was purely because of their genius for war that the Iroquois were able to raise themselves to their proud eminence. That genius acted in a land which had been built for empire. Morgan well pointed out that a great source of their strength lay in the lands which were their home, which were the highest on the continent, between the Atlantic and the Mississippi. There, in central New York, were the headwaters of great rivers-the Hudson, the St. Lawrence, the Susquehanna, the Ohio-which marked the highways along which they could descend to the conquest of inferior races far to the south and west. Long before the white man had made New York State a seat of civilization this dusky warrior race had marked out our territory as a land of empire."t
About the year 1600 the five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy were distributed throughout northern New York as follows : The Mo- hawks (or Caniengas, as Hale says "they should properly be called")} possessed the Mohawk River, a small part of the territory soutli of it and nearly all the region in the north-east corner of the State to the St. Lawrence River-including what is now known as the Adirondack region. "They 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." Lake Otsego and Canadurango Lake (mentioned on page 32) lay within the Mohawk territory.
At this time the Mahikans, or Mohegans (referred to on page 101), were located south of the Mohawks, while west of them the Oneidas held a strip of territory, about thirty miles in width, extending from the present northern boundaries of the counties of Delaware and Broome north to the St. Lawrence-including the Chenango River and the small river and part of the lake which now bear the name Oneida.
* See pages 38 and 39.
+ FRANCIS W. HALSEY, in The New York Times Saturday Review, June 7, 1902.
į They were also called "Maquas." The word maqua has been translated as "bear" and as "man- veater." See further, foot-notes on pages 106 and 112.
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West of the Oneidas the imperious Onondagas, the central and, in some respects, the ruling nation of the League, possessed the region ex- tending from the present counties of Tioga and Broome northward to the south-eastern and eastern shores of Lake Ontario and a short stretch of the St. Lawrence River. The territory of the Onondagas was smaller in extent than that of the Oneidas, and included within its limits the three lakes Skaneateles, Onondaga and Otisco and part of Oneida Lake.
Still proceeding westward, the lines of trail and river led to the long and winding reaches of Cayuga Lake, about which were clustered the towns of the people who gave their name to the lake .* The small- est of the five territories was that possessed by the Cayugas. It compre- hended parts of the present counties of Tompkins, Seneca, Cayuga and Wayne, and was bounded on the north by Lake Ontario. The Cayugas had several names when first known.
Beyond the Cayugan territory, over the wide expanse of hills and dales surrounding the lakes Seneca, Keuka and Canandaigua, were scattered the populous villages of the Senecas ("more correctly called Sonontowanas, or Mountaineers," says Hale). ; Their territory extended westward to the Genesee River, and was bounded on the north by Lake Ontario, and on the south by the region occupied by the Gachoi, or Gachoos. West of the Senecas at this period were the Neutrals, and south-west were the Eries, mentioned on page 107. "When first known the Senecas lived entirely in what is now known as Ontario County and in a small part of Monroe County, occupying several villages and having two conspicuous divisions. Tradition points to Yates County for their origin, and it is probable that forts in that direction may have been occupied by part of the nation."}
Jeffries says in his work on the human race that "the Five Nations, at the landing of the Pilgrims, constituted a rising power in America ; and had not New England been settled by Europeans it is most likely that the Iroquois would have exterminated the inferior tribes of red men."
"To this Indian league," writes Morgan, "France must chiefly ascribe the final overthrow of her magnificent schemes of colonization
* The Indian name for this lake was Gwe-u-gweth, "the Lake at the Mucky Land."
+O. H. MARSHALL (in "Historical Writings, " page 231) says : "The name 'Senecas' first appears on a Dutch map of 1616. * * How this name originated is vexata questio among Indo-antiquarians and etymologists. The least plausible supposition is, that the name has any reference to the moralist Seneca. Some have supposed it to be a corruption of the Dutch term for vermilion, or cinnabar, under the assump- tion that the Senecas, being the most warlike of the Five Nations, used that pigment inore than others, and thus gave origin to the name. This hypothesis is supported by no authority."
Schoolcraft (in his "History of the Indian Tribes," page 326) says : "The word Seneka, or Seneca, has been a puzzle to inquirers. How a Roman proper name should have become the distinctive cogno- men for a tribe of American Indians, it is not easy to say. The French, who first encountered them in western New York, termed them, agreeably to their system of bestowing nicknames, 'Tsonontowans' ; that is, 'Rattlesnakes.' * * * The Senecas call themselves 'Nundowa,' or 'People of the Hill,' from an eminence at the head of Canandaigua Lake, which is the locality of a popular allegory."
