The military nerves of the continent of North America lie in the water-ways bounding, traversing, or issuing from the State of New York. Its heart is the region between the Hudson and the Niagara. In these days of steam-traction, when transit is made at right angles to the rivers, and thus directly across the great natural channels of transportation, New York may be less the Empire State than in the days of canoes and bateaux. Yet even now its strategic importance is at once apparent. In the old days of conflict, first between the forces of Latin and Teutonic civilization, and later between British king-craft and American democracy, it was the ground chosen for struggle and decision.

Before the European set foot on the American continent, the leading body of native savages had discovered the main features of this great natural fortress and place of eminent domain. Inventors of the birch-bark canoe, the red man saw that from this centre all waters of the inland ocean made by the great lakes, the warm gulf, and the salt sea, could be easily reached. With short land-portages, during which the canoe, which served as shelter and roof at night and house and vehicle by day, could be carried on the shoulders, the Indian could paddle his way to Dakota, to Newfoundland, or to Hudson’s Bay on the north, or the Chesapeake and the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico on the south. In his moccasins he could travel as far. From New York State the pedestrian can go into twenty States and into two thirds of the territory of the United States without leaving the courses of valleys. No other State can so communicate between the east and the west without overcoming one or more mountain ridges. The T-shaped Hudson-Mohawk groove in the earth’s crust unites the valleys east of Massachusetts. With such geographical advantages, added to native abilities, the Iroquois were able to make themselves the virtual masters of the continent of North America.

Here, accordingly, was built the Long House; that is, was organized the federation of the Five Nations. Like the Pharaohs, Sultans, Mikados, and European princes of the world which we call old, because of its long written history, these forest sovereigns named their government after their house. The common edifice of the Iroquois was a bark structure fifty or more feet long, and from twelve to twenty feet wide, with doors at either end. In each dwelling lived several families.

So also, in the Great Long House, stretching from the Hudson to the Niagara, dwelt at first five families. The Mohawks occupied the room at the eastern end of the house, in the throat of the Mohawk Valley, the schenectady, or “place just outside the door,” being on the “mountain-dividing” or Hudson River. More exactly, the place of “Ye treaties of Schenectady” was at the mouth of Norman’s Kill, a little south of Albany. Here was the place of many ancestral graves, where multitudes of the dead lay, and where Hiawatha, their great civilizer, dwelt.

Of all the tribes the Mohawks were, or at least in England and the colonies were believed to be, the fiercest warriors. It was after them that the roughs in London in the early part of the eighteenth century were named, and the term was long used as a synonym with ferocious men. The tea-destroyers in Boston Harbor in 1774 also took this name. Next westward were the Oneidas, inhabiting the region from Little Falls to Oneida Lake. The Onondagas at the centre of the Long House, in the region between the Susquehanna and the eastern end of Lake Ontario, had the fireplace or centre of the confederacy. The Cayugas lived between the lake named after them and the Genesee Valley. The Senecas occupied the country between Rochester and Niagara. The evidence left by the chips on the floors of their workshops, show that their most ancient habitations were on the river-flats and at the edges of streams. Later, as game became scarcer, they occupied the hills and ledges farther back. On these points of vantage their still later elaborate fortifications of wood were built. As the rocks of New York make the Old Testament of geology, so the river-strands and the quarries are the most ancient chronicles of unwritten history, in times of war and peace.

How long the tribes of the Long House lived together under the forms of a federated republic, experts are unable to tell. It is believed that they were originally one large Dakota tribe, which became separated by overgrowth and dissensions, and later united, not as a unity, but as a confederation. The work of Dr. Cadwallader Colden, who in 1727 published his “History of the Five Nations,” has been too much relied upon by American and English writers. It was one of the very first works in English on local history published in the province of New York. Utterly ignoring the excellent writing of the Dutch scholars, Domine Megapolensis, De Vries, and the lawyer, Van der Donck, who wrote as men familiar with their subject at first hand; ignoring also the personal work of Arendt Van Curler,—Colden compiled most of his historic matter from French authors.

According to the tradition of the Algonkin Indians of Canada, which Colden gives at length, the Iroquois were at first mainly occupied in agriculture, and the Algonkins in hunting. The various wars had developed in the Iroquois the spirit of war and great powers of resistance, so that they held their own against their enemies. Another of the many bloody campaigns was to open on the shores of the lake named after Champlain, when Europeans appeared on the scene, and trustworthy history begins. Champlain, it seems, did not desire to join in the Indian feuds, but was compelled to do so in order to retain the friendship of the Hurons. This first use of fire-arms in Indian warfare meant nothing less than revolution in politics, in methods of war, in the influence of chiefs, and in other elements of Indian civilization. What gunpowder began, alcohol completed.

This much seems certain, that at the opening of the seventeenth century the whole continent was a dark and bloody ground, in which war was the rule and peace the exception; in which man hunted man as the beasts and fishes destroy and devour one another. The Iroquois, speaking substantially one language, were as an island in a great Algonkin ocean. Unlike mere fishermen and hunters they were agriculturists, and many hundred square miles were planted with their maize, squashes, pumpkins, beans, tobacco, and other vegetables, edible or useful. They were able to store up corn for long campaigns and to brave a season of famine. The streams furnished them with fish, and they hunted the deer, elk, bison, and smaller animals for flesh or furs; but their noblest game was man. To kill, to scalp, to save alive for torture, to burn his villages and houses, to wreak vengeance on his enemies, was rapture to the savage.

Before they knew gunpowder, the Iroquois, equipped with flint weapons and clothed in bark armour, often fought in the open field and with comparative personal exposure. Their battles were by masses of men who were led by chiefs, and their tactics and strategy resembled those of white men before the introduction of fire-arms. One famous field in the open ground near Schenectady was long pointed out in Indian tradition as the place where the great battle between the Iroquois and the Algonkins had been fought before the coming of the whites. For the defence of their villages they built palisades with galleries for the defenders to stand on, and with appliances at hand to put out fires, or to repel assaults and drive off besiegers. Theirs was the age of stone and wood; but their civilization was based on agriculture, which made them superior to that of their neighbours, whom they had compelled to be tributary vassals.

The apparition of the white man and the flash of Champlain’s arquebus, vomiting fire and dealing death by invisible balls, changed all Indian warfare and civilization. Gunpowder wrought as profound a revolution in the forests of America as in Europe. Bark or hide shields and armour were discarded; bows and arrows were soon left to children; the line and order of battle changed; fighting in masses ceased; the personal influence of the chiefs decreased, and each warrior became his own general. Individual valour and physical strength and bravery in battle counted for much less, and the dwarf was now equal to the giant.

