's poem.

These are the main features of that famous polity of the Iroquois which
gave them so remarkable a power of concentration in war, and was one
reason of their decided superiority over all the other nations of
America. In council, where all common and tribal affairs were decided,
the Iroquois showed great capacity for calm deliberation, and became
quite eloquent at times. Their language was extremely figurative,
though incapable of the expression of abstract thought, as is the case
with Indian tongues generally. The Indian--essentially a
materialist--could only find his similes, metaphors, and illustrations
in the objects of nature, but these he used with great skill. The
Iroquois had a very keen appreciation of their interests, and were well
able to protect them in their bargains or contracts with the white men.
In war they were a terrible foe, and a whisper of their neighbourhood
brought consternation to Indian camps and cabins, from the Kennebec
{123} to the Delaware, from the Susquehanna to the Illinois. They have
been well described as "the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the
continent." In their political organisation, their village life, their
culture of the soil, their power of eloquence, their skill as
politicians as well as warriors, they were superior to all the tribes
in America as far as New Mexico, although in the making of pottery and
other arts they were inferior to the mound-builders of the Ohio and the
Mississippi--probably the Allegewi who gave their names to the
Alleghanies and are believed by some writers to have been either
exterminated by a combination of Algonquin and Iroquois or driven
southward where they were absorbed in other nations. At no time could
the Iroquois muster more than 3000 warriors; and yet they were the
scourge and dread of all the scattered tribes of Algonquins, numbering
in the aggregate probably 90,000 souls, and eventually crushed the
Hurons and those other tribes of their own nationality, who did not
belong to their confederacy and had evoked their wrath.

The Algonquin and Huron-Iroquois nations had many institutions and
customs in common. Every clan had some such totem as I have described
in the case of the Iroquois. Every tribe had its chiefs as military
leaders and its councils for deliberation and decision. Consequently
the democratic principle dominated the whole organisation. Eloquence
was always prized and cultivated as a necessity of the sy