passed in safety along the bottom of the ocean, until they reached this
island.[A]
[Footnote A: History of the Indian Tribes of North America, by James
Hall and J. L. McKinney, a valuable work, containing one hundred and
twenty richly colored portraits of Indian chiefs.]
The Shawanoes have been known by different names. The Iroquois,
according to Colden's history of the "Five Nations," gave them the
appellation of Satanas. The Delawares, says Gallatin, in his synopsis
of the Indian tribes, call them Shawaneu, which means _southern_. The
French writers mention them under the name of Chaouanons; and
occasionally they are denominated Massawomees.
The orthography of the word by which they are generally designated, is
not very well settled. It has been written Shawanos, Sawanos, Shawaneu,
Shawnees and Shawanoes, which last method of spelling the word, will be
followed in the pages of this work.
The original seats of the Shawanoes have been placed in different
sections of the country. This has doubtless been owing to their very
erratic disposition. Of their history, prior to the year 1680, but
little is known. The earliest mention of them by any writer whose work
has fallen under our observation, was in the beginning of the
seventeenth century. Mr. Jefferson, in his "Notes on Virginia," says
that when captain John Smith first arrived in America a fierce war was
raging against the allied Mohicans, residing on Long Island, and the
Shawanoes on the Susquehanna, and to the westward of that river, by the
Iroquois. Captain Smith first landed on this continent in April, 1607.
In the following year, 1608, he penetrated down the Susquehanna to the
mouth of it, where he met six or seven of their canoes, filled with
warriors, about to attack their enemy in the rear. De Laet, in 1632, in
his enumeration of the different tribes, on either side of the Delaware
river, mentions the Shawanoes.--Charlevoix speaks of them under the
name of Chaouanons, as neighbors and allies in 1672, of the Andastes,
an Iroquois tribe, living south of the Senecas. Whether any of the
Shawanoes were present at the treaty[A] made in 1682, under the
celebrated Kensington elm, between William Penn and the Indians, does
not positively appear from any authorities before us; that such,
however, was the fact, may be fairly inferred, from the circumstance
that at a conference between the Indians and governor Keith, in 1722,
the Shawanoes exhibited a copy of this
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