The Niagara River

by Archer Butler Hulbert

Iroquois government was vested in a general council composed of fifty hereditary sachems, but the order of succession was always in the female and never in the male line. Each nation was divided into eight clans or tribes. The spirit of the animal or bird after which the clan was named, called its "To-tem," was the guardian spirit of the clan, and every member used its figure in his signature as his device. It was the rule that men and women of the same tribe could intermarry. In this manner relationships were interlocked forever by the closest of ties. The name of each sachemship was permanent. When a sachem died the people of the league selected the most competent from among those of his family, who by right inherited the title, and the one so chosen was raised in solemn council to the high honour, and dropping his own received the name of the sachemship. Two sachemships, however, after the death of the original sachems ever remained vacant, those of the Onondagas and "Ha-yo-went-ha" (Hi-a-wat-ha) immortalised by Longfellow, of the Mohawks. Daganoweda was the founder of the league, whose head was represented as covered with tangled serpents; Hi-a-wat-ha (meaning "he who combs") put the head in order and this aided the formation of the league. In honour of these great services this sachemship was afterward held vacant.

The entire body of sachems formed the council league; their authority was civil, confined to affairs of peace, and was advisory rather than otherwise. Every member of the confederacy followed, to a great extent, the dictates of his own will, controlled very much by the customs of his people and "a sentiment that ran through their whole system of affairs which was as inflexible as iron."

The character of the Iroquois confederacy has a bearing on the history of the Niagara country of prime importance; while their immediate seats were somewhat south of Niagara River itself, they were the red masters of the eastern Great Lake region when white men came to know it, conquering, as we have noted, the earlier red races, the Eries and Neutrals, who lived beside Lake Erie and the Niagara River. Of these very little is known; placed between the Iroquois on the South and the Hurons on the North both are accounted to have been fierce and brave peoples, for a long time able to withstand the savage inroads of the people of the Long House. The Eries occupied the territory just south of Lake Erie, while the Neuter or Neutral towns lay on the north side of the lake—stretching up perhaps near to Niagara Falls. They claimed the territory lying west of the Genesee River, and extending northward to the Huron land about Georgian Bay as their hunting-ground, and could, it was affirmed by Jesuits, number twelve thousand souls or four thousand fighting men in 1641, only a decade before annihilation by the southern foe.

Although the French applied to them the name of "neuter" [writes Marshall, the historian of the Niagara frontier], it was always an allusion to their neutrality between the Hurons and the Iroquois. These contending nations traversed the territories of the Neutral Nation in their wars against each other, and if, by chance, they met in the wigwams or villages of this people, they were forced to restrain their animosity and to separate in peace.

Notwithstanding this neutrality, they waged cruel wars with other nations, toward whom they exercised cruelties even more inhuman than those charged upon their savage neighbours. The early missionaries describe their customs as similar to those of the Hurons, their land as producing Indian corn, beans, and squashes in abundance, their rivers as abounding in fish of endless variety, and their forests as filled with animals yielding the richest furs.

They exceeded the Hurons in stature, strength, and symmetry of form, and wore their dress with a superior grace, and regarded their dead with peculiar affection; hence arose a custom which is worthy of notice, and explains the origin of the numerous burial mounds which are scattered over this vicinity. Instead of burying the bodies of their deceased friends, they deposited them in houses or on scaffolds erected for the purpose. They collected the skeletons from time to time and arranged them in their dwellings, in anticipation of the feast of the dead, which occurred once in ten or twelve years. On this occasion the whole nation repaired to an appointed place, each family, with the greatest apparent affection, bringing the bones of their deceased relatives enveloped in the choicest furs.

The final disruption between Neuters and Senecas came, it would seem, in 1648, in the shape of a challenge sent by the latter and accepted; the war raged until 1651, when two whole villages of Neuters were destroyed, the largest containing more than sixteen hundred men. Father Fremin in 1669 found Neuters still living in captivity in Gannogarae, a Seneca town east of the Genesee. Some two years later, seemingly by accident, a rupture between Senecas and Eries, farther to the westward, took place, resulting in a similar Seneca victory; thus the Iroquois came to be the masters of the Niagara country.

What this meant becomes very evident with the advance of France to this old-time key of the continent; here lay the strongest, most civilised Indian nations, conquerors of half a continent; what the friendship of the Iroquois meant to these would-be white conquerors of the self-same empire no words could express; as we have noted, the Niagara River was the direct passageway to the Mississippi basin. It is one of the most interesting caprices of Fate that France should have been given the great waterway—key of the continent; now, with a friendly alliance with the Six Nations the progress of French arms could hardly be challenged. But France, in the early hours of her progress, and by the hand of her best friend and wisest champion, Champlain, incurred the inveterate hatred of these powerful New York confederates. This he did in 1609 by joining a war-party of Algonquins of the lower St. Lawrence region on one of their memorable raids into the Iroquois country by way of the Richelieu River and Lake Champlain. Dr. Bourinot,[16] perhaps most clearly of all, has explained Champlain's own comprehension of the matter by saying that the dominating purpose of his life in New France was the exploration of the vast region from which came the sweeping tides of the St. Lawrence; supposing, naturally, that the Canadian red men were to be eventually the victors in the ancient war, especially if aided by the government of New France, it was politic for Champlain to espouse their cause since no general scheme of exploration "could have been attempted had he by any cold or unsympathetic conduct alienated the Indians who guarded the waterways over which he had to pass before he could unveil the mysteries of the Western wilderness."

In June this eventful invasion of the Iroquois country was undertaken, and on the last day of July but one, near what was to become the historic site of Fort Ticonderoga, a pitched battle was fought. Champlain's own account of this the first decisive battle of America cannot be excelled in its quaint and picturesque simplicity: