The writer would liked to have said a word or two or relation to the present condition and prospects of the Indians, but the original design in regard to both the topics and brevity of this writing having been already greatly transcended, it must be deferred. The once powerful confederacy of the Six Nations, occupying in its palmy days the greater portion of New York State, now number only a little over 3,000. Even this remnant will soon be gone. In view of this, as well as of the known fact that the Indian race is everywhere gradually diminishing in numbers, the writer cannot close without invoking for this unfortunate people renewed kindliness, sympathy and benevolent attention. It is true, that with some few exceptions, they possess habits and characteristics which render them difficult to approach; but still, they are only what the creator of us all has made them. And let it be remembered, it must be a large measure of kindliness and benevolence that will repay the injustice and wrongs that have been inflicted upon them.
ATOTARHO.
Atotarho, who by tradition was an Onondaga, is the great embodiment of the Iroquois courage, wisdom and heroism, and he is invested with allegoric traits which exalt him to a kind of superhuman character. Unequalled in war and arts his fame spread abroad, and exalted the Onondaga nation in the highest scale. He was placed at the head of the confederacy, and his name was used after his death as an examplar of glory and honor. While like that of Caesar, it became perpetuated as the official title of the presiding Sachem of the confederacy. He was a man of energy and renown. And such was the estimation in which he was held in his life time, and the popular veneration for his character after death, that, as above denoted, his name became the distinctive title for the office, and is not yet extinct, although the tribes have no longer war to prosecute or foreign embassadors to reply to.
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IROQUOIS LAWS OF DESCENT.
At the establishment of the confederacy, fifty sachems were founded and a name assigned to each, by which they are still known, and these names are kept as hereditary from the beginning to the present time. There were also fifty sub-sachems, or war chiefs—that is, to every sachem was given a war chief, to stand behind him to do his biddings. These sachemships were, and are still confined to the five nations; the Tuscaroras were admitted into the confederacy without enlarging the framework of the league, by allowing them their own sachems and sub-sachems, or war chiefs, as they inherited from their original nation of North Carolina.
But how, it may be asked, is a government so purely popular and so simple and essentially advisory in its character, to be reconciled with the laws of hereditary descent, fixed by the establishment of heraldic devices and bringing its proportion of weak and incompetent minds into office, and with the actual power it exercised and the fame it acquired. To answer this question, and to show how the aristocratic and democratic principles were made to harmonize in the Iroquois government, it will be necessary to go back and examine the laws of descent among the tribes, together with the curious and intricate principles of the clans or tribal bond.
Nothing is more fully under the cognizance of observers of the manners and customs of the Indians, than the fact of the entire nation or tribe being separated into distinct clans, each of them distinguished by the name and device of some quadruped, bird, or other object in the animal kingdom. This device is called by the Tuscaroras Or-reak-sa (clan). The Iroquois have turned it to account by assuming it as the very basis of their political and tribal bond.
A government wholly verbal must be conceded to have required this proximity and nearness of access. The original five nations of the Iroquois were, theoretically, separated into eight clans or original families of kindreds, who are distinguished respectively by the clans of the wolf, bear, turtle, deer, beaver, falcon, crane and the plover. I find that there is a little difference in the clans of the Tuscaroras, which are the bear, wolf, turtle, beaver, deer, eel and snipe. It is contrary to the usage of the Indians that near kindred should intermarry, and the ancient rule interdicts all intermarriage between persons of the same clan. They must marry into a clan which is different from their own. A Bear or Wolf male cannot marry a Bear or Wolf female. By this custom the purity of blood is preserved, while the ties of relationship between the clans themselves is strengthened or enlarged.
The line of descent is limited exclusively in the female's children. Owing to this arrangement, a chieftain's son cannot succeed him in office, but in case of his death, the right of descent being in his mother, he would be succeeded, not by one of his male children, but by his brother; or failing in this then by the son of his sister, or by some direct, however remote, descendent of a maternal line.