Dr. Beauchamp (previously mentioned), in an article on Indian flames, published in the Syracuse Journal in 1896, wrote : "The name of the Senecas is an old one (although not their owi1), first appear- ing on the Dutch maps of 1614-16, and having been given theni by the Algonkin tribes near the coast. These spoke a radically different language. In their tongue Sin-ne meant to eat,' and the forin is still found in the Ojibwa-as in We-sin-ne, 'we eat.' It was variously spelled by the Dutch, the most com111011 form being 'Sinneke,' or 'Sinneque,' and the spelling hardly suggests to the eye the Latin form so easily derived from it by the ear.
"Mr. Hale says that Sinako means 'stone snakes' in the Delaware, and that Mr. Squier was told that. as applied to this nation, their enemies, it meant 'mountain snakes.' This does not seem as well sup- ported as the other, and the more reasonable interpretation is thought to be 'the devourers, or eaters, of men,' actually or figuratively. All the early Iroquois had a terrible reputation in this way. Literally they were devourers of their enemies."
Says Heckewelder-quoting the Rev. C. Pyrlæus : "The Five Nations formerly did eat human flesh. "Eto niacht ochquari,' said they, in devouring the whole body of a French soldier ; which, being inter- preted, is, 'human flesh tastes like bear's meat !' "-Hayden's "The Wyoming Massacre," page 33.
On the map on page 33, ante, and on the map of Pennsylvania in Chapter V (both of which were published in 1756), it will be noticed that the territory at that time occupied by the Senecas is indicated in these words : "Chenessies, Canasadages and Chenandoanes, called by the English SENECAS."
# Bulletin of the New York State Museum, No. 32, page 125.
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in the northern part of America." To insure their well-being in Canada the French took the part of the Algonkins, and consequently were led into conflict with the Five Nations. It was thus that came about the first recorded battle of whites and Indians, on the site of Ticonderoga, at the lower end of Lake Champlain, in New York, a description of which we owe to Champlain. It took place July 30, 1609, more than eleven years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock."
The introduction of gunpowder into America revolutionized the entire Indian mode of life. Learning the importance and use of fire- arms-cumbrous arquebuses and matchlocks-from the Dutch and in the hands of Champlain's followers, the Five Nations seized upon these new weapons as rapidly as they could acquire them from the Dutch, with whom they had made an important treaty near Fort Orange-later, Albany-about 1614. With the possession of fire-arms began not only the rapid elevation, but absolute supremacy, of the Five Nations over other Indian nations. Thus rendered formidable they fearlessly extended the range of their triumphs. Within little more than fifty years all western New York, northern Ohio and much of Pennsylvania and Canada were theirs. They had changed the map.
"They made war or peace with equal facility, holding with a death grasp to their old ideas and traditions, conquering and absorb- ing tribes, and getting the control and government of the country from the Carolinas on the south to the lakes on the north and the Mississippi on the west. The Mohawk* war-whoop was the terror of aboriginal life, and the signal-fires of the Iroquois League, illumi- nating the hills and valleys of the Atlantic coast, meant danger to the outlying tribes. Their phenomenal fighting capacity, coupled with the rapidity of movement and power of concentration of their fighting men, gave the impression of a vast number of warriors."- Thomas Donaldson, in "Report on Indians at the Eleventh Census," page 447.
In 1643 the Five Nations expelled the Neuter Nation from the Niagara peninsula, and established a permanent settlement at the mouth of that river. In 1654 they nearly exterminated the Eries-adopting into their Confederacy many of the survivors of the disrupted tribe. Ambition now stimulated every canton, or nation, of the Confederacy, and when, in 1664, New Netherland was surrendered by the Dutch to the Duke of York, and became the Province of New York, the council- fire of the Iroquois League, at Onondaga, burned still brighter and more fiercely. By the terms of this surrender the good will of the Five Nations was secured to the English. Unaided by this influence New
* As previously noted (on pages 106 and 110) the Mohawks and the Iroquois were indiscriminately called "Maquas" by certain tribes of hostile Indians. This was no doubt due to the fact that the Mo- hawks were for many years more widely known as fierce and indomitable foes than any of the other nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. In this respect they were predominant ; and therefore it naturally followed that, by those far removed from the seat of power of the Confederacy, the name of a well- known section, or nation, of the latter should be applied to the entire body.
