The term _Ongwe Honwe_, or a people surpassing all others, which Colden was informed they applied proudly to themselves, may be strictly true, if limited, as they did, to mean a people surpassing all other red men. This they believed, and this was the sense in which they boastfully applied it. But it was a term older than the discovery, and had no reference to European races. The word _Honwe_, as will appear by the vocabulary hereto appended, means man. By the prefixed term _Ongwe_, it is qualified according to various interpretations, to mean real, as contradistinguished from sham men, or cowards; it may also mean strong, wise, or expert men, and, by ellipsis, men excelling others in manliness. But it was in no other sense distinctive of them. It was the common term for the red race of this continent, which they would appear, by the phrase, to acknowledge as a unity, and is, the word as I found it, used at this day, as the equivalent for our term “Indian.” Each tribe had, at some period of their progress, a distinctive appellation, as Onondaga, Oneida, &c. of which some traditionary matter will be stated, further on. When they came to confederate, and form a general council, they took the name of KONOSHIONI, (or as the French authors write it, _Acquinoshioni_), meaning literally, People of the Long House, and figuratively a UNITED PEOPLE, a term by which they still denominate themselves, when speaking in a national sense. This distinction, it is well to bear in mind, and not confound. This Long House, to employ their own figure, extended east and west from the present site of Albany to the foot of the great lakes, a distance, by modern admeasurement, of 325 miles, which is now traversed by railroad. An air palace, we may grant them, having beams and rafters, higher and longer than any pile of regal magnificence, yet reared by human hands.