weapons are not spears and
clubs, but letters. Your means are the quiet and peaceful paths of
inquiry. If these paths are often obscured by the foot of time and
tangled by the interlacings of history and antiquity, be it yours to put
the branches aside, and lead the right way. Truth is your aim, and
justice and benevolence your guides. They hold before you the lamp of
science so clearly, that you cannot mistake your way. While you essay,
with modesty and diligence to tread in this path, and render justice to
a proud and noble branch of the aboriginal race, your ultimate ends are
moral improvement, the accumulation of useful facts, and the general
advancement of historical letters.

You have selected, out of a wide field of aboriginal nations, the
history and ethnography of the Iroquois, as the theme of your particular
inquiries. To us, at least, these Tribes, stand in the most interesting
relations. They occupied our soil; they gave names to our rivers and
mountains. They figure in the foreground of our history. The very names
of the minor streams and lakes we dwell beside, bring up, by
association, the free and bold race, who once claimed them as their
patrimony. Before Columbus set out, on his solitary mule, to solicit the
patronage of Ferdinand and Isabella, they were here. Before Hudson
dropped anchor north of the, to him, wonderful peaks of the Ontiora, or
Highlands, they were here. Other Indian races have left their names on
other portions of the continent. The names of the Missouri and
Mississippi, the Alleghany and the Oregon, we trace to other stocks of
red men. But the Akonoshioni, or Iroquois, has consecrated the early
history of Western New-York. Their history is, to some extent, our
history; and we turn, with intellectual refreshment from the thread-bare
themes of Europe and the Europeans, to trace the humble sepulchres where
the Iroquois buried his dead--the mounds, which entombed his rulers or
his battle slain,--or lifted on high, his sacrificial lights--the long
and half obliterated trenches of embankments which encompassed his
ancient towns--the heaps of stone that lie at the angles and sally ports
of his simple fortresses, on the circular trenches, which enclosed his
beacon fires on the mountain tops. It is in localities of this kind,
that the ploughman turns up fragments of the Red Man's time wasted and
broken pottery--his stone pestles, his carved pipes, and his skilfully
chipped arrow heads, and sp