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.

Centuries of warfare for self-preservation have made them efficient in
the arts of war. Ferocity, craft, and deception, practised on them by
French, Dutch, and English, have taught them to reply in kind. Yet
these somber, engrafted qualities which we have recorded as their
distinguish