HISTORY OF THE LACKAWANNA VALLEY.

INDIAN HISTORY.

THE Indian's side of history can never be written, because traditions running back through centuries, and cherished only by the red man whom they concerned, perished with the race that knew them. We shall read of homes reddened by the tomahawk or charred by the fagot, but not of the wrongs urging the wild man to defend the spot where his wigwam stood. When the plain cabins of the Dutch first rose on the banks of the Hudson, all the Indians "on the Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna rivers, were in subjugation to the Five Nations," whose capital near the placid waters of the Onondaga Lakes, lay but a day's walk or two from the head-springs of the Lackawanna.

In 1827, Cusick published traditions of the Tuscaroras running from "twenty-five hundred winters before Columbus's discovery of America" down to the days of Mahomet. "About the time of Mahomet's career in 602, a great Tyrant arose on the Kaunaseh, now Susquehanna River, who waged war with the surrounding nations, from which it appears that while in Africa, Europe, and Asia revolution succeeded revolution, empires rose on the ruins of empires, that in America the same scenes were acting on as great a scale-cultivated regions, populous cities and towns, were reduced to a wilderness, as in the other countries."

'Smith's History of New York.

"American Antiquities, sec. ed., p. 349.

The Mohawks, asserting sovereignty over the proud Pequots and Narragansetts, numbering many hundred warriors, and exacting tribute from all the New England tribes as late as the sixteenth century, claimed the wilderness from the Connecticut to Wyoming. Massasoit, the ever warm friend of the Pilgrims, and his son Philip, afterward celebrated as King Philip, had frequent conflicts with this haughty, powerful tribe. The Dutch gave them the name of Maquos.1 The French, between whom war was almost perpetual, called them Iroquois.

When Captain John Smith was carried prisoner to the castle of Powhatan, in 1607, he learned that the Sasque-sah-ha-noughs" (Susquehanna Indians), living upon the river by this name, “are a Gyant like people and are thus atyred," giving in his work a graphic illustration of a chief “atyred" in all the gorgeous style of the wild

man.

The Confederation known as the Six Nations, formed by the union of Mohawks, Senecas, Onondagos, Oneidas, Cayugas, and the Tuscaroras, was not only formidable in the number of its warriors, but so democratic in the character of its organization, and so terrible in the exercise of its power, that few new settlements, made along the frontier, acquired either growth or age without harm or apprehension. Its power was absolute and unquestioned; its government a limited monarchy. This was vested in a Great Sachem or Chief, directed by a Council of Braves and aged warriors noted for wisdom and bravery. Its ever-burning Council Fire blazed from the plains of

1 This word, derived from moho, signifies to eat.-Roger Williams. Or Mohawks signifies cannibals or man-eaters, among other tribes of Indians.-Trumbull, U. S., pp. 1-4; Hutchinson, vol. i., p. 405. This tribe was situated along the Mohawk, and from it took its name, and was one of the powerful Five Nations who in 1713 were joined by the Tuskaroras, a large tribe from North Carolina, and thence known by the name of Six Nations.-Williamson's North Carolina, vol. i., p. 202. Hon. De Witt Clinton, in N. Y. Hist. Soc. Col., vol. ii., p. 48, says that the Tuskaroras joined the other nations in 1712.

N. Y. Hist. Col., vol. ii., p. 44.

Oh-na-qu-go, while the edicts and wishes of the assembled sachems, carried to Manhattan's shore by runners, were known and respected even in the far-off region of the magnolia and palmetto. With a dialect whose strange intonations bewildered the ear of the white man, and whose tongue, destitute of labials, was so diverse and corrupted from the parent language, that many of the tribes living on the same stream could only converse through an interpreter ; with neither books nor charts, with no history but the wigwam's lore, no guide but the moon's gray twilight, no valley was sunk too far away in the mountains, no stream stretched its tranquil length through grounds too remote from the war-path to escape the notice of men clad in skins, who occupied and gave

them a name.

