Chapter VII
[The Old Niagara Frontier]
What has been loosely called the "Niagara Frontier" embraces all the beautiful stretch of territory south of Lakes Ontario and Erie, extending westward quite to Cleveland, the Forest City on the latter lake. It would be difficult to point to a tract of country in all America the history of which is of more inherent interest than this far-flung old-time frontier of which the Niagara River was the strategic key. The beautiful cities now standing here, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Toronto, as well as the ancient Falls, forever new and wonderful, bring to this fair country, in large volume, the modern note that would drown the memory of the long ago; but here, as elsewhere, and particularly here, the Indian left his names upon the rivers and the shores of the lakes, beautiful names that will neither die nor permit the days of Iroquois, Eries, and Hurons to pass forgotten.
Historically, the Niagara frontier is memorable, firstly, because it embraced in part the homes and hunting-grounds of the Six Nations, the pre-eminent Indian confederacy of the continent. The French name for the confederacy was Iroquois; their own, "Ho-de-no-sote," or the "Long House," which extended from the Hudson to Lake Erie and from the St. Lawrence to the valleys of the Delaware, Susquehanna, and Allegheny. This domain was divided between the several nations by well-defined boundary lines, called "lines of property." The famous Senecas were on the Niagara frontier.
Colonel Römer's Map of the Country of the Iroquois, 1700.
In this pleasant land the Iroquois dwelt in palisaded villages upon the fertile banks of the lakes and streams which watered their country. Their houses were built within a protecting circle of palisades, and, like all the tribes of the Iroquois family, were long and narrow, not more than twelve or fifteen feet in width, but often exceeding one hundred and fifty in length. They were made of two parallel rows of poles stuck upright in the ground, of sufficient widths at the bottom to form the floor, and bent together at the top to form the roof; the whole was entirely covered with strips of peeled bark. At each end of the long house was a strip of bark or a bear skin hung loosely for a door. Within, they built their fires at intervals along the centre of the floor, the smoke rising through the opening in the top, which served, as well, to let in light. In every house were fires and many families, and every family having its own fire within the space allotted to it.
Among all the Indians of the New World, there were none so politic and intelligent, none so fierce and brave, none with so many heroic virtues mingled with savagery, as the people of the Long House. They were a terror to all the surrounding tribes, whether of their own or of Algonquin speech. In 1650 they overran the country of the Huron; in 1651 they destroyed the neutral nation along the Niagara; in 1652 they exterminated the Eries. They knew every war-path and "their war-cry was heard westward to the Mississippi and southward to the great gulf." They were, in fact, the conquerors of the New World, perhaps not unjustly styled the "Romans of the West." Wrote the Jesuit Father Ragueneau, in 1650, "My pen has no ink black enough to describe the fury of the Iroquois." In 1715, the Tuscaroras, a branch of the Iroquois family, in the Carolinas, united with the Five Nations, after which the confederacy was known as the Six Nations, of which the other five tribes were named in order of their rank, Mohawks, Onondagas, Senecas, Oneidas, and Cayugas.