THE LEAGUE OF THE SIX NATIONS.
All this region, and the lands westward beyond the Central Lake District of New York, was the home of that noted Indian Confederation of America which the French named the Iroquois. When the earliest French explorers found them, they were the "Five Nations"—the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas and Mohawks. Their name as a league was Hodenosaunee, meaning "they form a cabin,"—this being their idea of a combination, offensive and defensive, and within their figurative cabin the fire was in the centre at Onondaga, while the Mohawk was the door. They were great warriors, and their tradition was that the Algonquins had driven them from Canada to the south side of Lake Ontario. Subsequently a portion of the Tuscaroras came up from the South, and being admitted to the Confederacy, it became the "Six Nations." They had considerable warlike knowledge. Near Elmira, which is close to the Pennsylvania boundary south of Seneca Lake, their ancient fortifications are still visible, having been located with the skill of a military engineer as a defense against attacks. Fort Hill at Auburn was also an Iroquois fortification that has yielded many relics, and other works constructed by them are shown in various places. The league carried on almost continuous warfare against the neighboring tribes and the frontier colonists, and were conspicuous in all the colonial wars. When in their greatest prosperity they numbered about fifteen thousand, and over ten thousand now exist, being located on Canadian reservations adjacent to the St. Lawrence River, and on eight reservations in New York, where there are about five thousand, in civilized life, chiefly engaged in agriculture. In the ancient league they were ruled by the Council of Sachems of the various tribes, the central council-fire being upon the shore of Onondaga Lake, and the Atotarho, or head sachem of the Onondagas, being chief of the league.
In colonial New York the westernmost tribe was the Senecas, whose hunting-grounds extended from the Central Lake District to Lakes Ontario and Erie. When the Dutch pioneers encountered these Indians they were found to have the almost unpronounceable name of "Tsonnundawaonos," meaning the "great hill people," and the nearest the Dutch could come to it was to call them "Sinnekaas," which in time was changed to Senecas. The Quakers took great interest in them, with such fostering care that three thousand Senecas now live on the sixty-six thousand acres in their reservations. They have their own Indian language and special alphabet, and portions of the Scriptures are printed in it. In their days of power they had two famous chiefs—Cornplanter, also called Captain O'Beel, the name of his white father, he being a half-breed, and Red Jacket. The latter lived till 1830 in the Senecas' village near Buffalo. His original Indian name was Otetiani, or "Always Ready," and the popular title came from a richly-embroidered scarlet jacket given him by a British officer, which he always had great pride in wearing. He was a leader among the Indians of his time and an impressive orator. Next eastward of the Senecas were the Cayugas, who, when discovered by the French on the banks of their lake, had about three hundred warriors, and in the seventeenth century, under French tutelage, their chiefs became Christians. A remnant of the tribe is in the Indian Territory. The Onondagas were the "men of the mountain," getting their name from the highlands where they lived, south of Onondaga Lake. There are about three hundred now on their reservation and as many more in Canada. Their language is regarded as the purest of the Iroquois dialects, and its dictionary has been published. Farther eastward, where the granite outcroppings of the southern Adirondack ranges appeared, were the Oneidas, the "tribe of the granite rock," now having on their reservation at Oneida Castle over two hundred, with many more in Wisconsin and Canada. The Tuscaroras came into the league in 1713, and were given a location on the southeastern shore of Oneida Lake, and they are now on a reservation in Western New York, where over three hundred live, with more in Canada. Their name was of modern adoption, after they had assumed some of the habits of the whites, and means the "shirt-wearers."
The Mohawks lived farther east, in the Mohawk Valley, among the limestone and granitic formations of the Adirondacks and Eastern New York, and they were the Agmaque, meaning "the possessors of the flint." Within the league their name was Ganniagwari, or the "She-Bear," whence the Algonquins called them Mahaque, which the English gradually corrupted into Mohawk, the name being also adopted for their river. The early Dutch settlers at Albany made a treaty with them which was lasting, and the English also had their friendship. Their most noted chief was Thayendanega, better known as Joseph Brant, who espoused the English cause in the Revolution and held a post in the Canadian Indian Department, his tribe then extending throughout the whole region between the St. Lawrence and the Hudson. He visited England in 1786 and collected money to build a church for his people, and published the Prayer-Book and the Gospel of Mark in Mohawk and English. He steadily exerted himself after the Revolution to maintain peace between the frontier Indians and the United States, being zealously devoted to the welfare of his tribe. He had an estate on the shore of Lake Ontario, where he died in 1807.
LITTLE FALLS AND UTICA.