An equally great revolution in industry took place when the stone age was suddenly brought to a close and the age of metals ushered in. The iron pot and kettle, the steel knife, hoe, hatchet, and the various appliances of daily life made more effective and durable, almost at once destroyed the manufacture of stone and bone utensils. The old men lost their occupation, and the young men ceased to be pupils. This loss of skill and power was tremendous and far-reaching in its consequences; and its very suddenness transformed independent savages into dependents upon the white man. In time of famine or loss of trade, or interruption of their relations with the traders caused by political complications, the sufferings of the Indians were pitiable.

Champlain’s shot dictated the reconstruction of Indian warfare; but the Iroquois took to heart so promptly the lesson, that the Algonkins north of the St. Lawrence were able to profit little by their temporary victory. Full of hate to the French for interfering to their disadvantage, the Mohawks at once made friends with the Dutch.

Both Hudson and Champlain had visited Mount Desert Island, and thence separating had penetrated the continent by the great water-ways, both reaching the heart of New York within a few miles of each other. While the French founded Quebec, and settled at Montreal, the Dutch made a trading settlement on the Hudson at Norman’s Kill, Tawasentha. This “place of many graves” and immemorial tradition was the seat of their great civilizer and teacher, Hiawatha, who had introduced one phase of progress. It was now destined to be the gateway to a new era of change and development. As in Japan, at the other side of the globe, at nearly the same time white men, gunpowder, and Christianity had come all together.

It was not out of disinterested benevolence that the confederate savages sought the friendship of the Hollanders. They came to buy powder and ball, to arm themselves with equal weapons of vengeance, and to protect themselves against the French.

But if Champlain was a mighty figure in the imagination of the red man of the Mohawk Valley, there was coming a greater than he. This new man was to impress more deeply the imagination of all the Iroquois, and his name was to live in their language as long as their speech was heard on the earth. Champlain was a bringer of war; “Corlaer” was an apostle of peace.

Arendt Van Curler is a perfectly clear figure in the Indian tradition, and in the history and documentary archives of the Empire State. Having no descendants to embalm his name in art or literature, he has not had his monument. Yet he deserves to have his name enrolled high among the makers of America. The ignorance, errors—and there is a long list of them—of writers on American and local history concerning Arendt Van Curler, have been gross and inexcusable. It were surely worth while to know the original of that “Corlaer” after whom the Indians named, first the governors of New York, and later the governors of English Canada, and finally Queen Victoria, the Empress of India. To the Iroquois mind, Corlaer was the representative of Teutonic civilization. Other governors of colonies and prominent figures among the pale-faces, they called by names coined by themselves, just as they named their own warriors from trivial incidents or temporary associations. Even the King of Great Britain was only their unnamed “Father;” but as our ablest American historian, Francis Parkman, has said: “His [Van Curler’s] importance in the eyes of the Iroquois, and their attachment to him are shown by the fact that they always used his name (in the form of Corlaer) as the official designation of the governor of New York, just as they called the governors of Canada, Onontio, and those of Pennsylvania, Onas. I know of no other instance in which Iroquois used the name of an individual to designate the holder of an office. Onontio means ‘a great mountain;’ Onas means ‘a quill or pen;’ Kinshon, the governor of Massachusetts, ‘a fish.’ ”^[4]

Rev. I. A. Cuoq, in his “Lexique de la Langue Iroquoise,” also remarks that the title Kora, the present form of [Van] Curler, given even yet to the kings and queens of England and to the English governors of Canada, is a purely Iroquois creation; while that of Onontio, used of the French king and governors, was given for the first time to Montmagny, the successor of Champlain. Quite differently from their method in the case of Van Curler, they translated, with the aid of the French missionaries, Montmagny’s name, rendering it freely by Onontio, which means, strictly speaking, “the beautiful mountain,” rather than “the great mountain.” The term Onontio was used until the end of the French dominion in America, whereas Kora [or Corlaer] is still in vogue; Queen Victoria being to the Canadian Indians Kora-Kowa, or the great Van Curler.

As first-cousin of Kilian Van Rensselaer, Arendt Van Curler, a native of the country near Amsterdam, but probably of Huguenot descent, reached America in 1630, and became superintendent and justice of the colony at Rensselaerwyck. From the very first he dealt with the Indians in all honour, truth, and justice. He was a man of sterling integrity, a Dutch patriot, and a Christian of the Reformed faith, but also a man of continental ideas, a lover of all good men, and a Catholic in the true sense of the term. He rescued from death and torture the Christian prisoners in Mohawk villages; and his first visit into, or “discovery” of the Valley as far as Fonda in September, 1642, was to ransom Father Jogues. His description of “the most beautiful land on the Mohawk River that eye ever saw,” and the journal of his journey, probably sent with his letter of June 16, 1643, to the Patroon, form the first written description of the Valley. He mastered the vernacular of the savages, visited them at their council-fires, heard their complaints, dealt honestly with them, and compelled others to do the same. The first covenant of friendship, made in 1617, between the Dutch and the Iroquois, and its various later renewals, he developed into a policy of lasting peace and amity. The scattered links of friendship between the Dutch and the confederacy of Indians he forged into an irrefragable chain, which, until the English-speaking white men went to war in 1775, was never broken. In 1663 he saved the army of Courcelles from starvation and probably destruction. Winning alike the respect of the French in Canada, and of their enemies, the Mohawks, he was invited to visit the governor, Tracy, in Quebec. On his journey thither in 1667, he was drowned in Lake Champlain near Rock Regis, the boundary-mark between the Iroquois and Algonkin Indians. This lake, like the Mohawk River, and the town of Schenectady which he founded, the Indians and Canadians called Corlaer.

Rarely, if ever, was a council held in Albany or at Johnson’s house or at the Onondaga fireplace, that Corlaer’s name was not mentioned, and their “covenant chain” with him referred to under the varied figures of rhetoric.

Van Curler’s policy was continued and expanded by Peter Schuyler, a son of Van Curler’s warm personal friend, Philip Schuyler. As the Iroquois in speaking never closed the lips, but used the orotund with abundance of gutturals, they were unable to pronounce properly names in which labial consonants occurred. They could not say Peter; so they called their friend “Quider.” The policy of Johnson was simply a continuation and expansion of that of these two Hollanders, Van Curler and Schuyler. There was no name of any white man that Johnson heard oftener in the mouths of the Indians than that of Corlaer; and yet, in the index of seventy thousand references to the Johnson manuscripts in Albany there is no reference to this founder of the Dutch policy of peace with the Indians.

