Part 1

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AN ADDRESS, DELIVERED BEFORE THE WAS-AH HO-DE-NO-SON-NE OR NEW CONFEDERACY OF THE IROQUOIS,

BY

HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT,

A MEMBER: AT ITS THIRD ANNUAL COUNCIL, AUGUST 14, 1845.

ALSO,

GENUNDEWAH, A POEM,

BY

W. H. C. HOSMER,

A MEMBER:

PRONOUNCED ON THE SAME OCCASION.

PUBLISHED BY THE CONFEDERACY.

ROCHESTER: PRINTED BY JEROME & BROTHER, TALMAN BLOCK, Sign of the American Eagle, Buffalo-Street.

1846.

ADDRESS.

GENTLEMEN:

In a country like ours, whose institutions rest on the popular will, we must rely for our social and literary means and honors, exclusively on personal exertions, springing from the bosom of society. We have no external helps and reliances, sealed in expectations of public patronage, held by the hands of executive, or ministerial power. Our ancestors, it is true, were accustomed to such stimulants to literary exertions. Titles and honors were the prerogatives of Kings, who sometimes stooped from their political eminences, to bestow the reward upon the brows of men, who had rendered their names conspicuous in the fields of science and letters. Such is still the hope of men of letters in England, Germany and France. But if a bold and hardy ancestry, who had learned the art of thought in the bitter school of experience, were accustomed to such dispensations of royal favors, while they remained in Europe, they feel but little benefit from them here; and made no provision for their exercise, as one of the immunities of powers, when they came to set up the frame of a government for themselves.

No ruler, under our system, is invested with authority to tap, his kneeling fellow subject on the crown of his head, and exclaim, "Arise, Sir, Knight!" The cast of our institutions is all the other way, and the tendency of things, as the public mind becomes settled and compacted, is, to take away from men the prestige of names and titles; to award but little, on the score of antiquarian merit, and to weigh every man's powers and abilities, political and literary, in the scale of absolute individual capacity, to be judged of, by the community at large. If there are to be any "orders," in America, let us hope they will be like that, whose institution we are met to celebrate, which is founded on the principle of intellectual emulation, in the fields of history, science and letters.

Such are, indeed, the objects which bring us together on the present occasion, favored as we are in assembling around the light of this emblematic COUNCIL FIRE. Honored by your notice, as an honorary member, in your young institution, I may speak of it, as if I were myself a fellow laborer, in your circle: and, at least, as one, understanding somewhat of its plan, who feels a deep interest in its success.

Adopting one of the seats of the aboriginal powers, which once cast the spell of its simple, yet complicated, government, over the territory, a central point has been established HERE. To this central point, symbolizing the whole scheme of the Iroquois system, other points of subcentralization tend, as so many converging lines. You come from the east and the west, the north and the south. You have obeyed ONE impulse--followed ONE principle--come to unite your energies in ONE object. That object is the cultivation of letters. To give it force and distinctness, by which it may be known and distinguished among the efforts made to improve and employ the leisure hours of the young men of Western New York, you have adopted a name derived from the ancient confederacy of the Iroquois, who once occupied this soil. With the name, you have taken the general system of organization of society, within a society, held together by one bond. That bond, as existing in the TOTEMIC tie, reaches, with a peculiar force, each individual, in such society. It is an idea noble in itself, and worthy of the thought and care, by which it has been nurtured and moulded into its present auspicious form.--The union you thus form, is a union of minds. It is a band of brotherhood, but a brotherhood of letters. It is a confederacy of tribes, but a literary confederacy. It is an assemblage of warriors, but the labor to be pursued is exclusively of an intellectual character. The plumes with which you aim to pledge your literary arrows, are to be plucked from the wings of science. It is a council of clans, not to consult on the best means of advancing historical research; of promoting antiquarian knowledge; and of cultivating polite literature. The field of inquiry is broad, and it is to be trodden in various ways. You seek to advance in the paths of useful knowledge, but neglect not the flowers that bedeck the way. You aim at general objects and results, but pursue them, through the theme and story of that proud and noble race of the sons of the Forest, whose name, whose costume and whose principles of association you assume. Symbolically, you re-create the race. Thus aiming, and thus symbolizing your labors, your objects to resuscitate and exhume from the dust of by-gone years, some of those deeds of valor and renown which marked this hardy and vigorous race. There is in the idea of your association, one of the elements of a peculiar and national literature. And whatever may be the degree of success, which characterizes your labors, it is hoped they will bear the impress of American heads and American hearts. We have drawn our intellectual sustenance, it is true, from noble fountains and crystal streams. We have all England, and all Europe for our fountain head. But when this has been said, we must add, that they have been off-sets from foreign fountains and foreign streams. And nurtured as we have been, from such ample sources, it is time, in the course of our national developments, that we begin to produce something characteristic of the land that gave us birth. No people can bear a true nationality, which does not exfoliate, as it were, from its bosom, something that expresses the peculiarities of its own soil and climate. In building its intellectual edifice, we must have not only suitable decorations, but there must come from the broad and deep quarries of its own mountains, foundation stones, and columns and capitals, which bear the impress of an indigenous mental geognosy.

