N OF
EXTERMINATION OF THE SIX NATIONS OF INDIANS.

In his _Life of Brant, including the Border Wars of the American
Revolution_, Colonel Stone gives a much more elaborate account of this
expedition of destruction against the Six Nations, or rather the Five
Nations, for the Oneidas and some of the Tuscaroras joined the
Americans. Colonel Stone narrates the progress and work of General
Sullivan from place to place. We will add a few extracts from his
narrative, after some preliminary explanations.

Colonel Stone corrects a very common error, which views the whole race
of North American Indians as essentially alike--"all as the same roving,
restless, houseless race of hunters and fishermen, without a local
habitation and with scarce a name." He gives examples of the varieties
of Indian character, not less marked than between the English and the
French--some following the buffalo in his migrations, others finding a
precarious subsistence in the forest chase, others again fishing and
trapping; tribes who pass most of their time in canoes, while others,
woodland tribes, cultivate the soil, and gradually become organized, and
acquire a higher state of civilization, and present a marked difference
of character and taste from the hunter and fishermen tribes. "This
higher state of social organization among the Six Nations," says Colonel
Stone "greatly increased the difference. They had many towns and
villages giving evidence of perseverance. They were organized into
communities whose social and political institutions, simple as they
were, were still as distinct and well-defined as those of the American
Confederacy. They had now acquired some arts, and were enjoying many of
the comforts of civilized life. Not content with small patches of
cleared lands for the raising of a few vegetables, they possessed
cultivated fields and orchards of great productiveness at the West.
Especially was this the fact with regard to the Cayugas and Senecas. The
Mohawks having been driven from their own rich lands (in the valley of
the Mohawk and Susquehanna rivers), the extensive domains of the
westernmost tribes of the confederacy (in the Genesee country) formed
the granary of the whole. And in consequence of the superior social and
political organization just referred to, and the Spartan-like character
incident to the forest life, the Six Nations, though not the most
numerous, were beyond doubt the most formidable of the tribes then in
alliance w