In their political and social procedures, in public discourse, and in the etiquette of councils, no denizens of European courts were more truly bond-slaves to etiquette and custom than these forest senators. In certain outward phases of life—especially noticed by the man of hats, boots, and clean underclothing—the Indian seems to be a child of freedom, untutored and unsophisticated. In reality he is a slave compared to the enlightened and civilized man. He is by heredity, training, and environment fettered almost beyond hope. His mind can move out of predestined grooves only after long education, when a new God, new conceptions, induced power of abstract reasoning, and an entirely new mental outlook are given him. First of all, the savage needs a right idea of the Maker of the universe and of the laws by which the creation is governed; and then only does his mental freedom begin. So far from being free from prescribed form, he is less at liberty than a Chinese or Hindu. His adherence to ceremonial runs into bigotry. The calumet must be smoked. The opening speech must be on approved models. The wampum belts are as indispensable in a treaty as are seals and signatures in a Berlin conference or a Paris treaty. To challenge tradition, to step out of routine, to think for himself, and to act according to conviction, is more dangerous and costly to him than to one who has lived under the codes of civilization.

To gain his almost invincible influence over these red republicans of the woods, Johnson, like his previous exemplars, had to let patience have her perfect work. He had to stoop to them in order to lift them up. He even learned to outdo them in ostentation of etiquette, in rigid adherence to form, in close attention to long speeches without interruption, in convincing eloquence, in prolixity when it was necessary to subdue the red man’s brain and flesh by the power of the tongue, and in shine and glitter of outward display. Like a shrewd strategist, this typical Irishman knew when to exercise his native gift of garrulity in talking against time, and when also to condense into fiery sentences the message of the hour.

One chief reason, however, why the Iroquois preferred to talk with him more than with the average colonial grandee, was because they were not when before him at the mercy of interpreters. Despite the fact that time was of little value to the savage, it was rather trying to an Indian orator, after dilating for an hour or two in all the gorgeous eloquence of figurative language, to the manifest acceptance of his own kinsmen at least, to have an interpreter render the substance of his oration in a few sentences. Unaccustomed to abstract reasoning, the Indian was perforce obliged to draw the images of thought entirely from the environment of his life on land and water. Hence his speech superabounded with metaphors. He thoroughly enjoyed the discourse of one of his pale-faced brothers whose flowery language, while insufferably prolix to his fellow-whites, ran on in exuberant verbosity. In such a case, as Johnson soon learned to know, the sons of the forest felt complimented and flattered. Rarely was a speaker interrupted. Extreme rigidity of decorum was the rule at their councils. On great and solemn occasions the women were called as witnesses and listeners to hold in their memory words spoken or promises given.

There were other resources of human intercourse besides words. The wampum strings that reminded one of rosaries, or the belts made of hundreds and thousands of black and white shells, served as telegrams, letters missive, credentials, contracts, treaties, currency, and most of the purposes in diplomacy and business. The principal chief of a tribe had the custody of these archives of State. A definite value was placed upon these drilled, polished, and strung disks or oval cylinders of shell. The Dutch soon learned to make a better fabric than the Indian original, and they taught the art to the other colonists. Weeden, in his “Economic History of New England,” has shown how great an aid to commerce this, the ancient money of nearly all nations, proved in the early days when coined money was so scarce. The belts used as newsletters, as tokens of peace or war, as records of the past, or as confirmations of treaties, were often generous in width and length, beautifully made, and fringed with coloured strings. Schenectady was a famous place of wampum or seewant manufacture; and Hille Van Olinda, an interpreter, received in 1692 two pounds eight shillings for two great belts. Two others of like proportions cost three pounds twelve shillings. A large quantity of this sort of currency was always carried by the French to win over the Indians to their side. The same commercial and diplomatic tactics were also followed by the English, and especially by Johnson.

The Iroquois had also a rude system of heraldry. A traveller over the great trails or highways, or along the shores of the great water-ways most often traversed, would have seen many tokens of aboriginal art. The annals of the Jesuit missionaries and of travellers show that besides the hideously painted or carved manitou or idols found at certain well-known places, the trees and rocks were decorated with the totem signs. The wolf, the bear, the tortoise, were the living creatures most frequently seen in effigy on tent, robes, or arms. Or they were set as their seal and sign-manual on the title-deeds of lands bartered away, which the white man required as proofs of sale and absolute alienation, though often the red man intended only joint occupancy. In the Iroquois Confederacy there were eight totem-clans, which formed an eight-fold bond of union in the great commonwealth. Less important symbols were the deer, serpent, beaver, stone pipe, etc. In their drawings on trees or rocks there were certain canons of art well understood and easily read. A canoe meant a journey by water; human figures without heads, so many scalps; the same holding a chain, as being in alliance and friendship; an axe, an emblem of war, etc. A rude fraternity, with secrets, signs, and ceremonies,—the freemasonry of the forest,—was also known and was powerful in its influence. In family life, inheritance was on the female side; and on many subjects the advice of the women was sought and taken, and as witness-auditors they were a necessity at solemn councils, as well as made the repository of tradition.

Exactly what the religion of the Indians was it would be hard to say. To arrange their fluctuating and hazy ideas into a system would be impossible. Whatever the real mental value of their words “manitou” and “wakan,” or other terms implying deity, or simply used to cover ignorance or express mystery, it is evident that the blind worship of force was the essence of their faith. Living much nearer to the animal creation than the civilized man, they were prone to recognize in the brute either a close kinship or an incarnation of divine power. Extremes meet. The current if not the final philosophy of the scientific mind in our century, and that of the savage, have many points in common. All animated life was linked together, but the red man saw the presence of the deity of his conception in every mysterious movement of animate or inanimate things. Even the rattlesnake was the bearer of bane or blessing according as it was treated. Alexander Henry, the traveller from Philadelphia, relates that on meeting a snake four or five feet long, which he would have killed, the Iroquois reverently called it “grandfather,” blew their tobacco smoke in puffs toward it to please the reptile, and prayed to it to influence Colonel Johnson “to take care of their families during their absence, to show them charity, and to fill their canoes with rum.” When, afterward, they were on the lake and a storm arose, Henry came very near being made a Jonah to appease the wrath of the rattlesnake-manitou, but fortunately the tempest passed and it cleared off.

The Indians invented the birch or elm bark canoe, the racket or snow-shoe, the moccasin, all of which the white frontiersmen were quick to utilize when they saw their value. They also taught the settlers the use of new kinds of food, and how to get it from the soil or the water. To tread out eels from the mud, catch fish with the hand or with fish-hooks of bone, and to till the ground, even in the forest, for maize, squashes and pumpkins, were lessons learned from the red man. Frontier and savage life had many points in common, and not a little Indian blood entered into the veins of Americans. There were hundreds of instances of women as well as men rescued from their supposed low estate as captives who preferred to remain with the Indians in savage life. Often white settlers were saved from death by starvation by friendly red men or half-breeds; while half the plots of the savages failed because of the warnings given by friendly squaws, or boys who were usually not full-blooded.

