The name 'Iroquois' is said to be of French origin: the true title of the Five Nations was an Indian word,[10] signifying 'people of the long house.' Their dwellings were oblong in form, often of great length; and, as were their dwellings, so also was their dwelling-place. Side by side the Five Nations stretched in line from west to east, as may be told by lakes and rivers in New York State, which to this day bear their names. Farthest to the west were the Senecas; next came the Cayugas, the people of the marsh. The third in line, the central people of the league, within whose borders was the federal Council house, were the Onondagas, the mountaineers; the Oneidas followed; and easternmost of all were the Mohawks.[11] [Footnote 10: Hodenosaunee.] [Footnote 11: In a report of a committee of the Council held at New York, Nov. 6, 1724, on the subject of a petition of the London merchants against the Act of 1720, given in Colden's _History of the Five Indian Nations of Canada_ (3rd ed., London, 1755), p. 226, the Five Nations are placed as follows: the Mohawks but 40 miles due west of Albany, and within the English settlements; the Oneidas about 100 miles west of Albany, and near the head of the Mohawk river; the Onondagas about 130 miles west of Albany; the Cayugas 160; and the Senecas 240.] [Sidenote: _Small numbers of the Iroquois._] [Sidenote: _Their geographical position. They held the border line between French and English._] In all the history of European colonization no group of savages, perhaps, ever played so prominent a part as the Iroquois; none were so courted and feared; none made themselves felt so heavily for a long period of years together. This fact was not due to their numbers, for they were comparatively few, and Parkman estimates that 'In the days of their greatest triumphs their united cantons could not have mustered four thousand warriors.'[12] Yet they attacked and {57} blotted out other Indian races equal to or outnumbering themselves. They nearly destroyed the French settlements in Canada; and all through the contest between Great Britain and France in America, they were a force to be reckoned with by either side. Their alliance was sought, their enmity was dreaded. Their strength was due to the geographical position which they held, and to their national characteristics; while their policy was influenced by the differing conditions of the white people with whom they had to deal. Their home has been described. It was the southern frontier of central Canada, the borderland between the French and English spheres of trade and settlement. Here they lived, in a position where a weak race would have been ground in pieces between opposing forces, but where a strong race, conscious of its advantages and able to use them, could more than hold its own. 'Nothing,' wrote Charlevoix, 'has contributed more to render them formidable than the advantage of their situation,