The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization

The Ordeal of the Longhouse

The Ordeal of the Longhouse

The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization

DANIEL K. RICHTER

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill & London

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

© 1992 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data

Richter, Daniel K.

The ordeal of the longhouse : the peoples of the

Iroquois League in the era of European

colonization / Daniel K. Richter.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2060-1 (cloth: alk. paper).—

ISBN 0-8078-4394-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Iroquois Indians—History. 2. Iroquois

Indians—First contact with Europeans.

3. Iroquois Indians—Government relations.

I. Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.) II. Title.

E99.17R53    1992

974.7’004975—dc20

92-53621 CIP

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Maps drawn by Kimberley Nichols

This volume received indirect support from an unrestricted book publication grant awarded to the Institute by the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C. Skaggs Foundation of Oakland, California.

TO THOMAS AND MARY

PREFACE

I did not set out to write a book about the Iroquois. A dozen years before composing these words, as a graduate student at Columbia University I submitted a dissertation prospectus for a multiethnic study of the eighteenth-century Mohawk Valley frontier in New York. My initial questions centered on the roles that ethnicity and a shared history of group interaction played in determining allegiances during the American Revolution. I envisioned a mosaic in which the vitally important native pieces could easily be assembled from the vast shelf of Iroquois studies already in the library. But I never made it to the Revolutionary era, nor did I ever dig very deeply into the Dutch, Scottish, English, and Palatine German experiences in the region. Instead, sitting alone at a campfire near Albany in 1981 (I was on a research trip and could not afford a motel room), I concluded that the really interesting questions lay in an earlier period and on the Indian side of the colonial frontier.

The result—thanks to a thesis adviser who was either incredibly understanding or remarkably willing to see me hang myself with my own rope-was a too long, narrowly diplomatic, and archaeologically uninformed dissertation on Iroquois history in the seventeenth century. I was well aware of that work's limitations even as I somehow successfully defended it and persuaded the Institute of Early American History and Culture to give me two years of uninterrupted postdoctoral time to turn it into a book. The two years grew into eight that were increasingly interrupted by teaching and other scholarly projects, as I learned repeatedly just how enormous a task I had set for myself.

The literature on specialized aspects of the history, culture, and archaeology of the peoples of the Longhouse was so vast and was growing so rapidly that it often seemed the height of presumption—even folly—to survey a subject to which scholars have devoted lifetimes of research and on which so much was already in print. From another direction too, warnings rang that the topic was beyond my ability. Native American activists were arguing that it was long past time for Euro-American scholars to cease their document grubbing and free Indian people to write their own history, on their own terms, in their own conceptual vocabulary, so that they might retrieve their past from the colonizers who stole it from them. Small wonder, then, that when friends and colleagues asked about my project, I often turned the conversation to some small aspect of Iroquois history, to a remark on the questioner's own work, to baseball, or to anything else than the apparent audacity of what I was trying to do.

The alarms continue to sound in my head, but I am more confident than I once was of the need for an overview of how the peoples of the Iroquois League, almost universally agreed to be the most significant native American power of the Northeast, fit into our picture of the continent during the period of European colonization. My primary audience is neither the scholarly specialists on the Five Nations nor the Iroquois themselves, although I trust each will find something worthwhile here. Instead, I hope to reach historians, students, and interested readers who still too often exclude native peoples from the narrative mainstream of North American development. This is a story of European colonization viewed from the Indian side of the frontier.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Through the long course of researching and writing—which I have come to call "the Ordeal of The Ordeal of the Longhouse"—I have incurred many intellectual and personal debts. The living meaning of that financial cliché becomes apparent only as I begin to tally how little of this book I can actually claim as my own.

Several institutions provided vital financial support. A predoctoral fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society allowed me to turn six weeks of funding into half a year at that Worcester, Massachusetts, treasure-house. A two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Institute of Early American History and Culture, which was partially funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, gave an opportunity for research, writing, and intellectual networking very rarely enjoyed by someone so early in his scholarly career as I then was. Subsequently, a National Endowment for the Humanities Columbian Quincentennial Fellowship from the Hermon Dunlap Smith Center for the History of Cartography made possible two productive month-long summer stints at the Newberry Library, with its unparalleled collection of secondary and primary sources on native American topics and the intellectual stimulation of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian. And, repeatedly, my colleagues on the Dickinson College Faculty Committee on Research and Development have been generous in funding various expenses.

The staffs of many libraries and research centers have eased the burden of research. I particularly want to thank the special collections librarians at the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Newberry Library, the New York State Archives, and the Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania for their care and patience. The Interlibrary Loan office of the Boyd Lee Spahr Library of Dickinson College cheerfully fulfilled a number of unusual requests.

On several occasions I have been pleasantly surprised by the generosity of researchers who have opened their files and their calendars to share their unpublished findings with me. Richard Dunn and Marianne Wokeck, then of the Papers of William Penn project at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Charles Hayes, Lorraine Saunders, and Martha Sempowski of the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Charles Gehring of the New Netherland Project at the New York State Library, and George Hamell of the New York State Museum all made me feel very much at home on my visits to their institutions and provided valuable pieces of the Iroquois puzzle.