Charles Miner, in his really unequaled and charming History of Wyoming, remarks, with truth, that, “in unraveling the tangled web of Indian history, we found ourselves in the outset extremely embarrassed, especially when reading the pages of Heckewelder and other writers of the United Brethren. The removal of tribes or parts of tribes to the valley; their remaining a brief period and then emigrating to some other place, without any apparent motive founded in personal convenience, consistency, or wisdom, perplexed us exceedingly, as we doubt not it has others,"

The forest between the Hudson and Lake Huron constituted the sachemship of the Iroquois, or Five Nations, whose "smokes" ascended from the mountains of Vermont to the head-waters of the Delaware, Susquehanna, and the Ohio. The number of their warriors in 1660 was estimated by Chalmers to have been twenty-two hundred, while Bancroft puts the figure at ten thousand. Their language, spoken by the Pequods, the Narragansetts, the Mohawks, and Delawares, was the mother-tongue that

1 Jefferson.

welcomed the Pilgrims' and plead for Smith on the Chickahominy, through the fervid lips of Pocahontas. Between the Delaware and the Susquehanna, in the narrow, green plateau of the Lackawanna, dwelt a division of the Lenni-Lenape-the Minsi or Monsey clan, which, like the tribes at Wyoming, stripped of their glory by the Iroquois, melted away into other tribes strolling through the wilderness as conquerors. The Senecas and Oneidas, two of the rudest, most vindictive, as well as energetic members of the confederated Nations, took the most prominent part in the affairs of Wyoming. Their villages were strung around the lesser lakes feeding Ontario, while their seat of government was located at Onondaga, now Syracuse.

"The Onondagos," writes Miner, "were eminent as counselors, distinguished for eloquence, perhaps revered, like the tribe of Levi, as the priesthood of the confederacy, to whose care was committed the keeping or kindling the sacred fire around which their most solemn deliberations were held." After the Senecas and Oneidas, whose camp-fires gave a savage cheer to Wyoming as early as 1640, had removed to the land of the Iroquois, feebler tribes, which had lost favor with the civil sachems or the great war chiefs, were concentrated in this lovely region under the immediate eye and reach of royal prerogative.

Thus came the Shawnees from southern everglades, whose names are yet affixed to the lower portion of Wyoming Valley, and thus the Nanticokes, in 1748, came from the Chesakawon on the Chesapeake, and found shelter on the Susquehanna until their removal to Onondaga in 1755. The Delawares, of whom Teedyuscung was long the leading sachem, playing an important part in the history of Wyoming, taunted as women and treated as vassals, were ordered by the Six Nations, in the most imperious manner, into this valley in 1742.

At a great Council held at Philadelphia, July 12, 1742, where over two hundred warriors were assembled to talk with the Governor of Pennsylvania, in regard to the transgressions of the Delawares, who had sold lands on the river Delaware fifty years before, and who had refused to remove from the same, Canassategoe addressed them thus:

1

Did you ever tell Us

"Cousins, you ought to be taken by the hair of your head and shak'd severely till you recover your senses and become sober. Our Brother Onas' case is very just and plain and his Intentions to preserve friendship; on the other Hand your Cause is bad, your Heart far from being upright, and you are maliciously bent to break the Chain of friendship with our Brother Onas. But how came you to take upon you to Sell Land at all? We conquered You, we made Women of you; you know you are Women, and can no more sell Land than Women. You have been furnished with Cloaths and Meat and Drink by the Goods paid you for it, and now You want it again like Children as you are. that you had sold this Land in the Dark? did we ever receive any Part, even the Value of a Pipe Shank, from you for it? You have told Us a Blind Story that you sent a Messenger to Us to inform Us of the Sale, but he never came amongst Us, nor we never heard any thing about it. This is acting in the Dark, and very different from the Conduct our Six Nations observe in their Sales of Land. On such Occasions they give Publick Notice and invite all the Indians of their united Nations, and give them a share of the Presents they receive for their Lands. This is the behaviour of the wise United Nations, but we find you are none of our Blood. You Act a dishonest part not only in this but in other Matters. Your Ears are ever Open to Slanderous Reports about our

1 Penn received from the Indians the name of ONAS-i. e., quill or pen, from the fact that he governed by these instead of guns.