The Iroquois had also a rude system of heraldry. A traveller over the great trails or highways, or along the shores of the great water-ways most often traversed, would have seen many tokens of aboriginal art. The annals of the Jesuit missionaries and of travellers show that besides the hideously painted or carved manitou or idols found at certain well-known places, the trees and rocks were decorated with the totem signs. The wolf, the bear, the tortoise, were the living creatures most frequently seen in effigy on tent, robes, or arms. Or they were set as their seal and sign-manual on the title-deeds of lands bartered away, which the white man required as proofs of sale and absolute alienation, though often the red man intended only joint occupancy. In the Iroquois Confederacy there were eight totem-clans, which formed an eight-fold bond of union in the great commonwealth. Less important symbols were the deer, serpent, beaver, stone pipe, etc. In their drawings on trees or rocks there were certain canons of art well understood and easily read. A canoe meant a journey by water; human figures without heads, so many scalps; the same holding a chain, as being in alliance and friendship; an axe, an emblem of war, etc. A rude fraternity, with secrets, signs, and ceremonies,—the freemasonry of the forest,—was also known and was powerful in its influence. In family life, inheritance was on the female side; and on many subjects the advice of the women was sought and taken, and as witness-auditors they were a necessity at solemn councils, as well as made the repository of tradition.
Exactly what the religion of the Indians was it would be hard to say. To arrange their fluctuating and hazy ideas into a system would be impossible. Whatever the real mental value of their words “manitou” and “wakan,” or other terms implying deity, or simply used to cover ignorance or express mystery, it is evident that the blind worship of force was the essence of their faith. Living much nearer to the animal creation than the civilized man, they were prone to recognize in the brute either a close kinship or an incarnation of divine power. Extremes meet. The current if not the final philosophy of the scientific mind in our century, and that of the savage, have many points in common. All animated life was linked together, but the red man saw the presence of the deity of his conception in every mysterious movement of animate or inanimate things. Even the rattlesnake was the bearer of bane or blessing according as it was treated. Alexander Henry, the traveller from Philadelphia, relates that on meeting a snake four or five feet long, which he would have killed, the Iroquois reverently called it “grandfather,” blew their tobacco smoke in puffs toward it to please the reptile, and prayed to it to influence Colonel Johnson “to take care of their families during their absence, to show them charity, and to fill their canoes with rum.” When, afterward, they were on the lake and a storm arose, Henry came very near being made a Jonah to appease the wrath of the rattlesnake-manitou, but fortunately the tempest passed and it cleared off.
The Indians invented the birch or elm bark canoe, the racket or snow-shoe, the moccasin, all of which the white frontiersmen were quick to utilize when they saw their value. They also taught the settlers the use of new kinds of food, and how to get it from the soil or the water. To tread out eels from the mud, catch fish with the hand or with fish-hooks of bone, and to till the ground, even in the forest, for maize, squashes and pumpkins, were lessons learned from the red man. Frontier and savage life had many points in common, and not a little Indian blood entered into the veins of Americans. There were hundreds of instances of women as well as men rescued from their supposed low estate as captives who preferred to remain with the Indians in savage life. Often white settlers were saved from death by starvation by friendly red men or half-breeds; while half the plots of the savages failed because of the warnings given by friendly squaws, or boys who were usually not full-blooded.
Great changes took place within the Iroquois Confederacy after the advent of the white man. His fire-arms, liquor, fences, and ideas at once began to modify Indian politics, hunting, social life, and religion. The unity of interests was broken, and division and secession set in, as steady currents, to weaken the forest republic. Large numbers of the Iroquois emigrated westward to live and hunt in Ohio and beyond, and joined the Ottawa confederacy. Others left in bands or groups, and made their homes in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or the Southwest, to get away, if possible, from the white man’s fences and fire-water. Others followed their religious teachers into Canada, and made settlements there. These losses were only in a measure made good by the addition to the Long House of a whole tribe from the South, the Tuscaroras, whose ancestral seats had been in the Carolinas.
North Carolina was one of the majority of the original thirteen States first settled by a variety of colonists,—French, German, Swiss, Scottish, and Irish, as well as English. At first red and white men lived at peace; but soon the inevitable “question” came, and the Indians imagined that they could show themselves superior to the pale-faces. Making what white historians call a “conspiracy,” but striking what they believed to be a blow for home and freedom, they rose, and in one night massacred in or near Roanoke alone one hundred and thirty-seven of the white settlers. Their murderous act at once drew out the vengeance of Governor Craven of South Carolina, who sent Col. John Barnwell, an Irishman, who marched with a regiment of six hundred whites and several hundred Indian allies. Without provision trains, but subsisting as Indians do in a wilderness unbroken by villages, farms, or clearings, Barnwell struck the Tuscaroras in battle, and reduced their numbers by the loss of three hundred warriors. Pursuing them to their fortified castle, he laid siege and compelled surrender. By successive blows, this “Tuscarora John,” by death or capture, destroyed one thousand fighting men, and compelled the remainder of the tribe to leave the graves of their fathers, and emigrate northward. Only a remnant reached New York. The Tuscaroras joined the Iroquois Confederacy in 1713, and the federated forest republic then took upon itself the style and title of the Six Nations.