Richard Johnson, Gil Kelly, William Starna, and Fredrika Teute greatly improved this book by their reading of the entire manuscript; Bill, indeed, read parts of it twice and provided help and advice on numerous occasions. Drafts of several chapters benefited from the careful readings of James Axtell, William Fenton, Jay Miller, and Lorraine Saunders. The members (if that is not too strong a word for a group that prides itself on its nonorganiza-tion) of the Conference on Iroquois Research heard drafts of portions of the manuscript and annually entertained and enlightened me with their presentations and conversations in Rensselaerville, New York. Twice, Fred Hoxie invited me to try out my ideas on audiences at the McNickle Center. Similarly, participants in the Institute colloquium and in a conference, The ‘imperial’ Iroquois, held in Williamsburg in 1984 helped me hone my interpretations. Additional feedback came from the panelists and audiences of sessions at the meetings of the American Academy of Religion, 1983; the American Society for Ethnohistory, 1984; the Organization of American Historians, 1986; and the American Historical Association, 1988. To Syracuse University Press and the editors and peer reviewers of the Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, Ethnohistory, Journal of American History, and William and Mary Quarterly, I am grateful for permission to include material previously published in different forms and for the many ways in which they improved my interpretations and prose.

Other help—intellectual and personal—came from Thomas Abler, Francis Bremer, Thomas Burke, Gladys Cashman, Denys Delâge, John Demos, Mary Druke, Richard Haan, Alison Hirsch, Charles Jarvis, Jean Lee, Michael McGiffert, James Merrell, Philip Morgan, Peter and Kristin Onuf, Tina Reithmaier, Kim Rogers, Neal Salisbury, Dean Snow, Donna Swanson, Thad Tate, Christopher Vecsey, and my long-suffering students at Dickinson College. But special thanks go to two scholars who are not often mentioned favorably in the same paragraph. As my graduate adviser and later friend, Alden Vaughan gave me plenty of room to pursue my interests and none to engage my penchant for Germanic prose. And Francis Jennings has been a cherished thorn in my side; I will always have him to thank not only for his many intellectual contributions in print and in person but also for a December 1989 note demanding that I stop frittering and get it done.

As this section began with one cliché that deserves a new life, so it ends with another: to my family I owe the greatest thanks of all. My parents gave me unquestioning support at every step, even as they could not imagine why I kept revising and tinkering with the manuscript. Sharon Mead gracefully professed far more interest in the project than she must have felt after many years of critiquing my prose and enduring my fits of scholarly distraction—not to mention abandonment during long research trips when I left her too little time for her own work. More than she knows, she has been my modern-day equivalent of the seventeenth-century native spouse who taught the fur trader the language; most of what I know about anthropology I have absorbed from living with her. Finally, I must thank my children, who only hindered my progress in research and writing. For that reason, this book is dedicated to them: they have reminded me that the present is more important than the past and that the future is our hope. Perhaps they and their generation will, unlike most of the people in the story told here, come to understand that the visions of the Iroquois’ Peacemaker and of the Europeans’ Prince of Peace have much in common.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Illustrations

Introduction

Chapter One. The Iroquois in the World on the Turtle's Back

Chapter Two. The Great League of Peace and Power

Chapter Three. The Great League for War and Survival

Chapter Four. The Economic Lifeline to the Dutch

Chapter Five. The Ascendancy of the Francophiles

Chapter Six. The Revolt of the Anglophiles

Chapter Seven. The Last of the Beaver Wars

Chapter Eight. The Political Crisis of the Iroquois Confederacy

Chapter Nine. The Precarious Settlement Abroad and at Home

Chapter Ten. The Neutralist Diplomacy of Peace and Balance

Chapter Eleven. The Iroquois in a Euro-American World

Methodological Comments

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES

1. An Iroquoian Longhouse, 19

2. The Bear and Turtle Clans in Council, 21

3. Antler Maskette, Clay Pipe, and Antler Comb, 26

4. A Huron War Chief, 34

5. A Victorious War Party, 37

6. A Belt and Strings of Wampum, 48

7. Iroquois Warriors Returning with a Captive, 67

8. Beaver-Hunting Techniques, 77

9. Brass and Shell Necklace, 78

10. Native Uses of Imported Clothing, 80

11. A Comparison of Seneca Ornamental Combs, 82

12. An Iroquois Funeral, 84

13. An Iroquois Wampum Belt, 85

14. Kateri Tekakwitha, 127

15. A Native Record of Diplomacy, 142

16. A Euro-American Record of Diplomacy, 143

17. Otreouti's Speech at La Famine, 154

18. The Invasion of the Seneca Country, 157

19. The Four Indian Kings, 228

20. An Iroquois Going to War, 242

21. Plan of Oswego, 253

22. Floor Plan of an Onondaga Longhouse, 261

MAPS

1. The Emergence of Iroquoia, 10,500 B.C-6000 B.C., 12

2. The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in the Mid-Sixteenth Century, 16

3. The Mid-Seventeenth-Century Wars, 63

4. The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in the Mid-1660s, 100

5. Iroquois Villages in the Mid-1670s, 122

6. The Late-Seventeenth-Century Wars, 146

7. The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in the 1730s, 258

The Ordeal of the Longhouse

INTRODUCTION

The Iroquois League originally encompassed five groups of villagers who spoke related languages. In the land of Iroquoia—what is now the portion of Upstate New York between the Mohawk and Genesee River valleys—lived, from east to west, the Mohawks, or Ganienkeh, the people of the flint (the French called them Agniers and the Dutch Maquas); the Oneidas (in French Onneiouts), the people of the standing stone; the Onondagas (Onon-tagués), the people on the mountain; the Cayugas (Oiogouens), the people at the landing; and the Senecas (Tsonnontouans), the people of the great hill. In the early eighteenth century they were joined by a sixth nation, the Tuscaroras (whose name probably means those of the Indian hemp), speakers of a distantly related Iroquoian language who emigrated from what is today North Carolina.

