The contrast is very striking between such elaborate works and the most extensive of those still traceable in Western New York the origin of which appears to be correctly assigned to Iroquois and other tribes known to have been in occupation of their sites in comparatively recent times. Among the native Indian tribes who have come under direct observation of Europeans, none played a more prominent part than the Iroquois. At the period of Dutch discovery in the beginning of the seventeenth century, they occupied the territory between the Hudson and the Genesee rivers, of which they continued to maintain possession for nearly two centuries, in defiance of warlike native foes, and the more formidable aggression of the French invaders. Their numbers, at the period of their greatest prosperity, about the middle of the seventeenth century, have been variously estimated from 70,000, which La Hontan assigned to them, to the more probable estimate of 25,000 given by the historian of their League. Very exaggerated pictures have been drawn by some modern writers of the Iroquois confederacy. It was a union of tribes of savage hunters, among whom only the germs of incipient civilisation are traceable. They had indeed acquired settled habits, and devoted themselves to some extent to agriculture. But with all the matured arts resulting from combined action in the maintenance of their territory for successive generations against fierce hostile tribes, and the defence of an extensive frontier constantly exposed to invasion, the traces of the Iroquois strongholds are of so slight a description that many of them have already been obliterated by the plough.