At what period they confederated, we have no exact means of deciding. It appears to have been comparatively recent, judging from traditionary testimony.[17] While their advancement in the economy of living, in arms, in diplomacy and in civil polity, would lead conjecture to a more remote date. Their own legends, like those of some other leading stocks of the continent, carry them back to a period of wars with giants and demons and monsters of the sea, the land, and the air, and are fraught with strange and grotesque fancies of wizards and enchanters. But history, guiding the pen of the French Jesuit, describes them first as pouring in their canoes through the myriad streams that interlace in western New-York, and debouching, now on the gulf of the St. Lawrence, now on the Chesapeake—glancing again over the waves of Michigan, and now again plying their paddles in the waters of the turbid Mississippi. Wherever they went, they carried proofs of their energy, courage, and enterprise. [17] Vide Pyrlaus. At one period we hear the sound of their war cry, along the straits of the St. Mary’s and at the foot of Lake Superior. At another under the walls of Quebec, where they finally defeated the Hurons under the eyes of the French. They put out the fires of the Gahkwas and Eries. They eradicated the Susquehannocks. They placed the Lenapees, the Nanticokes, and the Munsees under the yoke of subjection. They put the Metoacks and the Manhattans under tribute. They spread the terror of their arms over all New-England. They traversed the whole length of the Appalachian chain, and descended like the enraged Gish and Megalonyx, on the Cherokees and the Catawbas. Smith encountered their warriors, in the settlement of Virginia, and La Salle on the discovery of the Illinois. Nations trembled when they heard the name of the KONOSHIONI.