In the era of colonization only the French regularly called these peoples Iroquois, a word of uncertain definition derived from one of the languages of the Algonquian family. The Dutch and English simply called them the Five or Six Nations or employed the words Mohawks, Maquas, or Senecas to encompass them all. Native neighbors used labels that have come down in English as Naudoways (they speak a foreign language), Menkwes, Maquas, or Mingos (the last three can only be translated roughly as Iroquoian-speakers). Within the League, the preferred collective self-descriptions were terms that meant the extended house, the whole house, or the Long-house, metaphorical usages that were based on the peoples’ characteristic form of communal dwelling. In the Seneca language the word was Haudeno-saunee; in Mohawk, Kanosoni.¹

These peoples of the Longhouse are among the most studied of all North American Indians; indeed, many would argue that they are overstudied. As the specialized literature has mushroomed, however, its producers have seldom paused to explain to a broader audience the ways in which their findings change the big picture. As a result, textbooks, writings in related fields, and popular understanding perpetuate interpretations that specialists have long since abandoned. Although most scholarly and many popular images of the colonial period no longer completely ignore the Indian presence, interpretations often stumble into what Vine Deloria aptly calls the ‘cameo’ theory of history. That approach takes a basic ‘manifest destiny’ white interpretation ... and lovingly plugs a few feathers, woolly heads, and sombreros into the famous events without changing the basic plot. Thanks to the work of a growing body of investigators, many readers’ understanding of colonial North America may have been revised in a multicultural direction, but for the most part they have not yet been re-visioned. I hope this book will help place both Iroquois and colonial North American history in fresher fields of view.²

In seeking to re-vision Iroquois history in the era of European colonization, I have considered the peoples of the Longhouse as neither noble or ignoble savages nor all-conquering militarists who kept their native neighbors groaning under the hobnailed moccasin. Instead, I have tried to see them simply as peoples who, like those who came to colonial North America from Europe or Africa, often found themselves caught up by economic, political, and demographic forces over which they had little control. To stress the importance of those external forces is hardly to portray the Iroquois as passive victims of an imperialist tide. The story I tell stresses creative adaptation to a series of cultural ordeals stemming from the European invasion of the late sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries. The ordeals were many and recurring, yet fell under four broad, successive headings: first came massive depopulation from imported diseases; next, a slide into economic dependence on trade with Europeans; then ensnarement in the imperial struggles of powerful French and English colonial neighbors; finally, direct incursions on Iroquois territory and sovereignty.³

A double trio of geographic and cultural advantages helped to orchestrate the Iroquois’ creative adaption to these ordeals. Few of the factors were unique to the Five Nations, but in northeastern North America only they appear to have possessed all for so long. As the chapters below explain in more detail, Iroquoia sat athwart most of the major trade routes of the native Northeast. That was the first of three geographical advantages, for it gave the Five Nations access both to multiple European colonial markets and to sources of the peltries Euro-American traders demanded. Yet many native peoples dwelled along trade routes and, despite even better access to both furs and markets than the Iroquois enjoyed, rapidly lost their economic and political independence: the Mahicans of the upper Hudson Valley and the Algonquins of the Ottawa River watershed are prime examples. Here a second, apparently contradictory, geographical advantage becomes crucial. An inland location placed the peoples of the Longhouse at sufficient distance from centers of European expansion to allow them to adapt to changed circumstances before being assailed by epidemics and overrun by colonists, missionaries, and other interlopers. Still, the Hurons of the Georgian Bay region—who dwelt at a much greater distance from the colonials than did the Five Nations—by the mid-seventeenth century had been destroyed by imported diseases, economic dependence on French traders, political and cultural controversies spawned by resident French missionaries, and attacks by their Iroquois enemies. Their fate highlights the third important advantage geography gave the peoples of the Longhouse. From the early seventeenth century on they stood between at least two competing colonial centers: the French on the St. Lawrence and the Dutch on the Hudson, later replaced by the English of New York and, still later, joined by Pennsylvania. Access to alternative markets and imperial centers gave the Five Nations maneuvering room to preserve their independence and keep Europeans at a safe distance in ways many of their native neighbors could not.⁴

Culturally, too, the Iroquois were privileged in at least three ways as they weathered their ordeals; again it was the combination, rather than the individual factors, that set them apart. Like most of their immediate neighbors but unlike such far northern groups as the Montagnais, the Iroquois were horticultural villagers for whom the altered hunting patterns inspired by the trade with Europeans for furs did not immediately overturn traditional methods of subsistence.⁵ Also like most of their native neighbors, the families of Iroquoia adopted war captives, a practice they greatly elaborated in the seventeenth century as their principal response to depopulation from disease. Here, culture intersected with geography to grant the Iroquois the economic and political wherewithal to be, at least briefly, far more successful than many of their neighbors. For their final advantage was the Iroquois Great League of Peace and Power itself, which fostered the acceptance of diverse peoples of varying speech and customs while providing a rock of traditional rituals to which the peoples of the Longhouse could cling as they adapted to new ways of life. The League always provided more a spiritual than a political form of unity; as such, it proved both flexible and perdurable.

These six cultural and geographic advantages prevailed for more than a century, but by the 1730s all but two had fallen away or become irrelevant. The Five Nations’ position along major trade routes decreased in importance as the fur trade declined in significance for European colonial economies. Meanwhile, the buffer zones that had kept colonizers at arm's length disappeared, as Indian neighbors lost their homelands—ironically, at Iroquois hands—and colonists arrived at the doors of the Longhouse. Geographically, only Iroquoia's situation in the midst of the imperial competition between France and Great Britain remained an important factor, and even that would obtain for only one more generation until it too disappeared, in the British conquest of New France in the Seven Years’ War. Culturally, decades of economic change, epidemic depopulation, and military defeats had by the 1730s eroded the fabric of Iroquois village life and left the taking of war captives a symbolic rather than demographically significant practice. Only the traditions of the League survived among the initial cultural advantages.