Dr. Beauchamp stated (in the article mentioned in the note on page 111) : "The early Dutch and English traders and colonists took the names of the interior tribes from the Algonkins, whom they first met along the coast. Thus the Mohawks were called by names which they themselves could not pro- nounce, their being no 'M' or other labial sound in the Iroquois dialects. The Dutch thus termed them 'Maguas,' or 'Maquas' ('Bears'), and this was gradually modified into Mohawks-also expressive of 'man- eaters.' Roger Williams says that 'the Mauguauogs, or man-eaters, that live two or three hundred miles. west from ns, make a delicious monstrous dish of the heads and brains of their enemies.' * * By the two early Algonkin names [Sinneke and Maqua], different in sound but similar in meaning, the Dutch and English long designated all the Iroquois-the Maquas, or Mohawks, being one part, and the Sinnekes. comprising all the rest."
Schoolcraft says ("History of the Indian Tribes," page 209) : "The warlike Mohawks were the most prominent tribe in the Confederacy at the time of the discovery of the Hudson."
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York, as well as the northern and central English colonies, could not have protected so wide a frontier without extraneous aid.
About the year 1670, after they had finally completed the dispersion and subjugation of the Adirondacks and Hurons, the Five Nations acquired possession of the whole country between the lakes Huron, Erie and Ontario, and of the north bank of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Ottawa River near Montreal. They also, about this time, became the terror of the New England tribes, who had been practically sub- jugated by the English. As to the warfare successfully carried on by the Five Nations against the Susquehannocks for several years prior to 1675, reference has already been made (on pages 39 and 40). In 1680 the Senecas, with 600 warriors, invaded the country of the Illinois Indians, upon the borders of the Mississippi, while La Salle was pre- paring to descend that river to the sea. At various times, both before and after this period, the Five Nations turned their warfare against the Cherokees upon the Tennessee River, and the Catawbas in South Carolina.
About the time William Penn landed in Pennsylvania (October, 1682), the once proud and powerful Lenni Lenâpés, who had then come to be called the Delawares, had been subjugated and "made women" by the Five Nations. It is well known that, according to this Indian form of expression, the Delawares were thenceforth prohibited from making war, and were placed under the sovereignty of their conquerors, who did not even allow sales of land-although the land might have been for some time in the actual possession of the Delawares-to be valid with- out their (the Five Nations) approbation. William Penn and his descendants, accordingly, always purchased the right of possession from the Delawares, and that of sovereignty from the Five Nations. It was with the Unami and the Unalachtigo clans of the Delaware nation that Penn held in 1683 his "Great Treaty" (referred to on page 40), which, says Voltaire, "was the only treaty ever made without an oath, and the only one kept inviolate."*
From the foregoing it will be observed that for nearly a hundred years prior to 1700 the Five Nations were involved in an almost unin- terrupted warfare. At the close of that period they had subdued and were holding in nominal subjection all the principal Indian nations occupying the territories which are now embraced in the States of New York, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the northern and western parts of Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, northern Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, a portion of the New England States and the prin- cipal part of Upper Canada. "Over these nations the haughty and im- perious Iroquois exercised a constant supervision. If any of them became involved in domestic difficulties, a delegation of chiefs went among them and restored tranquillity, prescribing at the same time their future conduct." Upon the Algonkins the Five Nations looked down "with the most inveterate contempt."
During King William's War (which was waged for several years in a desultory manner between the English Colonies in America and the Five Nations on one side, and the French and Indians of Canada on the other, and which was ended by the treaty of peace at Ryswick in the Autumn of 1697) the French had found themselves so severely
* See on page 130 a photo-illustration of a wampum belt used at that treaty.
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taxed to resist the Five Nations, that the conclusion of the treaty of peace was most welcome news. Cadwallader Colden, in his "History of the Five Indian Nations"-previously mentioned, on page 32-says (page 202) : "Nothing could be more terrible to Canada than the last war with the Five Nations. While this war lasted the inhabitants ate their bread with fear and trembling. No man was sure, when out of his house, of ever returning to it again. While they labored in the fields they were under perpetual apprehensions of being seized or killed or carried to the Indian country, there to end their days in cruel torments. They, many times, were forced to neglect both seed-time and harvest. In short, all trade and business was often at an entire stand, while fear, despair and misery appeared on the faces of the poor inhabitants."