And where! when we survey the length and breadth of the land, can a more suitable element, for the work be found, than is furnished by the history and antiquities and institutions and love, of the free, bold, wild, independent, native hunter race? They are, relatively to us, what the ancient Pict and Celt were to Britain, or the Teuton, Goth and Magyar to Continental Europe. Looking around, over the wide forests, and transcendent lakes of New York, the founders of this association, have beheld the footprints of the ancient race. They saw here, as it were, in vision, the lordly Iroquois, crowned by the feathers of the eagle, bearing in his hand the bow and arrows, and scorning, as it were, by the keen glances of his black eye, and the loftiness of his tread, the very earth that bore him up. History and tradition speak of the story of this ancient race.--They paint him as a man of war--of endurance--of indomitable courage--of capacity to endure tortures without complaint--of a heroic and noble independence. They tell us that these precincts, now waving with yellow corn, and smiling with villages, and glittering with spires, were once vocal with their war songs, and resounded with the chorusses of their corn feasts. We descry, as we plough the plain, the well chipped darts which pointed their arrows, and the elongated pestles, that crushed their maize. We exhume from their obliterated and simple graves, the pipe of steatite, in which they smoked, and offered incense to these deities, and the fragments of the culinary vases, around which, the lodge circle gathered to their forest meal. Mounds and trenches and ditches, speak of the movement of tribe against tribe, and dimly shadow forth the overthrow of nations. There are no plated columns of marble; no tablets of inscribed stone--no gates of rust-coated brass. But the MAN himself survives, in his generation. He is a WALKING STATUE before us. His looks and his gestures and his language remain. And he is himself, an attractive _monument_ to be studied. Shall we neglect him, and his antiquarian vestiges, to run after foreign sources of intellectual study? Shall we toil amid the ruins of Thebes and Palmyra, while we have before us the monumental enigma of an unknown race? Shall philosophical ardor expend itself, in searching after the buried sites of Nineveh, and Babylon and Troy, while we have not attempted, with decent research, to collect, arrange and determine, the leading data of our aboriginal history and antiquities?--These are inquiries, which you, at least, may aim to answer.

No branch of the human family is an object unworthy of high philosophic inquiry. Their food, their language, their arts, their physical peculiarities, and their mental traits, are each topics of deep interest, and susceptible of being converted into evidences of high importance. Mistaken our Red Men clearly were, in their theories and opinions on many points. They were wretched theologists, and poor casuists. But not more so, in three-fourths of their dogmas, than the disciples of Zoroaster, or Confucius. They were polytheists from their very position. And yet, there is a general idea, that under every form, they acknowledged but one DIVINE INTELLIGENCE under the name of the GREAT SPIRIT.

They paid their sacrifices, or at least, respects, to the imaginary and phantastic gods of the air, the woods and water, as Greece and Rome had done, and done as blindly before them. But they were a vigorous, hardy and brave off-shoot of the original race of man. They were full of humanities. They had many qualities to command admiration. They were wise in council, they were eloquent in the defence of their rights. They were kind and humane to the weak, bewildered and friendless. Their lodge-board was ever ready for the way farer. They were constant to a proverb, in their _professed_ friendships. They never forgot a kind act. Nor can it be recorded, to their dispraise, that they were a terror to their enemies. Their character was formed on the military principle, and to acquire distinction in this line, they roved over half the continent. They literally carried their conquests from the gulf of St. Lawrence to the gulf of Mexico. Few nations have ever existed, who have evinced more indomitable courage or hardihood, or shown more devotion to the spirit of independence than the Iroquois.

But all their efforts would have ended in disappointment, had it not been for that principle of confederation, which, at an early day, pervaded their councils, and converted them into a phalanx, which no other tribe could successfully penetrate, or resist. It is this trait, by which they are most distinguished from the other hunter nations of North America; and it is to their rigid adherence to the verbal compact, which bound them together, as tribes and clans, that they owe their present celebrity, and owed their former power.