As a result, by the 1730s, although the nations of the Longhouse retained most of their homelands and their day-to-day political autonomy, there was no escaping the dominant power of Euro-Americans: the Iroquois were colonized peoples living in a world no longer entirely their own. As they moved from an environment controlled by themselves (or rather, as they saw it, by powerful spiritual forces) to one dominated by Europeans, Iroquois peoples reshaped their economics, their politics, and even their ethnic composition. Yet core traditional values embodied in the rituals of the League survived to sustain their spiritual and cultural, if not their political and economic, independence from the colonizers. This story of creative persistence amid wrenching change is every bit as inspiring as the Plymouth Rock tales that still too often echo in American classrooms and homes. But it also conveys a tragic lesson about the legacies of the form of European imperialism once confidently labeled the Progress of Western Civilization.

In exploring that lesson and reconstructing that story, reified lists of geographic and cultural advantages are ultimately not very satisfactory. To reveal more, I try in this volume to look at events from Iroquoia outward, rather than from Albany, or Quebec, or Philadelphia inward. My stance is that of a historical visitor with anthropological leanings who, unfortunately, cannot ask his hosts any questions. I am, to twist a favorite phrase of my anthropologist friends, a nonparticipant observer, attempting to understand the viewpoint of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Iroquois peoples but aware that my comprehension is always incomplete. Thus, my perspective must remain that of a cultural outsider, and my narrative must offer an interpretation of the evidence rather than the truth of the historical experience.

As a Euro-American of the late twentieth century, I do not pretend to have plumbed the mind of seventeenth-century native Americans, for most of the mental world of the men and women who populate these pages is irrevocably lost. Neither historians who study documents produced by the colonizers, nor anthropologists who make inferences from their knowledge of later culture patterns, nor contemporary Iroquois who are heirs to a rich oral tradition but who live in profoundly changed material circumstances can do more than partially recover it. Individual personalities and life stories, too, remain tantalizingly beyond reach. I have been able to report what leaders and sometimes followers said and the images they presented to the outside world, but only rarely to glimpse interpersonal conflicts, personal motives, and private lives.

In more ways than one, we all must remain outsiders to a long-gone Iroquois world because of the inadequacies of the source materials available. With one major exception discussed at the end of Chapter 11, all documents surviving from the seventeenth and early eighteenth century were written by Europeans and Euro-Americans and preserve only an occasional isolated word in a native language. A few of the authors spent much of their lives among Indians, but most wrote comparatively little because they were not the bookish sort and their audiences were not much interested in the minutiae of native cultures. Many of those who produced more voluminous prose had little familiarity with Iroquoian languages or social structure and relied on inadequate translations by interpreters whose first European tongue was different from their own. Nearly all of the authors, too, were male; their gender biases combined with a lack of opportunity to witness the female side of Iroquois life to make women nearly invisible in the record.⁶

One partial antidote to these limitations is rigorous verification of historical evidence through the comparison of accounts in multiple sources. In itself, of course, that is no guarantee of validity, because writers shared stereotypes and often copied from one another. Still, particularly through comparison of documents originating with competing European powers or political factions, some flawed triangulation toward accuracy is possible. Additional insights come from the cautious use of the methodology called upstreaming, that is, the interpretation of historical sources in light of ethnological and folkloric materials collected in later periods; one moves up the historical stream from a better to a less well documented era.⁷ In what might be called side-streaming, I have also inferred a few conclusions about Iroquois culture from evidence on their more fully documented seventeenth-century linguistic, cultural, and geographic neighbors (and enemies), the Hurons. Finally, I have employed archaeological data wherever possible to illuminate the material side of Iroquois life.

While employing the tools of historical, anthropological, and archaeological scholarship, I have given priority to methods that try to let the subjects speak for themselves. The most valuable clues to Iroquois perspectives come from the speeches native leaders made during diplomatic encounters with Euro-Americans. The documents cited in my notes as treaty minutes share the biases and inadequacies of other sources: all were recorded by Europeans rather than Iroquois, all were translated by amateur linguists who lost volumes of the meaning conveyed in the original, a few were deliberately altered to further colonizers’ designs, and none preserves the body language and social context that were central to the native orators’ messages. Yet the sheer bulk and variety of the documents partially remedies the difficulties, and the critical edge that frequently appears in the written record suggests that much of what the Indian speakers intended found its way to paper. Moreover, transcripts of speeches often contain snippets of Iroquois accounts of events already in the past. These and other oral traditions documented at various times from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries must be treated with the same critical care as other historical documents, but they are crucial troves of evidence.

As the chapters below show, the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Iroquois spoke with, not one, but many voices. A rough and certainly incomplete count of headmen who participated in four hundred separate diplomatic encounters with the Dutch, French, and English during a seventy-year period beginning in 1663 yields 538 different names, of which only 20 appear more than five times. Those 20 include most of the men who figure prominently in the story told below—Garakontié, Onnucheranorum, Otre-outi, Ourehouare, Sadekanaktie, Tahiadoris, Teganissorens—but many of the 86 who participated two to five times and even some of the 432 who made only a single recorded appearance spoke at least briefly for substantial followings and had major impacts on the course of events. One of the ordeals Iroquois peoples faced was that so many such men died from disease just as they were emerging as effective leaders.⁸

In the many-headed political culture from which such leaders came, localism, factionalism, voluntarism, and individualistic patterns of leadership operated paradoxically within a system that stressed consensus, but of a distinctly non-Western form. When historians speak of "the French or the English," they do not pretend that all the inhabitants of those nation-states acted or believed in lockstep, but they do assume that in international affairs governments generally spoke with a single voice and were able to force their viewpoints on domestic dissenters at the point of a gun. No such coercive diplomatic unity can be assumed for the Five Nations in the colonial period; losers of internal debates were nearly as likely as winners to engage in negotiations with outsiders. Nonetheless, the culture's stress on consensus combined with pressures from uncomprehending representatives of European states to make factional leaders claim to speak for all their compatriots.

