a! Atotarho! Where were they? Where now was our own
Odasete; and Kanyadario, and the mighty wisdom of Dekanawidah? The end
of the Red League was already in sight; the Great Peace was broken; the
downfall of the Confederacy was at hand.

At that northern tryst at Thendara, the nine sachems allotted to the
Canienga, the fourteen sachems of the Onondaga, the eight Senecas, the
Cayuga ten must look in vain for nine Oneidas. And without them the
Great Peace breaks like a rotten arrow where the war-head drops and the
feathers fall from the unbound nock.

Strange, strange, that I, a white man of blood untainted, must answer
for this final tragic catastrophe! Without me, perhaps, the sachems of
the three clans might submit to the will of the League, for even the
surly Onondagas had now heeded the League-Call--yes, even the
Tuscaroras, too. And as for those Delaware dogs, they had come,
belly-dragging, cringing to the lash of the stricken Confederacy,
though now was their one chance in a hundred years to disobey and defy.
But the Lenape were ever women.

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