Indians of North America; Indians of North America -- Government relations; Indians of North America -- Legal status, laws, etc.
Nor did the Iroquois wait to complete the subjugation of their own
kindred, before turning their arms against their Algonquin neighbors.
The Delawares (Lenni Lenape, or Original Men) were subjugated almost
coincidently with the Hurons; and the same year which brought the
downfall of the Andastes witnessed the expulsion of the Shawnees from
the valley of the Ohio. Re-enforced in 1712 by the Tuscaroras, a warlike
tribe from the South, the Five Nations (now become the Six Nations)
carried their conquests east and west, north and south. The tribes
confronting the invaders in New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and
Virginia were continually disturbed and distracted by their incursions.
Taking the part of the English in the wars against the French, they
shook all Canada with the fear of their arms, while to the west they
extended their sway to the Straits of Michilimackinac and the entrance
to Lake Superior. The height of their fame was at the close of the Old
French War in 1763. Their decline and downfall, as a power upon the
continent, followed with the briefest interval. Reduced by incessant
fighting to seventeen hundred warriors, they took the part of England
against the Colonies in 1775. The glorious and the terrible incidents of
the Indian campaigns of the Revolution are familiar as household words.
The peace of 1783 found the Iroquois broken, humbled, homeless,
helpless, before the power of the United States, whose pensioners they
then became and have since remained. The bulk of these tribes still
reside in New York, while fragments of them are found in the extreme
West, having removed under the treaty of 1838.
Such, in brief, is the history of the Iroquois. They were the scourge of
God upon the aborigines of the continent, and were themselves used up,
stock, lash, and snapper, in the tremendous flagellation which was
administered through them to almost every branch, in turn, of the great
Algonquin family. It will not do to say, that, but for the Iroquois, the
settlement of the country by the whites would not have taken place; yet
assuredly that settlement would have been longer delayed, and have been
finally accomplished with far greater expense of blood and treasure, had
not the Six Nations, not knowing what they did, gone before in savage
blindness and fury, destroying or driving out tribe after tribe which
with them might, for more than one generation at least, have stayed the
western course of European invasion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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