Thus readers should always understand such phrases as "the Iroquois, the Five Nations, or the Mohawks" as references to the activities of a particular leader or group of leaders, rather than to the product of a unitary, state-organized form of decision making. In my view, the Iroquois Great League of Peace and Power was not, in essence, a device for exercising nation-state-style central political authority or devising unified diplomatic and military policies. Instead, it existed merely (or, better, sublimely) to keep the peace and preserve a spiritual unity among the many autonomous villages of the Five Nations. Those villages, and the various headmen and would-be headmen within each of them, often failed to agree and normally acted independently. Only in the late seventeenth century did a broader agency of political, diplomatic, and military unity that I have distinguished by the name of the Iroquois Confederacy emerge to parallel the cultural phenomenon of the Iroquois League. But even that new political entity was rooted in local quarrels among headmen of factions I call anglophile, francophile, and neutralist who were seeking alliances beyond the bounds of their own villages. Those leaders continued to act autonomously even as they found new ways to seek the prized but ever elusive consensus. In sum, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Iroquois politics and diplomacy, like twentieth-century post-Einsteinian physics, was a confusing world of particles constantly in flux, combining and recombining in diverse configurations.⁹

I have sought not only to allow the many Iroquois voices to speak through the filters of European documentation but to keep my own quarrels with other scholars in the background, presenting a narrative uninterrupted by digressions into methodology, critiques of previous literature, or, after this Introduction, the author's I.¹⁰ Here the narrative takes precedence. Most of the word history is, after all, story.

CHAPTER ONE The Iroquois in the World on the Turtle's Back

THE STORY perhaps best begins in the beginning. According to Iroquois traditions, the world as we know it originated when a being fell from a realm that rests on top of the sky. On the back of a great Turtle floating in the primal waters, she and her descendants built the material world and everything in it. No texts of this Cosmogonic, or origins, Myth survive directly from the period before European contact with the Five Nations, and the only elaborate versions date from centuries later. Still, common themes found in numerous variants reflect cultural motifs that resonated throughout the ordeal of the Longhouse. Characteristics of village and home life, patterns of kinship and interpersonal connections, models of interaction among humans, their environment, and the spirit world, and prototypes for relationships with people from beyond one's own village all appear in the story. By the usual standards of historical scholarship, precious little evidence testifies to the shape of Iroquois culture before Europeans arrived in North America; only mute material artifacts survive. Nonetheless, the Cosmogonic Myth—when read in light of archaeological studies of Iroquois origins and late-sixteenth-century remains and when compared with the observations of later visitors—provides important clues to life in Iroquoia on the eve of the invasion.¹

IN A HOUSE in the Sky World, native traditions say, a man and woman lived on opposite sides of a fireplace. The two had great spiritual power because each had been isolated from other people until the age of puberty. Every day after their housemates went out to work, the woman crossed to the other side to the fire to comb the man's hair. Through mysterious means, she became pregnant and bore a daughter. Shortly thereafter, the man fell ill and announced that he would soon die. Because no one in the Sky World knew what death was, he had to explain to the woman what would happen to him and instruct her how to preserve his body. After he died, the woman's growing daughter endured fits of weeping that, despite the best efforts of village neighbors to comfort her, could be relieved only by visits to the preserved corpse of the deceased, whose spirit told her that he was her father and taught her many things.

When the daughter, whom the Iroquois called Sky Woman, reached adulthood, her father's spirit instructed her to take a dangerous journey to the village of a man destined to become her spouse. She brought her prospective husband loaves of bread baked with berries and then, enduring great travail, cooked him a potent soup that cured him of a long-troublesome ailment. In exchange, he sent her home with a burden of venison that nearly filled her family's house. After Sky Woman returned to her husband, the pair always slept on opposite sides of the fire and refrained from sexual intercourse. Nevertheless, she, like her mother before her, inexplicably became pregnant. Stricken by jealousy, the husband again became ill and dreamed that a great tree near his house must be uprooted so that he and his spouse could look down through the resulting hole to the world below. To cure his sickness, all the people of the village worked together to pull it up. When Sky Woman looked over the edge of the abyss, her husband pushed her down.²

As she fell toward the endless waters below, the spirit birds and animals of the sea held a council to decide how to rescue her. Ducks flew up to catch her on their wings and bring her safely down, and the Turtle agreed to provide a place for her to rest on his Back. Meantime, various animals tried to dive to the bottom of the lake and bring up earth on which the woman could walk; only the Muskrat succeeded. The material he placed on the Turtle's Back grew, with Sky Woman's help, into the living dry land of North America. Soon the celestial visitor gave birth to a daughter, who in time became supernaturally pregnant by the spirit of the Turtle. In the younger woman's womb grew male twins, who began arguing over the best way to emerge from her body. The first, the Good Twin (Tharonhiawagon, Upholder of the Heavens, or Sky-Grasper), was born by the normal route. The second, the Evil Twin (Tawiskaron), burst forth from his mother's side and thus killed her. When Sky Woman asked which of her grandsons had slain her daughter, they blamed each other, but the Evil Twin was the more persistent and persuasive. The Grandmother cherished him, whom she loved; she turned the body and head of the boys’ deceased mother into the sun and moon, respectively; and she threw the Good Twin out of her house, assuming he would die.³