Great changes took place within the Iroquois Confederacy after the advent of the white man. His fire-arms, liquor, fences, and ideas at once began to modify Indian politics, hunting, social life, and religion. The unity of interests was broken, and division and secession set in, as steady currents, to weaken the forest republic. Large numbers of the Iroquois emigrated westward to live and hunt in Ohio and beyond, and joined the Ottawa confederacy. Others left in bands or groups, and made their homes in Pennsylvania, Virginia, or the Southwest, to get away, if possible, from the white man’s fences and fire-water. Others followed their religious teachers into Canada, and made settlements there. These losses were only in a measure made good by the addition to the Long House of a whole tribe from the South, the Tuscaroras, whose ancestral seats had been in the Carolinas.

North Carolina was one of the majority of the original thirteen States first settled by a variety of colonists,—French, German, Swiss, Scottish, and Irish, as well as English. At first red and white men lived at peace; but soon the inevitable “question” came, and the Indians imagined that they could show themselves superior to the pale-faces. Making what white historians call a “conspiracy,” but striking what they believed to be a blow for home and freedom, they rose, and in one night massacred in or near Roanoke alone one hundred and thirty-seven of the white settlers. Their murderous act at once drew out the vengeance of Governor Craven of South Carolina, who sent Col. John Barnwell, an Irishman, who marched with a regiment of six hundred whites and several hundred Indian allies. Without provision trains, but subsisting as Indians do in a wilderness unbroken by villages, farms, or clearings, Barnwell struck the Tuscaroras in battle, and reduced their numbers by the loss of three hundred warriors. Pursuing them to their fortified castle, he laid siege and compelled surrender. By successive blows, this “Tuscarora John,” by death or capture, destroyed one thousand fighting men, and compelled the remainder of the tribe to leave the graves of their fathers, and emigrate northward. Only a remnant reached New York. The Tuscaroras joined the Iroquois Confederacy in 1713, and the federated forest republic then took upon itself the style and title of the Six Nations.

Nearly a century afterward, when the Iroquois Confederacy was a dream, and the Southern Confederacy beginning to be woven of the same stuff, the descendant of “Tuscarora John,” who had added a new tribe to the Long House, gave at Montgomery, Alabama, the casting vote that made Jefferson Davis President of a new one in the many forms of federation on the North American continent. About the same time the great English historian, Freeman, neglecting for the nonce the distinction between history and prophecy, began his work on the “History of Federal Government, from the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United States of America,” only one volume of which was published, the events of 1863–1865 compelling the completion of the work to be indefinitely postponed.

How far the various attempts of the red man to combine in federal union for common strength or defence, and especially those in the stable political edifice in New York, were potent in aiding the formation of the American Commonwealth, is an interesting question worthy of careful study. That it was not without direct influence upon the minds of those constructive statesmen like Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, Monroe, who came so numerously from States nearest the Long House, and most familiar with Iroquois politics, cannot be denied. The men of the English-speaking colonies which had been peopled from continental and insular Europe, were inheritors of classic culture. They naturally read the precedents furnished by Greece and Rome; but they were also powerfully affected by the living realities of the federal republics of Holland and Switzerland, as well as in the aristocratic republic of Venice, while in the one nearest England many of them were educated. It is not too much to affirm, however, that the power of this great example at home, on the soil and under their eyes, was as great in moulding opinion and consolidating thought in favour of a federal union of States, as were the distant exemplars of the ancient world, or in modern Europe. Though we give him no credit, and spurn the idea of political indebtedness to the red man, with almost the same intolerant fierceness that some of the latter-day New England Puritans deny obligations to the Dutch Republic that sheltered and educated their fathers, yet our government is in a measure copied from that of the forest republicans, whose political edifice and conquests shaped the history and civilization of this continent. In still retaining the sonorous names given to our mountains, valleys, and rivers, and in transferring these to our ships and men-of-war; in giving the effigy of the Indian a place on our municipal coats of arms and seals of State, we are proving that in our memory at least of the aboriginal dwellers on the soil they are not wholly forgotten. These graphic symbols are, indeed, but shadows; but beyond all shadow is substance.

While the white man’s gunpowder and bullets, war, diseases, fire-water, and trade wrought profound changes for better or worse, usually the latter, the Indians were not stolid or unreceptive to his religion. Both the Roman and the Reformed teachers won many disciples in the Long House. Almost as soon as the learned Domine Megapolensis arrived at Fort Orange, he began to learn the language of the Mohawks. He was soon able to preach to them and to teach their children. This was three years before John Eliot began his work in Massachusetts. The pastors at Schenectady did the same, translating portions of the Bible and of the liturgy of the Netherlands Reformed Church, and of the Book of Common Prayer. The missionary efforts of the Dutch Christians soon bore definite and practical results. The Reformed Church records show large numbers of Indians baptized or married or buried according to Christian rites. There are also frequent instances of adult communicant membership in the Mohawk, Hudson, Raritan, and Hackensack Valleys. Hundreds of Indian children were trained in the same catechetical instruction, and in the same classes with those of the whites. As a general rule, the Hollanders and other peoples from the Continent lived in kindness and peace with their red brethren. The occasional outbreaks of the savages in massacre, fire, and blood were not by those of New York, but from Canada. The Indians were set on like dogs by the French, who stimulated the thirst for blood by political and religious hatreds; and the English repaid in kind. Rarely was the peace broken between the people of New Netherlands and New York except by causes operative in, and coming from Europe.

The first Roman Catholic who entered the bounds of the State of New York was Isaac Jogues, who was captured by the Mohawks while ascending the St. Lawrence River. One of the sweetest spirits and noblest characters that ever glorified the flesh he dwelt in, Isaac Jogues was brought captive into the Mohawk Valley to be reserved for fiendish torture. Ransomed by Arendt Van Curler, and assisted to France by Domine Megapolensis, these three men of the Holy Catholic Church became ever after true friends. The surface discords of church names were lost in the deeper harmonies of their one faith and love to a common Saviour. Bressani was later assisted in like manner. Returning willingly, by way of Quebec, after his fingers, once chewed to shapeless lumps between the teeth of the Mohawks, had been kissed by nobles and ladies in the court at Versailles, Jogues reached, four years later (1647), the scene of his martyrdom and nameless burial. His severed head, mounted upon one of the palisades of the Indian castle, was set with its face to Canada, whence he came, in insult and defiance.

Nevertheless, the French Jesuit missionaries, with unquailing courage and fervent faith, persevered; and Poncet, Le Moyne, Fremin, Bruyas, and Pierron passed to and fro through Albany to continue the work in what they had already named as the Mission of the Martyrs. In 1667 St. Mary’s Chapel was established at the Indian village which stood on the site of Spraker’s Basin. In 1669 St. Peter’s Chapel was built of logs on the sand-flats at Caughnawaga near Fonda, by Boniface. Here in 1676 the Iroquois maiden Tegawita—the White Lily of the Mohawks, the now canonized saint—was baptized by James de Lamberville. From 1642 to 1684 was the golden age of early missions of the Roman form of the Christian faith in New York. Then it was abruptly brought to a close, not because of Indian animosity or Protestant opposition, but by the Roman Catholic Governor Dongan in the interests of British trade.

