Strange, strange, that I, a white man of unmixed blood, should stand in League-Council for the noblest clan of the Oneida nation!
That I had been adopted satisfied the hereditary law of chieftainship; that I had been selected satisfied the elective law of the sachems. Rank follows the female line; the son of a chief never succeeded to rank. It is the matron—the chief woman of the family—who chooses a dead chief's successor from the female line in descent; and thus Cloud on the Sun chose me, her adopted; and, dying, heard the loud, imperious challenge from the council-fire as the solemn rite ended with:
"Now show me the man!"
And so, knowing that the antlers were lifted and the quiver slung across my thigh, she died contented, and I, a lad, stood a chief of the Oneida nation. Never since time began, since the Caniengas adopted Hiawatha, had a white councilor been chosen who had been accepted by family, clan, and national council, and ratified by the federal senate, excepting only Sir William Johnson and myself. That Algonquin word "sachem," so seldom used, so difficult of pronunciation by the Iroquois, was never employed to designate a councilor in council; there they used the title, Roy-a-neh, and to that title had I answered the belt of the Iroquois, in the name of Kayanehenh-Kowa, the Great Peace.
For what Magna Charta is to the Englishman, what the Constitution is to us, is the Great Peace to an Iroquois; and their gratitude, their intense reverence and love for its founder, Hiawatha, is like no sentiment we have conceived even for the beloved name of Washington.
Now that the Revolution had split the Great Peace, which is the Iroquois League, the larger portion of the nation had followed Brant to Canada—all the Caniengas, the greater part of the Onondaga nation, all the Cayugas, the one hundred and fifty of our own Oneidas. And though the Senecas did not desert their western post as keepers of the shattered gate in a house divided against itself, they acted with the Mohawks; the Onondagas had brought their wampum from Onondaga, and a new council-fire was kindled in Canada as rallying-place of a great people in process of final disintegration.
It was sad to me who loved them, who knew them first as firm allies of New York province, who understood them, their true character, their history and tradition, their intimate social and family life.
And though I stood with those whom they struck heavily, and who in turn struck them hip and thigh, I bear witness before God that they were not by nature the fiends and demons our historians have painted, not by instinct the violent and ferocious scourges that the painted Tories made of these children of the forest, who for five hundred years had formed a confederacy whose sole object was peace.
I speak not of the brutal and degraded gens de prairie—the horse-riding savages of the West, whose primal instincts are to torture the helpless and to violate women—a crime no Iroquois, no Huron, no Algonquin, no Lenni-Lenape can be charged with. But I speak for the gens de bois—the forest Indians of the East, and of those who maintained the Great League, which was but a powerful tribunal imposing peace upon half a continent.
Left alone to themselves, unharassed by men of my blood and color, they are a kindly and affectionate people, full of sympathy for their friends in distress, considerate of their women, tender to their children, generous to strangers, anxious for peace, and profoundly reverent where their League or its founders were concerned.