But he did not perish. Instead, with the aid of his father the Turtle, the Good Twin improved Iroquoia, making various animals, learning the secrets of cultivating maize and other crops, and, finally, bringing into existence mortal human beings. All of these things he did not create from nothingness; rather, they grew through a process of transformation and infusion of supernatural power from the living earth and from prototypical spirit beings who dwelled in the Sky World and beneath the waters. At each step, Sky Woman and the Evil Twin partially undid the Good Twin's efforts in ways that forever after would make life difficult for humans. When the Good Twin constructed straight rivers that facilitated canoe travel by flowing both ways at once, the Evil Twin introduced rocks and hills to twist the streams and make their frequently obstructed waters fall in only one direction. When the Good Twin grew succulent ears of corn, Sky Woman threw ashes into his cooking pot and decreed that thenceforth maize must be parched and ground before it could be eaten. When the Good Twin made animals readily give themselves to humans as food, the Evil Twin sealed them all in a cave, from which Sky-Grasper could rescue only a portion; the rest the Evil Twin turned into enemies of humans.⁴

Finally, the two brothers fought, and the Good Twin triumphed. He could not, however, undo all the evil that his brother and Grandmother had left in the world. Instead, he taught humans how to grow corn to support themselves and how to keep harm at bay through ceremonies of thanksgiving and propitiation to the spirit world. To keep those ceremonies, Sky-Grasper assigned roles to various camps of people he arbitrarily designated as clans named after such animals as the Wolf, the Bear, and the Turtle. But he knew that mortals could never keep the rituals adequately. The time will arrive when there will be divisions between individual minds, he announced in a late-nineteenth-century rendition of the myth. There will be nothing but contentions,... they will continually dispute one with another;... and now also will they destroy one another. Having done his best to instruct and warn human beings, the Good Twin at last departed for home. There he never dies; instead, explains another version of the story, when ... his body becomes ancient normally, he then retransforms his body ... and again recovers his youth.⁵

A shift in perspective from the realm of allegorical truth to the domain of the physically demonstrable reveals that the world the Good Twin shaped on the Turtle's Back indeed emerged from the waters. From the period of the arrival of the first humans in North America until approximately 10,500 B.C., Iroquoia was covered by glaciers. As the ice sheets began their slow retreat northward, the melt water collected in what geologists label Lake Iroquois, a body of water stretching from near present-day Rome, New York, to beyond the current western shore of Lake Ontario. To the east, encompassing today's Lakes George and Champlain and their environs, stretched a saltwater extension of the Gulf of St. Lawrence called the Cham-plain Sea. Only in the centuries between 8000 and 6000 B.C. did the climate begin to approximate current conditions and the dry land of Iroquoia emerge, bracketed by the Mohawk and Genesee rivers and punctuated by the Finger Lakes and countless smaller streams and bodies of water.⁶

The rivers that remained in the beds initially carved by the melting ice made Iroquoia the geographical heart of northeastern Indian North America. Spanning the country of the Five Nations, a modest east-west rise separated streams flowing north through the Great Lakes Lowland from those flowing south through the Allegheny Plateau. Given enough time and good enough canoes, therefore, one could travel literally almost anywhere from Iroquoia. To the northeast, an almost uninterrupted water corridor led from the upper Hudson River through Lakes George and Champlain toward the St. Lawrence River and, hundreds of miles later, the North Atlantic. To the east, the Mohawk River flowed into the Hudson and thence to the sea in what Europeans would later call New York Harbor. To the southeast, the headwaters of the Delaware River ran to the Atlantic coast via Delaware Bay. To the south, the Susquehanna and its tributaries provided a route to the

MAP 1. The Emergence of Iroquoia, 10,500 B.C–6000 B.C. Sources for maps are discussed in Methodological Comments.

Chesapeake. To the southwest, the waters of the Allegheny River fell into the Ohio and thence, ultimately, the Mississippi. To the west, the Niagara River offered a route to vast territories north of the Great Lakes. To the north, various streams emptied into Lake Ontario, on which canoes hugging the shore could travel either west to Niagara or east to the St. Lawrence Valley. And if water flowed away in all directions, so too did all routes lead to Iroquoia, although, thanks to the Evil Twin, one had to paddle upstream and portage around many obstacles to get there.⁷

But however crucial its geography, Iroquoia as a social construct did not yet exist. Throughout the postglacial period, Paleo-Indian hunters pursued game in the tundralike environment ringing the shores on the Turtle's Back. By approximately 4500 B.C., as the climate warmed and the land assumed its modern form, Archaic cultures evolved in adaption to local environments. In these societies, bands of a few dozen people migrated in seasonal cycles to exploit the food resources available in valleys and near streams and lakes. Whether any of the Archaic peoples were direct ancestors of the Five Nations Iroquois remains very much in doubt. Perhaps, however, the region's first speakers of a proto-Iroquoian language were the people of the Frost Island culture, who apparently migrated northward through the Susquehanna watershed in approximately 1600 B.C.⁸

By approximately 1200 B.C., the Frost Island culture had evolved into a Meadowood phase that marked the beginning of the Early Woodland period in Iroquoia. Among the most notable innovations of this stage were semipermanent settlements and means for storing significant amounts of food in storage pits and ceramic pots; whereas their Late Archaic predecessors had used soapstone bowls and experimented with pottery, Early Woodland peoples were the first northeastern native Americans to make ceramics effectively. Apparently the food stored and cooked in these new vessels was not agriculturally produced, but their makers depended heavily on such semi-domesticated vegetation as acorns and Chenopodium (the goosefoot), from which they made flour.⁹