Perhaps this interruption was not wholly dictated by greed, but was strongly influenced by political interests. This fact must be noted. When Catharine Ganneaktena, an Erie Indian woman adopted into the Oneida tribe, was led to serious thought by Bruyas, to whom she taught the language in 1668, and with her Christian husband was persecuted by the pagans, the couple left for Montreal. Here she was baptized and confirmed by Bishop Laval. Instructed by Raffeix, who was somewhat of a statesman, Catharine invited several of her family in New York to Canada, and early in 1670 they founded the Indian village of La Prairie, where members of the Iroquois Confederacy might come to settle. According to the code of laws established in this Christian community, every one must renounce belief in dreams, polygamy, and drunkenness. This settlement was destined to be a powerful influence, not only in the Christianization of the Indians, but upon the politics of New York. In 1674, the wife of Kryn, “the great Mohawk,” who had conquered the Mohegans, became a Christian, and her husband abandoned her. Happening in his wanderings to visit the Christian village of La Prairie, Kryn was impressed with the peace and order reigning in it, and after a time became a Christian.

Returning to his home on the Mohawk, Kryn told what he had seen, and persuaded forty of his fellows from Caughnawaga (now Fonda, New York) to follow him. They reached La Prairie on Easter Sunday, 1676. From this time forth Kryn was an active missionary, on one occasion talking over a whole party of sixty Mohawks sent by Dongan on a raid against the French, and converting four of them to Christianity. He also persuaded the Oneidas and Onondagas to keep peace with the French, and in this was aided by the remarkable influence of Garakonthie, the Christian protector of “the black coats.” It was Kryn who led, and it was these “praying Indians” from Canada who with the French were sent by Frontenac to destroy Schenectady in 1690; and it was he who just before the attack harangued them to the highest pitch of fury. His especial pretext for revenge was the murder of sixty Canadian Indians by the Iroquois about six months previously.

For many years La Prairie was the gathering-place of seceders from the confederacy who had adopted the religion of their French teachers. In 1763 the village had three hundred fighting men; during the Revolution the number increased, and at present the Indian reservation at Caughnawaga, about twenty miles from Montreal, contains about thirteen hundred Roman Catholic Indians. These facts explain why the Mohawks and others of the confederacy had so many relatives fighting for the French, and why the political situation in New York, until the fall of French dominion, was so complex. As a rule, the Iroquois preferred the more sensuous religion of the French, while eager also for the strouds, duffels, guns, and blankets of the Dutch. Under Gallic and British influences, their hearts were as often divided as their heads were distracted. They were like tourists from Dover to Calais, when in the choppy seas which seethe between the coasts of England, France, and Holland.

In 1684 Jean de Lamberville, the last Jesuit settler in New York among the Iroquois, departed for Canada amid the lamentations of the Onondagas who escorted him. In a few generations all traces of the work of the French missionaries had vanished from the Mohawk Valley. In our days, when under the farmer’s plough or labourer’s pickaxe, the earth casts out her dead, the copper rings with the sign of the cross tell the touching story of the Indian maiden’s faith. Under the eloquent pen of John Gilmary Shea the thrilling story of labour and martyrdom glows. The Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs at Auriesville shows that even modern piety can find fresh stimulus in recalling the events which have made the Mohawk Valley classic ground to devout pilgrims as well as to the scholar and patriot.

For over a century—from 1664 until 1783—the diplomatic, military, and eleemosynary operations of British agents and armies among the Iroquois were actively carried on. These were prolonged and costly, and had much to do with making the enormous public debt of England, still unpaid. The effect was to affect powerfully the imagination of the British public. It was not merely the fiction of Cooper which created the tendency of the Englishman just landed at Castle Garden to look for painted and feathered Indians on Broadway. The author of “Leatherstocking” did but stimulate the imagination already fed by the narratives of returned veterans. Thousands of soldiers, who had heard the war-whoop in forest battles, told their stories at British hearthstones until well into this century. They, with Cooper, are responsible for the idea that forests grow in Philadelphia. The fear still possessing English children that American visitors, even of unmixed European blood, may turn red or black, is one prompted by tradition as well as by literary fiction.

For the possession of the North American continent two nations, France and England, representing the two civilizations, Roman and Teutonic, which dominate respectively Southern and Northern Europe, contended. France, in America, embodied the Roman or more ancient type of civilization, in which government and order were represented by the priest and the soldier, while the people had little or nothing to do with the government, except to obey. External authority was everything; inward condition, little or nothing. The French system was not that of real colonization, but of military possession; and the desired form of social and political order was that based on monarchy and feudalism. In the despotism of a Church subordinate to a ruler in Italy, and of a State represented by a monarch, the individual was lost, and the people’s function was simply to submit and pay taxes. They were taught to look upon their privileges and enjoyments as the gifts of the sovereign and of the Church. Authority emanated from the government, which represented God, and represented Him infallibly.

The English colonists, whose leaders had been largely trained in the Dutch Republic, represented the best elements of Teutonic civilization, those of English blood being more English than the Englishmen left behind, and more Teutonic than the Germans. Most of the principles and institutions wrought out in the experience of the colonists, especially those now seen to be most peculiarly American, were not of British, but of continental origin. New England was settled mostly by immigrants who had left England before 1640; and nearly all their leaders had come by way of Holland, receiving their political and military education in the United States of Holland, and under its red, white, and blue flag.

The strong hereditary instincts of Germanic freedom were best represented in the seventeenth century by the Hollanders, who in the little republic had long lived under democratic institutions. Nearly all the leading men who settled New England had come to America after a longer or shorter stay in Holland, where they imbibed the republican ideas which they transported as good seed to America. The Pilgrims, who were the first settlers of Massachusetts; many of the Puritans who came later to Boston and Salem; the leaders of the Connecticut Colony,—Hooker, Davenport, and many of their company,—had all been in Holland. The military commanders—Miles Standish, John Smith, Samuel Argall, Lyon Gardiner, Governor Dudley, and others—had been trained in the Dutch armies. Thus it came to pass that while the makers of New England were English in blood and language, their peculiar institutions were not of England, but directly borrowed from the one republic of Northern Europe.

The Middle States were all settled under the Netherlands influences. Even in New York, where through the patroon system semi-feudal institutions very much like those of aristocratic England had begun, the innate love of liberty in the people ultimately broke through these as a seed through its shell. The full growth was the typical American State of New York, whose constitution possessed more of the features of the National Constitution of 1787 than any other of the original thirteen States. Feudalism and its ideas were thus for the most part left behind or soon outgrown. The Church, even when united with the State, as was the case in some of the colonies, was of democratic form. The system of landholding and registry, the town-meeting, and the written and secret ballot,—all Germanic ideas,—with many customs and practical political ideas brought from Holland, made the people free, developed the individual man, and gave the colonies a reserve of strength and endurance impossible in Canada.

