ous area, but when first known to Europeans were settled in three
distinct regions, separated from each other by tribes of other lineage.
The northern group was surrounded by tribes of Algonquian stock, while
the more southern groups bordered upon the Catawba and Maskoki.

A tradition of the Iroquois points to the St. Lawrence region as the
early home of the Iroquoian tribes, whence they gradually moved down to
the southwest along the shores of the Great Lakes.

When Cartier, in 1534, first explored the bays and inlets of the Gulf of
St. Lawrence he met a Huron-Iroquoian people on the shores of the Bay of
Gaspe, who also visited the northern coast of the gulf. In the following
year when he sailed up the St. Lawrence River he found the banks of the
river from Quebec to Montreal occupied by an Iroquoian people. From
statements of Champlain and other early explorers it seems probable that
the Wyandot once occupied the country along the northern shore of Lake
Ontario.

The Conestoga, and perhaps some allied tribes, occupied the country
about the Lower Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and have
commonly been regarded as an isolated body, but it seems probable that
their territory was contiguous to that of the Five Nations on the north
before the Delaware began their westward movement.

As the Cherokee were the principal tribe on the borders of the southern
colonies and occupied the leading place in all the treaty negotiations,
they came to be considered as the owners of a large territory to which
they had no real claim. Their first sale, in 1721, embraced a tract in
South Carolina, between the Congaree and the South Fork of the
Edisto,[44] but about one-half of this tract, forming the present
Lexington County, belonging to the Congaree.[45] In 1755 they sold a
second tract above the first and extending across South Carolina from
the Savannah to the Catawba (or Wateree),[46] but all of this tract east
of Broad River belonged to other tribes. The lower part, between the
Congaree and the Wateree, had been sold 20 years before, and in the
upper part the Broad River was acknowledged as the western Catawba
boundary.[48] In 1770 they sold a tract, principally in Virginia and
West Virginia, bounded east by the Great Kanawha,[47] but the Iroquois
claimed by conquest all of this tract northwest of the main ridge of the
Alleghany and Cumberland Mountains, and extending at least to the
Kentucky River,[49] and two years previ