The Meadowood culture developed an elaborate mortuary ceremonialism. Like Sky Woman's father in the Cosmogonic Myth, the deceased were apparently kept and venerated above ground for a time, later to be cremated and buried with gifts of food and other items, presumably for their use in the spirit world. Many of the burial offerings were acquired in long-distance trade—shell beads from the Atlantic coast, soapstone pots and pipes from Pennsylvania, copper from the Great Lakes, ritual items from the Adena Moundbuilder culture of the Ohio Valley—and trade seems to have been a communal activity carried on almost exclusively to acquire goods to be interred in funeral ceremonies. The supernatural associations of this commerce echo the spirit world exchange of foods between Sky Woman and her intended husband. The marital analogy in turn coincides with the archaeological and ethnographic argument that Meadowood communities were composed of several extended families grouped into a single exogamous fictive kin group—a clan—that sought marriage partners from other communities.¹⁰

By approximately A.D. 200, the Meadowood culture had given birth to a distinct Middle Woodland tradition known throughout the Great Lakes region as Point Peninsula and characterized in Iroquoia by three successive major phases: Canoe Point (which flourished in about A.D. 200), Kipp Island (about A.D. 700), and Hunter's Home (about A.D. 900). Large ceramic vessels created during the Middle Woodland period suggest both more substantial and more permanently settled communities than were typical of earlier phases. If agriculture was practiced at all (and no conclusive evidence indicates that it was), it made only a small and relatively unpredictable contribution to a varied diet gleaned from rich woodlands, lakes, and streams. The economy probably rested upon a sexual division of labor in which women gathered berries, nuts, and semiwild vegetables and grains while men hunted and fished. Reflecting the same cultural pattern, Sky Woman brought her husband bread baked with berries; his return gift was venison. During the Middle Woodland period, basketmaking and the weaving of fishnets and such other textile products as bags and burden straps from split twigs and Indian hemp flourished. Mortuary ceremonialism and its associated longdistance trade became ever more elaborate in the Canoe Point phase, including in the western part of Iroquoia even some small burial mounds similar to those characteristic of the contemporaneous Hopewellian people of the Ohio Valley. For unknown reasons, however, such practices declined significantly in the Hunter's Home era.¹¹

The centuries around A.D. 1000 saw the appearance of the Late Woodland culture archaeologists label Owasco. The transition is dramatic enough to suggest the possibility that a new Iroquoian-speaking population entered the region from the south. For the purposes of this story, however, the question of whether the Owasco peoples were indigenous or immigrants is less significant than the conclusion that they created a basic way of life that would still prevail in Iroquoia during the period of early contact with Europeans. In particular, three aspects of that way of life are crucial. First, as part of an agricultural revolution sweeping the Northeast in this period, Owasco villagers cultivated maize, beans, and squash on a scale that made horticulture central to their subsistence. Second, new mortuary rituals replaced the older two-stage process in favor of immediate burials which included a few material goods that were evidently personal belongings rather than grave offerings. Third, long-distance trade virtually ceased, at least as indicated by the archaeological record; in its place emerged greatly intensified warfare among communities. The origins of these conflicts remain controversial, but more important for understanding later developments is that once they began, a continual cycle of feuding made them very difficult to stop, and they took on a life of their own. As the Cosmogonic Myth relates, the Good Twin showed human beings how to plant corn, but feared they would forget the ceremonies he taught them and begin to destroy one another.¹²

The new horticulture allowed much larger numbers of people to live together on a more permanent basis than in the Middle Woodland period. At the same time, warfare presumably impelled communities to combine resources—voluntarily for defensive purposes, or involuntarily through conquest. As a result, over a span of five hundred years, Owasco communities coalesced into ever fewer but ever larger agglomerations. It is likely that clans (or, more accurately, segments of clans) that had once constituted autonomous settlements now lived with analogous groups in socially and politically complex villages. At the same time, the isolation of warring communities was apparently one factor that caused an originally common proto-lroquois speech to develop after A.D. 1000 into the distinct languages of Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, Susquehannock, and perhaps several others. In the sixteenth century, as a final wave of village consolidations occurred, the speakers of the first five of these languages coalesced as the original members of the Iroquois League. The Susquehannocks became one of their inveterate enemies. In a southwest-to-northeast arc around the borders of the Five Nations lived speakers of related Iroquoian languages and practitioners of similar ways of life who also remained outside the League: Monongahelas, Eries, Wenros, Petuns, Neutrals, Hurons, Jefferson County Iroquoians, and St. Lawrence Iroquoians. To the east and southeast was the realm of the radically different Algonquian linguistic family, of which varying languages and dialects were used by the Algonquins, Western Abena-kis, Mahicans, River Indians, New England Algonquians, Munsees, and Le-napes.¹³

In Iroquoia, the ancestors of the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayu-gas, and Senecas developed patterns of life consonant with the Cosmogonic Myth. Much of the story in the Sky World centers on communal life: villagers

MAP 2. The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in the Mid-Sixteenth Century

gathered to comfort the weeping orphan child and labored together to uproot the great tree, and for Sky Woman the support and safety of her native community contrasted sharply with the long and dangerous voyage to her prospective husband's town. In late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Iroquoia, much of life indeed centered on village communities, which included three basic types: camps, hamlets, and towns. Camps were occupied only seasonally for fishing, fowling, and other pursuits. Hamlets were small settlements almost invariably closely tied to a much larger town located a few miles away.¹⁴