In their plan of strategy, the French idea was to limit the English domain within and east of the Alleghany Mountains by a chain of forts stretching from Quebec along the Great Lakes, down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans. This was a scheme of magnificent distances, involving enormous energy and expense, especially while the English held the seacoast and bases of supplies. It was evident that for any hope of success in their mighty territorial scheme the aborigines must be secured as allies. In this work the priest could do more than the soldier. Hence the zeal and energy of the spiritual orders were invoked, and put under tribute to the grand design of Gallicizing America.

On the other hand, to overcome the plans of the French, there must be that which could neutralize the wiles of the Jesuit as well as the ability of the soldier. In every war between France and England, Americans must bear a part; and until the ultimate question should have been decided, the Indian held, on this continent, the balance of power. Neutrality to red or white man was impossible. The spring, the dominating idea of diplomacy and war in Europe was this doctrine of the balance of power; but in America it was less a speculative notion than a practical reality. The American Indian would be the decisive element until one or other of the two nations and civilizations became paramount.

A fresh disturbance of this doctrinal stability in European politics occurring near the middle of the eighteenth century, at once caused the scales to oscillate in America, gave the French the first advantage, and compelled William Johnson to follow up Van Curler’s work, and to be the most active agent and influence among the Mohawks which had been felt since the death of “Brother Corlaer.” This series of episodes is called in Europe “The War of the Austrian Succession.” It was begun by Frederick the Great of Prussia, against Maria Theresa of Austria. In America it is known in history as the “Old French War.”

The “Old” French War (not that of 1753) was declared by Louis XV., March 15, 1744. The news was known all along the Canada borders by the end of April. The tidings travelled more slowly in the English language; and it was the middle of May, after the French had attacked the English garrison at Canso and compelled it to surrender, before the startling facts aroused the colonies. Already the Indian hatchets had been sharpened, and the plan of raid and slaughter well made, when the governor of New York, relying on the Indians as the great breakwater against the waves of Canadian invasion, called a council of the chiefs of the confederated Six Nations at Albany, which met June 18, 1744.

The settlers soon found that, in this as in previous wars, the French and Canadian Indians were the more aggressive party, while the military authorities of New York relied on a defensive policy. The governor, George Clinton,—not the ancestor of the Clintons in the United States, but the sixth son of the Earl of Lincoln,—had arrived in September, 1743. He was an old sea-dog, an ex-admiral, who knew as much about civil government as one of his powder-monkeys on shipboard. It seemed to be the policy of the British Government to send over decayed functionaries and politicians who were favourites at court, but in every way unfitted for the great problems of state in the complex community whose borders were on Canada, where French power was intrenched. Too many of these nominees of the Crown considered it to be their first duty to build up their private fortune. Nevertheless, it was Clinton—who had probably been influenced by his fellow-sailor, Captain Warren—who summoned William Johnson, the trader, into public life.

Despite the superiority of the British fleet, the French moved more quickly, and were first in America with reinforcements. The open water-way from Canada into the heart of New York was the military nerve of the continent. It made the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys the objective point of the French invaders. The war, though not yet declared, was to last five years, and, as we shall see, developed all the inherent energies of Johnson, the young Irishman, who had already shown powers of leadership. The military policy of the French was to keep the English frontier in a state of ceaseless alarm, by small parties of stealthy savages striking their blows unexpectedly all along the line from Oswego to Hoosic. The story of the numberless petty raids is well told in Drake’s “Particular History;” but in some cases the details are now extant only in written accounts found in the Johnson papers, in church records, in family Bibles, and on tombstones in Mohawk Valley and in New England.

Johnson soon found himself where the Robinson Crusoe of poetry wished to be,—“in the midst of alarms;” but his temper rose into the heights of unshakable calm as the dangers increased. Invited, with his wife and three infant children, to come and live in Albany till the war was over, he declined, and remained at Mount Johnson, losing no opportunity to win, to keep, and to increase his influence over the Iroquois. His abilities and power were, as we have seen, brought to the notice of the new governor, indirectly through his uncle, but immediately through the introduction of Chief Justice De Lancey, a brother of his uncle’s wife. In the month of April, 1745, William Johnson received a commission as one of the justices of the peace in the county of Albany, which then extended from Coeymans to Herkimer.

At this point the strictly private life of Johnson ended, and his political career began. The situation of Mount Johnson was within easy reach of all important places in the province which were likely to be the seat of war. An easy day’s ride on horseback would bring him to Albany, whence, by either land or water, the country was opened northward to Crown Point, or southward to New York. Thence, over a cross route by way of Saratoga Springs, a strong man well mounted could, by hard riding, reach Mount Johnson from the foot of Lake George in a day and part of a night. Westward also, by river or land route, there was easy access to all the tribes of the Long House and to all the Mohawk Valley settlements.

Johnson’s uncle, Captain Warren, had by the capture of a privateer distinguished himself at sea, and receiving promotion to the grade of Commodore, was ordered to command the naval forces for the reduction of Louisburg. By his energy and ability strict blockade was maintained while the American citizen soldiery under Pepperell tightened the coils of investment. When the “Vigilante,” a French frigate laden with reinforcements in men and provisions, had been decoyed and captured, the fortress was surrendered. Warren became an admiral; and Pepperell, a merchant like Johnson, was made a baronet,—the former one day, the latter one month, after receipt of the news in England.

Chronology was in this case a key to English jealousy of the colonists, whose growing strength and republicanism monarchical Britain feared. The joy of the Americans was excessive. It culminated in Boston, where “Louisburg Square” still preserves the name. The gladness on this side of the Atlantic equalled the astonishment, flavoured with jealousy, which fell upon Europe. One would have thought that it would salt wholesomely the inborn contempt which the regular officers of the king’s troops felt toward provincial fighters, but it did not; and Braddock, Loudon, Abercrombie, and their foolish imitators were yet numerously to come. Indeed, this success of provincial Americans induced a jealousy that was to rankle for a generation or more in British breasts, to the serious disadvantage of both Great Britain and the colonies, as we shall soon see.

Meanwhile, Indian affairs were in a critical condition, and the signs of danger on the frontier were ominous. For reasons not here to be analyzed, there were bad feelings between the Iroquois and the Albany people. Rumours of the purpose of the English to destroy the Indians were diligently kept in circulation by both lay and clerical Frenchmen. Those who wore canonicals and those who wore regimentals were equally industrious in fomenting dissatisfaction. The uneasiness of the Mohawks was so great that they sent several chiefs to confer with their brethren, the Caughnawaga Indians, in Canada. It was generally believed that the French would attack Oswego. There is also evidence that attempts were made to kidnap Johnson, against whom, as a relative of Admiral Warren, as one of the captors of Louisburg, and as the man who especially influenced the Iroquois in favour of the English, the French had an especial grudge. It was known that from the fort at Crown Point scalping parties issued at intervals; but mere rumours turned into genuine history when Longmeadow, Massachusetts, was attacked and burned by French Indians. On Nov. 17, 1745, the poorly fortified Dutch village of Saratoga on the Hudson was attacked by an overwhelming force of over six hundred French and Indians. After easy victory the place was given over to the torch, and the sickening story of the massacre of Schenectady was repeated.

