The best light I could personally obtain from tradition of the date of the event, viz. the era of the confederacy, came through a tradition handed down from Ezekiel Webster, an American, who at an early day settled among the Onondagas, learned their language, married the daughter of a chief, and became himself a man of great influence among them. Mr. Tyler of Seneca-Falls, son of one of the first settlers in the present county of Onondaga, informed me in a casual interview at Aurora, on the 13th of August, that his father had received this account from Webster’s own lips, namely, that the confederation, as related by the Onondagas, took place about the length of one man’s life before the white men appeared. A remarkable confirmation of the statement of Pyrlaus.[47] It must be admitted, however, that we cannot, without rejecting many positive traditions of the Iroquois themselves [D.] refuse to concede a much earlier period to the first attempts of these interesting tribes to form a general political association. For eighty years before the American Revolution they, in friendly recommendation, held up their confederacy as a political model to the English colonies. (See Colden.) Their own first attempts to form themselves into one nation may have borne the same relation to them and their subsequent condition as our early confederation of States bears to the present Union; and this, instead of lasting a few years, as did ours, may have continued even for centuries, among so rude a people, before it could ripen into the bonds of empire. [47] A Seneca tradition which is hereafter noticed, places the event of the confederation four years before the appearance of Hudson in his ship, in the bay of New-York.