It is proposed to inquire into the principles of this confederacy, and to make a few brief suggestions on its origin and history. In the time that has been given me, I have had but little opportunity for research, and even this little, other engagements, have not permitted me, fully to employ. The little that I have to offer, would indeed have been confined to the reminiscence of former reading, had I not been called, the present season, to make a personal visit to the reservation still occupied by the principal tribes.

1. Prominent in its effects on the rise and progress of nations, in the geographical diameter of the country they occupy. And in this respect, the Iroquois were singularly favored. They lived under an atmosphere the most genial of any in the temperate latitude. Equally free from the extremes of heat, and humidity, it has been found eminently favorable to human life. Inquiries into the statistics of vitality will abundantly denote this. Many of the civil sachems lived to a great age. And the same may be said of those warriors who escaped the dart and club, until they came to the period, not a very advanced one, when they ceased to follow the war path.

They possessed a country, unsurpassed for its various advantages, not only on this continent, but on the globe.--It afforded a soil of the most fruitful kind, where they could, with ease and certainty, always cultivate their maize. Its forests abounded in the deer, elk, bear and other animals, whose flesh supplied their lodges. It was irrigated by some of the sublimest rivers of the continent, whose waters ran south and north, east, and by the Alleghanies, west, till they all found their level, at distant points, either in the Gulfs of St. Lawrence and Mexico, or in the intermediate shores of the Atlantic. Lakes of an amazing size, compared to those of Europe, bounded this territory on the north and north east. Its own bosom, was spotted, with secondary sheets of water, like that of the Cayuga, upon whose banks we are assembled. These added freshness and beauty to the thick, and almost unbroken continuity of these forests.

Nations doubtless owe some of their characteristics to the natural scenes of their country, and if we grant the same influence to the red sons of the forest, they had sources of animating and elevating thoughts around them.--Men who habitually cast their views to the Genesee and the Niagara--who crossed in their light canoe, the Ontario and Erie, wending their way into the sublime vista of the upper lakes: men, who threaded these broad forests in search of the deer, or who descended the powerful and rapid channels of the Alleghany, the Susquehanna, the Delaware and the St. Lawrence, in quest of their foes, must have felt the influence of magnitude and creative grandeur, and could not but originate ideas favorable to liberty and personal independence. Their very position, became thus the initiatory step in their assent to power.

2. Such was the country occupied, at the era of the discovery, by the Iroquois. They lived, to employ their own symbolic language, in a long lodge extending east and west, from the waters of the Ca-ho-ha-ta-tea[A] to those of Erie. Their most easterly tribe, the Mohawks, extended their occupancy to a point which they still call, with dialectic variations, Skan-ek-ta-tea, being the present site of Albany. To this place, or, as is more generally thought, to this geographical vicinity, the commercial enterprize of Holland, sent an exploring ship in 1609. Here begins the certain and recorded history of the Iroquois. We have only known them 200 years. All beyond this, is a field of antiquarian inquiry.

[A] Hudson.

From the historical documents recently obtained by the State from France, and deposited in the public offices at the capitol, it is seen that this people are sometimes called the NINE nations of the Iroquois. Algonquin tradition, which I have recently published, denotes that they originally consisted of EIGHT tribes. (ONEOTA.) Whatever of truth or error, there may be in these terms, it is certain that, at the period of the Dutch discovery and settlement referred to, they uniformly described themselves as the FIVE NATIONS, or United People, under the title of AKONOSHIONI.[B] The term Ongwe Honwee, which Colden mentions as peculiarly applied to themselves, as proudly contradistinguished from others, is a mere equivalent, in the several dialects, at this day, for the term Indian, and applies equally to other tribes, throughout the continent, as well as to themselves. By the admission of the Tuscaroras into the confederacy, they became known as the Six Nations. The principles of their compact, were such as to admit of any extension. They might as well, for aught that is known, have consisted of Sixteen as Six Tribes, and like our own Union, they would have been stronger and firmer in their power, with each admission.

[B] Or Ho-de-no-son-ne.

I have directed some few inquiries to their plan of union. It appears to have originated in a proposal to act in concert, by means of a central council, in questions of peace and war. In other respects, each tribe was an independency. It had no right to receive ambassadors from other tribes.--Messages delivered to a frontier tribe, were immediately transmitted to the next tribe in position, and by them passed on, to the central councils. They affirm that these messages were forwarded, with extraordinary celerity, by runners who rested not, night or day. The power to convene the general council, for despatch of public business, was in the presiding or executive chief of the Central Tribe.

