Into all the Indian wars after King Philip’s death two nationalities besides the Indian and English entered in an important way. These were the Dutch and the French. It was the Dutch who, soon after 1614, first sold firearms to the Indians in defiance of their own laws, and by this means greatly increased the horrors of the Indian warfare. On the other hand, the Dutch, because of the close friendship they established with the Five Nations, commonly called the Iroquois, did to the English colonists, though unintentionally, a service so great that the whole issue of the prolonged war may have turned upon it. These tribes, the Cayugas, Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Senecas--afterward joined by the Tuscaroras--held the key to the continent. Occupying the greater part of what is now the State of New York, they virtually ruled the country from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes to the Savannah River. They were from the first treated with great consideration by the Dutch, and they remained, with brief intervals of war, their firm friends. One war, indeed, there was under the injudicious management of Governor Kieft, lasting from 1640 to 1643; and this came near involving the English colonies, while it caused the death of sixteen hundred Indians, first or last, seven hundred of these being massacred under the borrowed Puritan leader Captain Underhill. But this made no permanent interruption to the alliance between the Iroquois and the Dutch. When New Netherlands yielded to the English, the same alliance was retained, and to this we probably owe the preservation of the colonies, their union against England, and the very existence of the present American nation. Yet the first English governor, Colden, has left on record the complaint of an Indian chief, who said that they very soon felt the difference between the two alliances. “When the Dutch held this country,” he said, “we lay in our houses, but the English have always made us lie out-of-doors.”