The claims of the Susquehannocks extended down the Chesapeake Bay on the east shore, as far as the Choptank River, and on the west shore as far as the Patuxent. In 1654 they ceded to the government of Maryland their southern territory to these boundaries.[8] The first English explorers met them on the Potomac, about the Falls, and the Pascatoways were deserting their villages and fleeing before them, when, in 1634, Calvert founded his colony at St. Mary's.
Their subjection to the Five Nations took place about 1680, and it was through the rights obtained by this conquest that, at the treaty of Lancaster, 1744, Canassatego, the Onondaga speaker for the Nation, claimed pay from the government of Maryland for the lands on the Potomac, or, as that river was called in his tongue, the Cohongorontas.
The Hurons.
The Hurons, Wyandots, or Wendats, were another Iroquois people, who seem, at some remote epoch, to have come into contact with the Lenape. The latter called them Delamattenos[9] and claimed to have driven them out of a portion of their possessions. A Chipeway tradition also states that the Hurons were driven north from the lake shores by Algonkin tribes.[10] We know, from the early accounts of the Jesuits, that there was commercial intercourse between them and the tribes south of the lakes, the materials of trade being principally fish and corn.[11] The Jesuit Relations of 1648 contain quite a full account of a Huron convert who, in that year, visited the Lenape on the Delaware River, and had an interview with the Swedish Governor, whom he took to task for neglecting the morals of his men.
The Cherokees.
The Cherokees were called by the Delawares Kittuwa (Kuttoowauw, in the spelling of the native Aupaumut). This word I suppose to be derived from the prefix, kit, great, and the root tawa (Cree, yette, tawa), to open, whence tawatawik, an open, i.e., uninhabited place, a wilderness (Zeisberger).
The designation is geographical. According to the tradition of the Cherokees, they once lived (probably about the fourteenth century) in the Ohio Valley, and claimed to have been the constructors of the Grave Creek and other earthworks there.[12] Some support is given to this claim by the recent linguistic investigations of Mr. Horatio Hale,[13] and the archaeological researches of Prof. Cyrus Thomas.[14] They were driven southward by their warlike neighbors, locating their council fire first near Monticello, Va., and the main body reaching East Tennessee about the close of the fifteenth century. As late as 1730 some of them continued to live east of the Alleghanies, while, on the other hand, it is evident, from the proper names preserved by the chroniclers of De Soto's expedition (1542), that at that period others held the mountains of Northern Georgia. To the Delawares they remained kit-tawa-wi, inhabitants of the great wilderness of Southern Ohio and Kentucky.
Delaware traditions distinctly recalled the period when portions of the Cherokees were on the Ohio, and recounted long wars with them.[15] When the Lenape assumed the office of peacemaker, this feud ceased, and was not renewed until the general turmoil of the French-Indian wars, 1750-60. After this closed, in 1768, the Cherokees sought and effected a renewal of their peaceful relations with the Delawares, and in 1779 they even sent a deputation of "condolence" to their "grandfather," the Lenape, on the death of the head chief, White Eyes.[16]