This power to make war or peace, or cession of sovereignty, was given up, on the principle of an equal union in all respects, without regard to numbers. It was strictly federative, or a union of tribes. The assent to a measure, was given by tribes. Whether all were required to assent, or a majority was sufficient, is not known. It is believed they _required_ entire unanimity.

3. But another principle, of the deepest importance, ran throughout the organization of all the tribes, more remote in its origin, and still more influential, it may be thought, in forming a more perfect union, and giving strength and compactness to the government. It was the plan of the TOTEMIC BOND. This bond was a fraternity of separate clans in each tribe. It was based on original consanguinity, and marked by a heraldic device, as the figure of a quadruped, or bird. This appears to be an ancient feature in their organization, and is also found among other North American tribes. The Algonquin tribes, who possess the same organization, and from whose vocabulary we take the name, call it the Totem. The institution of the totem, or inter-fraternity of clans, existed, and is also found, with well marked features, among the Iroquois. It had, however, one characteristic, which was peculiar, to these nations.--It was employed to mark the descent of the chiefs, which ran exclusively by the female. The law of marriage, interdicting connexions within the clan, and limiting them to another, was probably established in ancient times, among the other nations who adhere to this institution, but, if so, it has dropped, or dwindled into mere tradition.

Totem, is a term denoting the device, or pictorial sign, which is used by each individual, to determine his family identity. As many as have the same totem are admitted to be of the same family or clan. In this respect, it is analogous to coats of arms. It differs from them in this, that no person can marry another of the same arms and totem. They are related. The reason for keeping up this interdict, in cases where the degree of relationship must often be very small, or is entirely lost, appears to be one of policy, and will be, as far as possible, explained.

Originally, there appears to have been three leading families or clans, among all the North American Indians, whose devices were, respectively, the TURTLE, the WOLF, and the BEAR. This triad of honored clans, existed and still exists among nations diverse in their languages, and remote in position, and may be considered as a proof of their common origin. These totems were regarded as of the highest authority--a fact which may denote either original paternity in these clans, or some distinguished action or services, analogous, perhaps, to the well known events of the Curatii and Horatii.

It is certain, at least, that amongst each of the Iroquois tribes, as well as the great Algonquin family, there existed the totem or clan of the turtle, the wolf, and the bear. I will take, however, as an illustration of the Totemic organization of the tribes, the instance of the NUN-DO-WA-GA, or Senecas. The facts here employed have recently been communicated to me by their distinguished chief DE-O-NE-HO-GA-WA. The tribe consists of eight clans. They are, in the order communicated, the wolf, the turtle, the bear, the beaver, the snipe or plover, the falcon or hawk, the deer and the cranes. The present reigning clan is the wolf, the clan to which the noted orator, Red Jacket, and my informant, both belonged. We may assume, that what appear to have been fundamental principles, were actually so, and are to be regarded as the constitutional basis.

Each clan is entitled to a chief. Each chief has a seat in council. The chiefs are hereditary, counting by the female line. By this law of descent, no chief could beget an immediate successor. And herein consisted one of the marked points of political wisdom in their system. It is this law of descent which best distinguishes it from the system of government of other nations on this continent, and in Asia. No such rule is known to exist, but may exist, among the Mongol race, or other Asiatic stocks, to whom these people have usually been traced. If so, the law of descent, in this regard, is indigenous and original. What disquisitions have we not seen, that a certain Iroquois chief was in the regular line of the chieftainship, by the father? whereas, it is clear, that the son of a chief could never, in any case, succeed his father. The descent ran, so to say, in the line of the queen-mother. If a chief die, his brother, next in age, would succeed him. These failing, his daughter's male children, if connected with the reigning totem, would succeed. Her children constituted the chain of transmission; but the heir to the chieftainship, whether by acknowledged succession, or by choice in case of dispute or uncertainty, had his claims uniformly submitted to a called council, and if approved, the sachem was regularly installed to the office. Councils had this right from an early day, and are known to have ever been very scrupulous and jealous in its exercise, and continue to be so, at this time.

By the establishment of this law of descent, the evils of a hereditary chieftainship were obviated. And the succession was kept in healthy channels, by the right of the council to decide, in all cases, and to set aside incompetent claimants. This right was so exercised, as to give the nation the advantages of the elective power, and to avail itself of all its talent.

We perceive in this system, an effective provision for breaking dynasties, and securing at each mutation of the chieftainship, a fresh line of chiefs, who were subject to a life limit. Each clan having the same right to one chief, a perpetual, yet constantly changing body of sachems, was kept up, which must necessarily change the body entirely in one generation. Yet, like the classes in our senatorial organization, the change was effected so slowly and gradually, that the body of chiefs constituted a political perpetuity.