This much seems certain, that at the opening of the seventeenth century the whole continent was a dark and bloody ground, in which war was the rule and peace the exception; in which man hunted man as the beasts and fishes destroy and devour one another. The Iroquois, speaking substantially one language, were as an island in a great Algonkin ocean. Unlike mere fishermen and hunters they were agriculturists, and many hundred square miles were planted with their maize, squashes, pumpkins, beans, tobacco, and other vegetables, edible or useful. They were able to store up corn for long campaigns and to brave a season of famine. The streams furnished them with fish, and they hunted the deer, elk, bison, and smaller animals for flesh or furs; but their noblest game was man. To kill, to scalp, to save alive for torture, to burn his villages and houses, to wreak vengeance on his enemies, was rapture to the savage. Before they knew gunpowder, the Iroquois, equipped with flint weapons and clothed in bark armour, often fought in the open field and with comparative personal exposure. Their battles were by masses of men who were led by chiefs, and their tactics and strategy resembled those of white men before the introduction of fire-arms. One famous field in the open ground near Schenectady was long pointed out in Indian tradition as the place where the great battle between the Iroquois and the Algonkins had been fought before the coming of the whites. For the defence of their villages they built palisades with galleries for the defenders to stand on, and with appliances at hand to put out fires, or to repel assaults and drive off besiegers. Theirs was the age of stone and wood; but their civilization was based on agriculture, which made them superior to that of their neighbours, whom they had compelled to be tributary vassals. The apparition of the white man and the flash of Champlain’s arquebus, vomiting fire and dealing death by invisible balls, changed all Indian warfare and civilization. Gunpowder wrought as profound a revolution in the forests of America as in Europe. Bark or hide shields and armour were discarded; bows and arrows were soon left to children; the line and order of battle changed; fighting in masses ceased; the personal influence of the chiefs decreased, and each warrior became his own general. Individual valour and physical strength and bravery in battle counted for much less, and the dwarf was now equal to the giant.