Of all the northern Indians, the Iroquois were by far the most powerful. They were the enemies, in the time of the early French explorations and settlements, of the Huron and the Illinois, and from these tribes they took many captives whom they enslaved. The statement has been made that no personal slavery ever existed among the Iroquois—that their captives were either killed or adopted as a part of the nation.[21] Quite the contrary is true. They held both Indians and whites in personal slavery. They brought back from the Ohio country bands of captives, sometimes numbering three or four hundred.[22] They preyed upon the Shawnee and carried them off into slavery.[23] They captured and enslaved the Miami for whose redemption they were presented with quantities of beaver skin. These they received but failed to free the slaves.[24] They brought home slaves from Maryland and the south,[25] and from the land of the “Chat”[26] (the Erie). It was the Iroquois (the Seneca), called by an early writer “Sonnagars,” who enslaved captives taken from the tribes of Carolina and Florida.[27] Similar practices are related of the southern Indians. The Virginia tribes possessed “people of a rank inferior to the commons, a sort of servants ... called black boys, attendant upon the gentry.”[28] When Menendez founded St. Augustine in 1565, he discovered in a native village the descendants of a band of Cuban Indians who had come to the mainland, been taken prisoners by the Florida Indians, and reduced to slavery.[29] In the south the strongest tribes were the Choctaw and Chickasaw. These two tribes were not only at war with each other from time to time, but each preyed upon the weaker tribes of the surrounding country. In 1717, a Cadodaquiou chief informed La Harpe, on his journey to the Nassoni northwest from Natchitoches, that the Chickasaw had killed and enslaved their nation until it was then very small, and that the remnant had been forced to take refuge among the Natchitoch and Nassoni.[30] The Choctaw enslaved the Choccuma, a small tribe lying between them and the Cherokee,[31] and about 1770 captured and burned their village. The chief and his warriors were slain, and the women and children became the slaves of the conquerors.[32] The Pima of the present southern Arizona took their slaves chiefly from the ranks of the Apache and their allies, and in some degree from the Yuma. These captives were largely children. When not killed they were enslaved. Some of them were kept within the tribe, and were even permitted to marry members of the tribe. But their origin was never forgotten, and the innate superstition of the natives found expression in the declaration of the medicine men that disasters and misfortunes came to the tribe through the presence of these aliens.[33]