In ascending the Mohawk valley the distant view is circumscribed on the south by the Catskills and Helderbergs, and on the north by the Adirondack ranges. The outcrops of the latter compress upon the river in long protruding crags covered with firs and known as the "Noses." There are various villages, started in the eighteenth century as frontier posts among the Indians. There are also hop-fields in plenty and much pasture, and finally the hills become higher and the valley narrower as Little Falls is reached, where the Mohawk forces a passage through a spur of the Adirondacks, known as the Rollaway. The river, approaching the gorge, sharply bends from east to south, and plunges wildly down a series of rapids, the town being set among the rocky precipices right in the throat of the defile. The place is heaped with rocks, the stream falling forty-two feet within a thousand yards, the descent forming three separate cataracts, which give power to numerous mills on the banks and clustering upon an island in the rapids. They make cheese and paper, and on either hand precipitous crags rise five hundred feet above them. The pass is very narrow, compressing the Erie Canal and the New York Central and West Shore Railways closely upon the river; in fact, the canal passage has been blasted out of the solid granite on the southern river-bank. Here can be readily studied the crystalline rocks of the Laurentian formation, which are described as "part of the oldest dry land on the face of the globe." It is this pass through the mountains, made by the Mohawk, that gives the Erie Canal and the Vanderbilt railways their low-level route between the Atlantic seaboard and the West. All the other trunk railways climb the Allegheny ranges and cross them at elevations of two thousand feet or more, while here the elevation is not four hundred feet, thus avoiding steep gradients and expensive hauling. The Rollaway stretches for a long distance, clothed to its summit with pines and birches.
Beyond, the amber waters of Canada Creek flow in from the north, giving the Mohawk a largely increased current, and the land becomes a region of gentle hills, with meadows and herds, a scene of pastoral beauty, the great dairy region of New York. Here is Herkimer, which was an Indian frontier fort, and a few miles farther is Utica, the dairymen's and cheese-makers' headquarters, a city of fifty thousand people. The whole Mohawk valley for miles has an atmosphere of peacefulness and content, innumerable cows and sheep grazing and resting upon the rich pastures. The river is narrow and meanders slowly past Utica, which is built to the southward along the banks of the canal. This city also grew up around an Indian border post. General Schuyler, who came westward from Albany, seeking trade, built Fort Schuyler here in 1758, the grant of land being known as Cosby's Manor. Then a block-house was built, but the settlement, known as Old Fort Schuyler, grew very little until after the canal was opened. Utica had the honor of producing two of the leading men of New York, Roscoe Conkling and Horatio Seymour, the latter having been Governor of New York and the Democratic candidate for President when General Grant was first elected in 1868. The city rises gradually upon a gentle slope south of the Mohawk, until it reaches one hundred and fifty feet elevation, Genesee street, the chief highway, wide and attractive, extending back from the river and across the canal, bordered by elegant residences, fronted by lawns and fine shade trees. Its leading public institution is the State Lunatic Asylum, but its pride is the regulation of the butter and cheese trades of New York.
In journeying through New York, it is noticed that there is an ambitious nomenclature. The towns are given classic names, as if there had been an early immigration of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Thus we were at Troy on the Hudson, and coming up the Mohawk have passed Fonda, Palatine bridge and Ilion on the route to Utica, while farther on are Rome and Verona. It seems that in the primitive days of New York old Simeon de Witt was the Surveyor General, and under his auspices the remorseless college graduate is said to have wandered over the country with instrument and map and scattered broadcast classic names. These flourish most in Western New York. Albion and Attica, Corfu and Palmyra, are near neighbors there, the latter being chiefly known to fame as the place where the original Mormon apostle, "Joe Smith," claimed to have found the sacred golden plates of the Mormon bible and the stone spectacles through which he interpreted the signs written upon them. Memphis is near by, and Macedon and Jordan are adjacent villages. Pompey, Virgil and Ulysses are named up, and Ovid is between Lakes Seneca and Cayuga, with Geneva at the foot of Seneca and Ithaca at the head of Cayuga. Auburn—"loveliest village of the plain"—is to the eastward, and Aurelius, Marcellus and Camillus are railway stations on the route to Syracuse, one of whose former names was Corinth. To the southward is Homer, having Nineveh and Manlius near by; Venice is not far away, and Babylon is down on Long Island. The Mohawk thus heads in classic ground, rising in the highlands of Oneida about twenty miles north of Rome, past which it flows a small and winding brook through the almost level country. Rome, unlike its ancient namesake, has no hills at all, but is built upon a plain, having grown up around the Indian frontier outpost of Fort Stanwix of the Revolution, the battle of Oriskany, in August, 1777, which cut off the reinforcements going to Burgoyne at Saratoga, thus helping to defeat him, having been fought just outside its limits. There are about seventeen thousand people in Rome, which is a prominent lumber market, being at the junction of the Erie and Black River Canals, the latter fetching lumber down from Canada, which has come through Lake Ontario. From Rome the narrow Mohawk flows to Utica, and thence with broadening current onward to the Hudson, its whole length being about one hundred and forty miles. Its gentle course and pastoral beauty remind of the pleasant lines of that poet of nature, John Dyer:
"And see the rivers how they run
Through woods and meads, in shade and sun,