In French civilization the priest and the soldier always go together. They are the two necessary figures, whether in Corea, Africa, Cochin China, or Canada. The soldier, Marin, was in this case led by the priest, Picquet. Besides the massacre, in which thirty persons were killed and scalped, sixty were made prisoners; and the whole fertile farming country, blooming with the flower and fruit of industry, was desolated for many miles. Many of the captives were negroes, and a majority of the whole number died of disease in the prisons of Quebec. One of the best accounts of this massacre—meagre in details—is contained in a letter to Mr. Johnson from Mr. Sanders, of Albany. It was nine days after this event that Johnson received the urgent letter inviting him to move for safety to Albany.

A line of fire and blood, ashes and blackness, was now being drawn from Springfield to Niagara. All men were under arms, and each was called to watch every third night. No house was safe, except palisaded or built of logs for defence. The forts were repaired and garrisoned. The bullet moulds were kept hot, and extra flints, ramrods, and ammunition laid out all ready, while weary sentinels strained ear and eye through each long, dark night.

Out from the gateway of Crown Point, like centrifugal whirlwinds of fire, swept bands of savages, who swooped down on the settlements. Almost under the shadow of the palisades of Albany, Schenectady, and the villages along the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, men were shot and their scalps taken to decorate Canadian wigwams. The little “God’s Acre” in every settlement on the Mohawk began to fatten with victims who had died out of their beds. Perhaps none of these ancient sleeping-places has been reverently emptied in order to consign their memorials of once active life to more enduring public honour in the modern cemeteries, but the number of perforated skulls surprises the beholder. In these mute witnesses to the disquiet of the past, he reads the story of ancestral danger and suffering. The devout frontiersman made his way to church on the Lord’s Day with his loaded gun on his shoulder, its flint well picked and its pan well primed. He took his seat at the end of the pew, only after sentinels had been posted and arms made ready for instant use. Slight wonder was it that the effects of all-night vigils, and the unusual posture of repose in a pew, rather than the length of the Domine’s sermon, induced sleep even in meeting.

Most of the churches were loop-holed for defence, and even in the few old houses occasionally found with projecting second floor, we see an interesting survival of the old days, when from both church and dwelling a line of gun-barrels might at any hour decorate the eaves with gargoyles spouting fire and death. Away from the villages, the farmers, building a block-house on some commanding hill, and if possible over a well or spring, kept a sentinel on the roof while they laboured in the fields. Horn in hand, the watcher surveyed the wide stretches of valley, or scrutinized the edges of the clearing, to give warning of the approach of skulking red or white murderers. Yet human nerves would weary, and after constant strain for months with no near sign of danger, vigilance would often relax at the very moment when the enemy opened fire and raised his yell. Men would laugh to-day at warnings, while, perhaps, the boys in play would set up mock sentinels at the gateways, who on the morrow would be scalped or be bound and on their way to Canada.

The twofold plan of campaign decided on in England was the old one first formulated by Leisler in 1690, looking to the invasion and subjugation of Canada, attempted again in 1711, when a German regiment in New York was raised for the purpose, and which was frustrated by the disaster to the British fleet. The land and naval forces of New and Old England were now to make rendezvous at Louisburg, and move up the St. Lawrence to Quebec, while the provincial militia of the middle and lower colonies, combined with the Iroquois if possible, should capture the French fort, St. Frederick, at Crown Point, and the city of Montreal.

The disastrous inaction of King George and the London lords, arising probably from jealousy of the provincials, and the rumours of a great French fleet under D’Anville to be sent against New England, caused the abandonment of the expedition to Quebec. This, however, was not known by submarine electric cable; and meantime New York politics, at which we must now glance, had become interesting.

Two friends, the Chief-Justice De Lancey and Governor Clinton, quarrelled over their cups at a convivial gathering, and this took place just after the latter had renewed the former’s commission for life. Happening, too, on the eve of the great council of the Six Nations, which Clinton had summoned at Albany, just when that town was pestiferous with small-pox and bilious fever, the outlook for successful negotiations was not very promising. Messrs. Rutherford, Livingston, and Dr. Cadwallader Colden were the only members of his council who came with Clinton, while of the expected Indians only three had arrived. These, for the two scalps with the blood hardly dried on the hair, were rewarded with strouds and laced coats, and sent to drum up recruits, while the governor waited a month for the tardy, suspicious, and sullen savages to appear before him.

Matters looked dark indeed. Yet when Mohawk runners, despatched by Johnson on a scouting expedition to Crown Point, arrived, bringing news of French preparations for a descent upon Schenectady and the Valley, and possibly upon Albany, the governor was unable to see the imminent danger. He still waited; he still believed wholly in the defensive policy, and seemed satisfied, because for the fort on the Hudson at Saratoga, now Easton, a sum equal to about eight hundred dollars had been voted by the Assembly. This sum enabled the colonial engineers to build a palisade one hundred and fifty feet long, with six redoubts for barracks, all of timber, and to mount on platforms twelve cannon of six, twelve, and eighteen pound calibre. In this way the summer was wasted in waiting; for the Indians came not, and Clinton’s ambition to be a powerful diplomatist with the Indians was for the present baffled.

Believing this was a matter between French and English alone, strongly inclining to neutrality, and diligently persuaded thereto by the French Jesuits, the Iroquois sulked at home. Not only did they flatly refuse to meet the governor, but some of the chiefs went openly over to the French.

Meanwhile the white settlers were, according to Johnson’s report, abandoning their farms along the Mohawk, and concentrating in the block-houses or palisaded towns. Besides having sent Indian scouts to the Champlain country, Johnson wrote urgent letters to Clinton stating the case, and asking him to open his eyes to the facts. To protect Johnson’s stores of eleven thousand bushels of grain, while standing his ground, the governor sent a lieutenant and thirty men. Another militia company was despatched to the upper Mohawk Castle. Having done these things, Clinton, who had as early as the 4th of August officially notified Governor Shirley of Massachusetts that he would proceed against Crown Point with the warriors of the Five Nations, was at his wits’ end. He had alienated Colonel Schuyler and the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners, mostly faithful and trusted men well known in the provinces. In the quarrel of the governor with De Lancey, these ranged themselves on the side of the chief justice.