Nearly a century afterward, when the Iroquois Confederacy was a dream, and the Southern Confederacy beginning to be woven of the same stuff, the descendant of “Tuscarora John,” who had added a new tribe to the Long House, gave at Montgomery, Alabama, the casting vote that made Jefferson Davis President of a new one in the many forms of federation on the North American continent. About the same time the great English historian, Freeman, neglecting for the nonce the distinction between history and prophecy, began his work on the “History of Federal Government, from the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United States of America,” only one volume of which was published, the events of 1863–1865 compelling the completion of the work to be indefinitely postponed.
How far the various attempts of the red man to combine in federal union for common strength or defence, and especially those in the stable political edifice in New York, were potent in aiding the formation of the American Commonwealth, is an interesting question worthy of careful study. That it was not without direct influence upon the minds of those constructive statesmen like Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, who came so numerously from States nearest the Long House, and most familiar with Iroquois politics, cannot be denied. The men of the English-speaking colonies which had been peopled from continental and insular Europe, were inheritors of classic culture. They naturally read the precedents furnished by Greece and Rome; but they were also powerfully affected by the living realities of the federal republics of Holland and Switzerland, as well as in the aristocratic republic of Venice, while in the one nearest England many of them were educated. It is not too much to affirm, however, that the power of this great example at home, on the soil and under their eyes, was as great in moulding opinion and consolidating thought in favour of a federal union of States, as were the distant exemplars of the ancient world, or in modern Europe. Though we give him no credit, and spurn the idea of political indebtedness to the red man, with almost the same intolerant fierceness that some of the latter-day New England Puritans deny obligations to the Dutch Republic that sheltered and educated their fathers, yet our government is in a measure copied from that of the forest republicans, whose political edifice and conquests shaped the history and civilization of this continent. In still retaining the sonorous names given to our mountains, valleys, and rivers, and in transferring these to our ships and men-of-war; in giving the effigy of the Indian a place on our municipal coats of arms and seals of State, we are proving that in our memory at least of the aboriginal dwellers on the soil they are not wholly forgotten. These graphic symbols are, indeed, but shadows; but beyond all shadow is substance.
While the white man’s gunpowder and bullets, war, diseases, fire-water, and trade wrought profound changes for better or worse, usually the latter, the Indians were not stolid or unreceptive to his religion. Both the Roman and the Reformed teachers won many disciples in the Long House. Almost as soon as the learned Domine Megapolensis arrived at Fort Orange, he began to learn the language of the Mohawks. He was soon able to preach to them and to teach their children. This was three years before John Eliot began his work in Massachusetts. The pastors at Schenectady did the same, translating portions of the Bible and of the liturgy of the Netherlands Reformed Church, and of the Book of Common Prayer. The missionary efforts of the Dutch Christians soon bore definite and practical results. The Reformed Church records show large numbers of Indians baptized or married or buried according to Christian rites. There are also frequent instances of adult communicant membership in the Mohawk, Hudson, Raritan, and Hackensack Valleys. Hundreds of Indian children were trained in the same catechetical instruction, and in the same classes with those of the whites. As a general rule, the Hollanders and other peoples from the Continent lived in kindness and peace with their red brethren. The occasional outbreaks of the savages in massacre, fire, and blood were not by those of New York, but from Canada. The Indians were set on like dogs by the French, who stimulated the thirst for blood by political and religious hatreds; and the English repaid in kind. Rarely was the peace broken between the people of New Netherlands and New York except by causes operative in, and coming from Europe.
The first Roman Catholic who entered the bounds of the State of New York was Isaac Jogues, who was captured by the Mohawks while ascending the St. Lawrence River. One of the sweetest spirits and noblest characters that ever glorified the flesh he dwelt in, Isaac Jogues was brought captive into the Mohawk Valley to be reserved for fiendish torture. Ransomed by Arendt Van Curler, and assisted to France by Domine Megapolensis, these three men of the Holy Catholic Church became ever after true friends. The surface discords of church names were lost in the deeper harmonies of their one faith and love to a common Saviour. Bressani was later assisted in like manner. Returning willingly, by way of Quebec, after his fingers, once chewed to shapeless lumps between the teeth of the Mohawks, had been kissed by nobles and ladies in the court at Versailles, Jogues reached, four years later (1647), the scene of his martyrdom and nameless burial. His severed head, mounted upon one of the palisades of the Indian castle, was set with its face to Canada, whence he came, in insult and defiance.
Nevertheless, the French Jesuit missionaries, with unquailing courage and fervent faith, persevered; and Poncet, Le Moyne, Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron passed to and fro through Albany to continue the work in what they had already named as the Mission of the Martyrs. In 1667 St. Mary’s Chapel was established at the Indian village which stood on the site of Spraker’s Basin. In 1669 St. Peter’s Chapel was built of logs on the sand-flats at Caughnawaga near Fonda, by Boniface. Here in 1676 the Iroquois maiden Tegawita—the White Lily of the Mohawks, the now canonized saint—was baptized by James de Lamberville. From 1642 to 1684 was the golden age of early missions of the Roman form of the Christian faith in New York. Then it was abruptly brought to a close, not because of Indian animosity or Protestant opposition, but by the Roman Catholic Governor Dongan in the interests of British trade.