riginally to
distant nations.[9]

All writers on the history of the Eastern Indians agree in assigning the
highest place to the Iroquois. Parkman asserts that they afford perhaps
an example of the highest elevation which man can reach without emerging
from the primitive condition of the hunter. Morgan declares that in the
width of their sway they had reared the most powerful empire that ever
existed in America north of the Aztec monarchy. The home country of the
Iroquois included nearly the whole of the present State of New York, but
at the era of their highest military supremacy, about 1660, they made
their influence felt from New England to the Mississippi, and from the
St. Lawrence to the Tennessee. Within this league, the tribal territory
of the Mohawks extended to the Hudson River and Lake Champlain on the
east, northward to the St. Lawrence, and westward to a boundary not
easily determined, but which included Otsego Lake. In the great league
of the Iroquois the name of the Mohawk nation always stood first, and of
all the Iroquois nations they were the most renowned in war. Joseph
Brant, whom John Fiske calls the most remarkable Indian known to
history, was a Mohawk chief.

Although the field of Iroquois influence was so wide, and their military
fame so great, it is a mistake to imagine that the forests of their time
were thickly peopled with red men, or that they were perpetually at war.
The entire population of the Iroquois throughout what is now the State
of New York probably never numbered more than 20,000 souls. Of these the
whole Mohawk nation counted only about 3,000, grouped in small villages
over their wide territory.[10] The avowed object of the Iroquois
confederacy was peace. By means of a great political fraternity the
purpose was to break up the spirit of perpetual warfare which had wasted
the Indian race from age to age.[11] To a considerable degree this
purpose was realized. After the power of the Iroquois had become
consolidated, their villages were no longer stockaded, such defences
having ceased to be necessary.

Otsego has witnessed other aspects of Indian life than those of war and
the chase. The Iroquois were agriculturists, and they, or rather their
women, cultivated not only fruit trees, but corn, melons, squash,
pumpkins, beans, and tobacco.[12] They had other human interests also,
not unlike our own. As the young people grew up amid sylvan charms that
are wont to stir romantic feelings i