O Red Jacket "Oh, chequered train of years, farewell! "And thou, the new-beginning age, The record of thy happier reign." NE July morning in 1609, a band of sixty Al morning gonquin and Huron Indians landed from their canoes where the promontory of Ticonderoga, or "meeting of waters," reaches into "Lake Iroquois❞ (as Lake Champlain was then called). After a night of hideous taunts and savage threats, they hurried to the attack of nearly two hundred Mohawk warriors. The weapons were the arrows and spears of the Stone Age. Appalled by the numbers of their opponents, the assailants called for help. From beneath the furs that covered them as they lay in canoes along the shore, three white men arose. Astonished by the presence of seemingly supernatural beings, the Mohawks paused. As they poised their arrows to shoot, two of the white men lifted their strange weapons. When the bell-shaped mouths belched forth their terrifying thunder, two Mohawk chiefs fell dead and a third was wounded. Little did Champlain, the romantic French ex plorer, know that his rashness would profoundly affect the history of the American continent. The Mohawks were the most easterly tribe of the Iroquois Confederacy. Before the coming of white men the Iroquois had lived north of the St. Lawrence. Hochelega, the site of Montreal, was once one of their towns. By the fierce Adirondacks, a tribe of the Algonquin peoples, they had been driven southward to what is now the State of New York. Here they finally divided into five tribes, named the Senecas, the Cayugas, the Onondagas, the Oneidas and the Mohawks. The confederacy that they then formed is one of the most remarkable political organizations in the story of red men. They sought to induce their kin, the Hurons, some of the Eries and others of Iroquoian stock to join. None did, except the Tuscaroras; the rest, as well as the much more numerous Algonquins, composed of scores of great tribes, the Iroquois ever held in enmity. It is supposed that the migration from Canada to New York occurred about 1350, that about a century later the confederacy was established, and that the Five Nations were joined by the Tuscaroras about 1712. The country that they inhabited stretched from the eastern end of Lake Erie to the valley of the Hudson. This territory was spoken of as the "Long House." The Onondagas were called the "Fathers of the Confederacy." At their principal village, not far from where Syracuse, New York, now is, the great council house was maintained, and in it the council fire was ever burning. The Mohawks were known as the "Eldest Brother," and the guardians of the eastern gate of the "Long House." The Oneidas were the "Heads"; the Cayugas, the "Youngest Brother"; and the Senecas, the "Watchmen of the Western Gate." The traditions of the origin of the "United People," as the Iroquois translated their confederate name, and the form and workings of their government are worthy of detailed study. It is here remarkable that, greatly outnumbered as they were by their Indian enemies, never were they overcome by other red men. Champlain's killing of the two Mohawk chiefs gained for the French the deep enmity of the confederacy. While the Iroquois nation did not, on the coming of the white men, exceed twelve thousand souls, for a century and a half they held the arms of the French at bay. Because of their control of Lake Erie, the French missionaries, soldiers, traders and voyageurs on their westward journey were obliged to travel up the Ottawa River, and by the various water routes and portages make way to Georgian Bay and Lake Huron. By the Iroquois, more southerly routes and posts were denied the French. The Dutch and the English, as their successors, who gained the friendship of this most powerful association of Indians on the continent, ultimately achieved supremacy in the westward march along the southern shores of the Great Lakes and in the valley of the Ohio. A people who could so vitally affect a continent's story must have had able leaders. Most of their principal men were great warriors. One of them, not famous as a warrior, never having won the right to wear the Eagle's feather, gained the sachemship of his people thru the power of his eloquence. Even among savages is the art of persuasion useful. Especially was this true of the Seneca Sagoyewatha, or, as he is better known, Red Jacket. The American Indians produced many great orators. The imagery of men who live close to nature always appeals. But words and imagery are not the principal stuff of which orations are made. The orator must have a theme-one that is fed from his very soul, if he would speak with authority. This Red Jacket had. It was his implacable opposition to the civilization, the religion and the westward advance of white men. For his and future generations of red men he pleaded. The preservation of the Indian's home and his hunting grounds, as the Great Spirit had given them, was the theme that called up his greatest powers. Once he said: "We stand a small island in the bosom of the Great Waters. We are encircled. We are encompassed. The evil spirit rides upon the blast, and the waters are disturbed. They rise, they press upon us, and, the waves once settled over us, we disappear forever. Who then lives to mourn us? No one. What marks our extermination? Nothing. We are mingled with the common elements." Sagoyewatha probably is the only great Indian leader who owed his sachemship entirely to his oratorical abilities. He was born on Seneca Lake, New York, in 1751, and named O-te-ti-ani, or "Always Ready." On coming to the sachemship, he was christened Sagoyewatha, which means, "He keeps them awake." In his youth he learned to track and to hunt. He was taught to observe and to reason. The bruise on a leaf, the bending of a twig, a disturbance in the moss or dust, and the thousands of things that to the untrained go unobserved, or are meaningless, to him, as to all Indians, told how, what, when, who, where and why. That white men could likewise develop their powers of observation in the wilderness is shown by Boone, who for years lived in "the dark and bloody ground" woodlands, depending for life upon his alertness and skill. Simon Kenton, whose life was one of the most romantic of the western pioneers, avoided or met successfully thousands of dangers through the use of the craft which was the Indian's educational curriculum. Then there were the Seviers, Robertsons, Steiners, Wetzels, Manskers and many other Indian fighters who lived where every bush had its threat of death, every tree lifted a possible shield for a savage enemy, and the pleasant sounds of the woodland might be the deceptive calls of skulking foes. |