“The honorable gentleman has told you that the Iroquois have no monuments. Did he not previously prove that the land of Gano-no-o, or the Empire State as you love to call it, was once laced by our trails from Albany to Buffalo—trails that we had trod for centuries—trails worn so deep by the feet of the Iroquois that they became your own roads of travel as your possessions gradually eat into those of my people? Your roads still traverse those same lines of communication and bind one part of the long house to another. The land of Gano-no-o—the Empire State—then is our monument! and we wish its soil to rest above our bones when we shall be no more. We shall not long [[267]]occupy much room in living; we shall occupy still less when we are gone; a single tree of the thousands which sheltered our forefathers—one old elm under which the representatives of the tribes were wont to meet—will cover us all; but we would have our bodies twined in death among its roots on the very soil where it grew! Perhaps it will last the longer from being fertilized with their decay.
“I have been told that the first object of this Society is to preserve the history of the State of New York. You, all of you know, that alike in its wars and in its treaties the Iroquois, long before the Revolution, formed a part of that history; that they were then one in council with you, and were taught to believe themselves one in interest. In your last war with England, your red brothers—your elder brothers—still came up to help you, as of old, on the Canada frontier! Have we, the first holders of this prosperous region, no longer a share in your history? Glad were your forefathers to sit down upon the threshold of the ‘Long House’; rich did they then hold themselves, in getting the mere sweepings from its doors. Had our forefathers spurned you from it when the French were thundering at the opposite end, to get a passage through and drive you into the sea, whatever has been the fate of other Indians, the Iroquois might still have been a nation; and I—I—instead of pleading here for the privilege of lingering within your borders—I—I—might have had—a country!”
This was delivered extemporaneously, and was very long, but only these few sentences have been preserved, and for these we are indebted to Mr. Hoffman, who devoted to the author and his subject a long article in the Literary World the next day.
The following was delivered before an enlightened assembly by Mr. Maris B. Pierce. [[268]]
“It has been said, and reiterated so frequently as to have obtained the familiarity of household words, that it is the doom of the Indian to disappear—to vanish like the morning dew before the advance of civilization—before those who belong by nature to a different, and by education and circumstances to a superior race; and melancholy is it to us—those doomed ones—that the history of this country, in respect to us, and its civilization, has furnished so much ground for the saying, and for giving credence to it.
“But whence and why are we thus doomed? Why must we be crushed by the arm of civilization, or the requiem of our race be chanted by the waves of the Pacific, which is destined to ingulf us? Say ye, on whom the sunlight of civilization has constantly shone—into whose lap Fortune has poured her brimful horn, so that you are enjoying the highest and best spiritual and temporal blessings of this world, say, if some being from fairy land, or some distant planet, should come to you in such a manner as to cause you to deem them children of greater light and superior wisdom to yourselves, and you should open to them the hospitality of your dwellings and the fruits of your labor, and they should by dint of their superior wisdom dazzle and amaze you, so as, for what to them were toys and rattles, they should gain freer admission and fuller welcome, till, finally, they should claim the right to your possessions, and of hunting you, like wild beasts, from your long and hitherto undisputed domain, how ready would you be to be taught of them? How cordially would you open your minds to the conviction that they meant not to deceive you further and still more fatally in their proffers of pretended kindness?
“How much of the kindliness of friendship for them, and of esteem for their manners and customs would you feel? Would not ‘the milk of human kindness’ in your [[269]]breasts be turned to the gall of hatred towards them? And have not we, the original and undisputed possessors of this country, been treated worse than you would be, should any supposed case be transferred to reality.
“But I will leave the consideration of this point for the present, by saying, what I believe every person who hears me will assent to, that the manner in which the white people have habitually dealt with the Indians, makes them wonder that their hatred has not burned with tenfold fury against them, rather than that they have not laid aside their own peculiar notions and habits, and adopted those of their civilized neighbors.
“For instances of those natural endowments, which, by cultivation, give to the children of civilization their great names and far-reaching fame, call to mind Philip of Mount Hope, whose consummate talents and skill made him the white man’s terror, by the display of those talents and that skill for the white man’s destruction.
“Call to mind Tecumseh, by an undeserved association with whose name one of the great men of your nation has obtained more of greatness than he ever merited, either for his deeds or his character. Call to mind Red Jacket, formerly your neighbor, with some of you a friend and familiar, and to be a friend and familiar with whom none of you feel it a disgrace.