Each tribe was independent of the others. They increased in numbers, valor and skill, and in all sorts of knowledge necessary in the forest. But they began to fight and quarrel among themselves, and thus wasted and destroyed each other. They lived a life of perpetual fear and built forts to defend themselves, or to protect their women and children. Besides this, the country was wide and covered with large forests and lakes, and it gave shelter to many fierce wild animals and monsters, who beset their paths and kept them in dread. The evil spirit also plagued them with monstrous visitations. They were often induced to change their villages, sometimes from the fear of such enemies, and sometimes from sickness or bad luck. In this manner, and owing to their perpetual hostility, their population was often reduced. How long they wandered and warred, they do not know. At length it was proposed by some wise man that they should no longer fight against each other, but unite their strength against their enemies, the Alleghans, the Adirondacks, the Eries, and other ancient and once powerful tribes, who figure in the foreground of their early history, and who, if accounts be true, once greatly excelled them both in war and arts, the skill of making implements, canoes and utensils, &c. To this league, which was formed on the banks of Onondaga lake, they in time, gave the name of the Long House, using the term symbolically, to denote that they were tied and braced together by blood and lineage, as well as political bonds. This house, agreeably to the allusion so often made by their speakers, during our colonial history, reached from the banks of the Hudson to the Lakes. At its eastern door stood the Mohawks, at the west the Senecas, who guarded it with vigilance. [_a._] The Mohawks. The Mohawks are supposed to be the eldest brother, in the symbolical chain of the Six Nations. Their own tradition assigns them this rank, and it appears to be consonant to other traditions. When Tarenyawagon, their liberator from their subterranean confinement, bid them travel east, he gave them his personal conduct and care until they had entered the Mohawk valley. Some of their western brethren call this stream Tenonanatche, or a river flowing through a mountain. In due time, they went on into the valley of the Hudson, and thence, if we credit their annals, to the sea. The seat of their power and growth was, however, in the genial valley where they had at first located. Here they lived when the country was discovered, and here they continued to live and flourish until the events of the American revolution, and the determined cruelty which they exercised, under the authority and influence of the British crown, drove them out of it, and lost them the inheritance.