Towns were bustling places of as many as two thousand people; with an average population of about two hundred per acre, they were the most densely settled places in the European or native Northeast before the nineteenth century.¹⁵ At the turn of the seventeenth century the Mohawks possessed three or four towns and several hamlets stretching in an east-west line south of the Mohawk River; the Oneidas a town and probably a hamlet near Oneida Creek in what is now Madison County, New York; the Onondagas a town and hamlet southeast of modern Syracuse; the Cayugas three towns (no evidence of hamlets has been discovered) clustered between Owasco and Cayuga lakes; and the Senecas two towns, each allied with at least one hamlet, east of the Genesee River and north of the Finger Lakes. The total population of the ten towns and several hamlets was probably between twenty thousand and thirty thousand.¹⁶

In contrast to their predecessors in the Early and Middle Woodland periods, Owasco and Iroquois towns were usually not located along waterways. Instead, perhaps in response to the frequent wars of the period, they gravitated toward defensible hilltops a mile or two back in the forest. Military concerns also dictated that most towns be heavily fortified, and residents of nearby hamlets, which usually had no defenses except perhaps a thin palisade designed to keep wild animals out and small children in, probably crowded into them when enemies threatened. All approachable sides of fortified towns were surrounded by two or three ranks of palisades reaching twelve to twenty feet in the air and angled to join at the top. The uprights were the trunks of hardwood saplings; the spaces between them were filled with smaller branches and sheets of bark intertwined horizontally and occasionally reinforced by piles of lumber and brush. In some cases, galleries joined portions of the palisade lines, providing platforms from which to hurl weapons at attackers; in others, ditches and earthworks provided additional defense. Sometimes a network of wooden troughs channeled water from nearby ponds or streams to sustain besieged inhabitants and quench fires set by assailants. The one or two openings of three feet or so in width that provided the only access to the interior of a town could easily be closed off with logs during an attack.¹⁷

Completing the militant image, the main gate might feature two or more posts topped with carved figures of human heads crowned with the scalps of enemies. No wonder seventeenth-century Dutch and English visitors referred to Iroquois towns as castles, and no wonder Sky Woman approached the village of her intended spouse with considerable trepidation. To mitigate the threat, welcome guests received a hearty reception from local leaders, who initiated ceremonies to calm their minds and rest their bodies, and from queues of enthusiastic villagers who flanked the town gate; these rituals survive today in traditional Iroquois culture as the At the Wood's Edge rite. A friendly visitor found the contrast between harsh façade and warm reception even more striking once inside the palisades, where throngs of women and children presented a busy but far more peaceful scene than that outside.¹⁸

Packed within the two to sixteen acres encompassed by the palisade were anywhere from 30 to 150 structures, the majority of which were longhouses. Standing side by side in parallel rows, they were a little more than 20 feet in width and varied in length from 40 to 200 feet; the average was about 100. Saplings twisted into the ground at close intervals provided the basic framework for their exterior walls and arched to frame a roof 15–20 feet tall. Large sheets of elm bark secured by tree fibers and small saplings enclosed the framework's sides and most of the rafters; movable panels covered doorways at each end and rooftop openings that let smoke out and daylight in. A central corridor, punctuated at roughly 20-foot intervals by fireplaces, dominated the interior. Against the walls on either side of the hearths stood platforms raised a foot or so off the ground that floored bark-enclosed sleeping compartments roughly 12 feet long, 6 deep, and 5 high. Storage space for food, firewood, and personal belongings was available in vestibules at either end of the longhouse, along the exterior walls in the intervals between compartments and above their ceilings, and (where local conditions permitted) in pits dug under the platforms and lined with bark. When no longer suitable for holding food, the pits became receptacles for household wastes. The length of the structure depended on the number of fires it contained, which in turn reflected the number of residents it sheltered. An existing house could be extended with additional sets of apartments and fires to accommodate growing families.¹⁹

The cultural significance of these dwellings for the peoples of the Long-house rested on their interior spatial geography and the experiential legacy of

PLATE 1 . An Iroquoian Longhouse. Detail from Plan du Fort Frontenac ou Cataraouy, circa 1720. Courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago

countless hours spent confined within them during the snowy winters of Iroquoia. Each compartment was home to a nuclear family, which shared its fire, and thus its heating and cooking facilities, with the family on the opposite side. The organization of physical space thus embodied an ethic of sharing and reciprocity between kin groups who, although separated, boile in one kettle, eat out of one dish, and with one spoon, and so be one. The same values prevailed when Sky Woman's mother daily crossed the house to comb the father's hair and when Sky Woman herself exchanged gifts of food with her husband on the other side of the fire. In seventeenth-century Iroquoia, would-be brides still brought presents of bread to their intendeds.²⁰

Not only across the fire but on the same side of it reciprocity reigned. The efforts of both sexes provided a starchy but balanced diet whose low-in-red-meat virtues many Euro-Americans would come to appreciate only in the late twentieth century.²¹ As in the Sky World and in the lives of the terrestrial cultural predecessors of the Iroquois, males were responsible for procuring animal protein and females for vegetables. Thus, while younger men hunted and older ones fished, women retrieved and processed the game, tended the fields of corn, beans, and squash that stretched more than a mile outside the town palisades, gathered berries, nuts, and other wild food from the surrounding countryside, and provided pottery, baskets, and firewood with which to prepare and store the bounty. Together men and women filled family cooking pots and stuffed the storage pits and baskets that lined the longhouse walls. The houses in this castle, said a