"The Iroquois, in their best days, were the noblest and most interesting of all Indians who have lived on this continent north of Mexico. They were truly the men whom a name they bore described, a word signifying men who surpassed all others .* They alone founded political institutions and gained political supremacy. With European civilization unknown to them, they had given birth to self-government in America. They founded independence ; effected a union of States ; carried their arms far beyond their own borders ; made their conquests permanent ; conquered peoples becoming tributary States much after the manner of those which Rome conquered 2,000 years ago, or those which England subdues in our day. In diplomacy they matched the white man from Europe ; they had self-control, knowledge of human nature, tact and sagacity, and they often became the arbiters in disputes between other peoples. *
* Convinced that they were born free, they bore themselves always with the pride which sprang from that consciousness. * * In war genius they have been equalled by no race of red men. The forts which they erected around their villages were essentially impregnable. An over- whelming force alone could enter them ; artillery alone could destroy them. It was virtually an empire that they reared, and this empire of the sword, like the Empire of Rome, meant peace within its borders. Before the Europeans came there had, unques- tionably, for some generations, been peace among them. It was an ideal and an idyllic state of aboriginal life, all of which was to be overthrown by the white man when he arrived, bearing in one hand fire-arnis, and in the other fire-water."-Francis W. Halsey, in "The Old New York Frontier," page 11.
"As in old Rome the soldiers were honored above all other men, so they were among the Iroquois; and the warriors, under their chiefs, were all-powerful in public affairs. * * The Iroquois was only a barbarian more advanced toward civilization than the rest of his dusky brethren on the continent. He was superstitious and cruel. So
INDIANS TORTURING A FEMALE CAPTIVE. After a painting by Capt. S. Eastman, U. S. A. (1856.)
were the men and women of all the other Americani nations. They all believ- ed in witches, as firmly as did Cotton Mather and a majority of civilized men and women in his day, in the light of Christianity ; and they punished them in lıuman form as fiercely and piously as did the magistrates of Henry VIII, or the rulers and gospel-ministers of Salem in later times.
"The 'medicine men' and 'prophets' were as acute deceivers, and as despotic and absurd in social life, as were the priests and oracles and conjurers of the Civilized Man in another hemi- sphere. They tortured their captive enemies, i11 revenge for kindred slain, with almost as exquisite
* Schoolcraft, following Cadwallader Colden, says the Iroquois "by a hyperbole are also called Ongwi Honwi, 'a people surpassing others.' "
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a refinement of cruelty as did the ministers of the Holy Inquisition of Civilized Man 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 English- men around Joan of Arc as a sorceress, or Bishops Latimer and Ridley as unbelievers in an utter absurdity."-Benson J. Lossing, in "Our Barbarian Brethren," previously mentioned.
At an early day there were located in what is now the south-eastern part of the United States certain tribes who were believed to belong to the Iroquoian family of aboriginals. They are known in history as the "Iroquois tribes of the South," or "Southern Iroquois," and they occupied, principally, the territory along the Chowan River and its tributary streams in Virginia and North Carolina. So far as known these tribes-with the one exception hereinafter noted-had no connection at any time with the Iroquois Confederacy. One, and perhaps more, of these tribes was known, particularly in Virginia, under the name of Monacan. Other tribes were the Chowan, the Meherrin (now said to have been identified witlı the Susquehannocks), the Nottoway, the Tutelo (now understood to have been a Siouan tribe) and the Tuscarora.
In 1708 the Chowans, Tuteloes and Notto- ways had together ninety-five warriors in North Carolina ; but the Tuteloes and Nottoways were principally seated in Virginia. The last-named had preserved their independence and their num- bers in Virginia later, even, than the one-time powerful Powhatans (referred to on pages 39 and 100), and at the end of the seventeenth century had 130 warriors. They do not appear to have migrated from their original seats in a body. In the year 1822 they are said to have been reduced to twenty-seven souls in Southampton County, Vir- ginia,* and were still in pos- session of 7,000 acres of land there which had been at an early date reserved for them.
The Tuscaroras, or Dus-ga- NOT-TO-WAY ( "THE THINKER"), a "Southern Iroquois" chief.t o-weh-o-no ("Shirt-wearing Peo- ple"), were by far the most powerful nation in North Caro- lina in historic times prior to 1700. Their principal seats in 170S were on the rivers Neuse and Taw, or Tar, and they had about 1,200 warriors in fifteen towns. In 1711 the Tuscaroras attacked the English colonists,
* See "Report on Indians at the Eleventh Census," pages 7 and 14.
+ This is a reduced facsimile of an outline drawing made by George Catlin from a portrait painted by himself at or near Fort Snelling, Minnesota, in 1831. Relative to Not-to-way Mr. Catlin wrote: "A temper- ate and an excellent man, and was handsomely dressed for his picture. I had much conversation with him. and became very much attached to him. He seemed to be quite ignorant of the early history of his tribe. as well as of the position and condition of its few scattered remnants who are yet in existence. He told me * * * that, though he was an Iroquois-which he was proud to acknowledge to me, as I was to 'make him live after he was dead'-he wished it to be generally thought that he was a Chippeway." * *
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