It is too clumsy an attempt at explanation of the difficulty between the king’s agent, Clinton, and the Board of Indian Commissioners, to ascribe the causes chiefly or entirely to the “rascality” of the commissioners, who “abused their office for private peculation,” or to the ambition of De Lancey. It is not necessary in one who appreciates the great abilities of Johnson to describe him as a white lily of honesty and purity. English authors, the Tory historians of the Revolution, and the prejudiced writers of American history, who reflect their own narrowness and sectional views, take delight in maligning the character of the men of colonial New York simply because they were Dutch. As matter of unsentimental fact, there is much to be said on both sides. The people of New York were not anxious to send the Indians on the war-path, nor to furnish white soldiers to guard their squaws and pappooses while they were away from their villages. They were not at all persuaded of the superior honesty either of the governor or his advisers and appointees. The greater facts are also clear, that the New York Assembly was vigilantly jealous of the people’s liberties, and was determined at all hazards to limit the royal prerogative as far as possible. Since his quarrel with De Lancey, the governor had shown excessive zeal in maintaining the rights of the king. On the other hand, most of the steps necessary to make New York an independent state had, as the British Attorney-General Bradley declared, already been taken by his Assembly, which of twenty-seven members had fourteen of Dutch descent. These men were determined to teach the king’s agent that he must bow to the will of the people, who were more important than king and court, and make no advance in monarchical ideas. They saw that the governor was under the close personal influence of Cadwallader Colden, a radical Tory, who they suspected prepared most of Clinton’s State papers; and they set themselves in array against this intermeddler on royalty’s behalf. Again the petty jealousy which burned steadily in all the colonies made these Dutchmen enjoy paying back the New Englanders in their own coin some of the slights and insults of the past. The former had long looked down in contempt on the settlers of New Amsterdam, and their sons now repaid them in kind, and were on the whole rather glad to snub Shirley and to annoy Clinton for so deferring to the wishes of the latter. Clinton seemed lacking in tact, and was unable to conciliate the members of the Board of Indian Commissioners, who one and all, led by Schuyler, resigned.

In a word, Clinton had begun his administration by trying to bully and drive the Dutchmen. Now, those who know the men of this branch of the Teutonic race have always found by experience that when their hearts are won they are easily led. All attempts to drive them, however, usually result as Alva’s and Philip’s plans resulted in the Netherlands, where three hundred thousand Spaniards were buried; or as in South Africa, where Dutch boers hold their own against British aggression. It took Clinton some years to learn the lesson, but it was the same experience of failure and retreat.

At his wits’ end, Governor Clinton turned to the man for the hour. William Johnson was offered the appointment of Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and at once accepted. Thus, at thirty-one years, opened in full promise the splendid career of the Irish adventurer.

While no man in the province or continent comprehended more clearly the gravity of the situation, no one better understood all the elements in the case, the ground of faith in the immediate improvement of affairs, and the ultimate supremacy of the British cause. Johnson was a man of continental ideas. Without losing an instant of time he at once set himself to the task of getting hold of the chief men of the Six Nations. He first sent wampum belts to the Pennsylvanian Indians and the Esopus tribe, asking their co-operation with the Albany Council. He put on Indian dress, and for weeks gave himself up to their pastimes. Sparing not paint, grease, ochre, feathers, games, or councils, he arrayed himself as one of their own braves. He encouraged them to get up war-dances, in order to excite their martial spirit. He was speedily successful in turning the tide of opinion in one whole canton of the Confederacy in favour of attending the Albany Convention.

It was probably about this time that Johnson was formally adopted into the Mohawk tribe, made a chief, and received that name which was ever afterward his Indian title. This habit of the Iroquois, of especially and significantly naming prominent personages, is still in vogue. When some Dakota Indians visited Boston in 1889, after seeing Charlestown and Bunker Hill Monument, they called on Governor Brackett, and named him the “Great Rock in the Clouds.”

The title which the Mohawks gave their new white chief and leader in 1746, was, according to the anarchic and unscientific spelling of the time, War-ragh-i-yah-gey. The term may be translated “Chief Director of Affairs.” It may with economy of vocables be spelled Wa-ra-i-ya-gé.

Other matters contributed to this success, and utilized the work of others. Conrad Weiser, the Pennsylvanian German interpreter, had been recently among the tribes as far as Ohio, influencing them in favour of the English. A happy accident—the coming of a delegation of Chickasaws from the West and South to invade Canada, and to invite the Senecas to take part and pilot them—awoke this most western division of the Iroquois Confederacy to the importance of the accession. The simultaneous offers of alliance and aid by other scattered tribes led to a complete change of views. In a word, the Senecas resolved to sit at the Albany caucus. With the tribes at each end, the west and the east of the Long House, thus in substantial accord, Johnson directed the Mohawks to send out runners to the whole confederation. Thus the work of winning over the other few tribes, at least so far as attendance at Albany was concerned, proved to be comparatively easy.

Even the feuds and quarrels which at the time divided the Long House seemed to work for Johnson’s fame and the English cause. For some reason in Iroquois politics, occult to a white man, the house was divided against itself: the Senecas, Onondagas, and Mohawks composed one great faction; the Oneidas, Cayugas, and Tuscaroras formed the other and weaker. The latter tribe from the Carolinas, which had joined the Confederacy a generation before, in 1712, were far from being won over so as to take up arms for the English. When the fighting braves and counselling old men came to pow-wow with the large faction, the first thing done by them was to give the Mohawks, especially, a vigorous scolding for having acted so presumptuously and independently without taking council of the whole Confederacy. After lively debate and rejoinder, it was agreed by all to go to Albany, but with the river between the factions on their journey. So, along the banks of the Mohawk the delegates of the Confederacy marched as far as Schenectady, when quitting the river, the trail across country and to Norman’s Kill was followed. All but three of the Mohawk chiefs had been won to the English side. Of these, two of the Bear-totem clan lived at the upper castle at Canajoharie, and the third of the Tortoise-totem clan at the lower castle on the hill near Schoharie Creek. These dignitaries were finally persuaded by Rev. Mr. Barclay, then living among the Mohawks, and the famous Dr. Cadwallader Colden, who knew the Indians well, and later became the historian of the Six Nations.

It was a decisive moment in the history of America when on the 8th of August, 1746, the two rival divisions marched down old Patroon Street, the Clinton Avenue of to-day, and into State Street to Fort Frederick. Leading the Mohawk band in all the paraphernalia of Indian dress and decoration, with abundant ochre and plumes, was the pale-faced man, Johnson, who could whoop, yell, leap, dance, run, wrestle, play racket, and eat dog-hash—drawing the line at the cannibal feast,—with the best champions in any of the six tribes. The double column moved past Fort Frederick, where now stands the Episcopal Church, the Indians firing their guns and the fort its ordnance. Then the gates of the sallyport swung open, and in the largest room of the fort the red men squatted and were served with food.