The Confederated Tribes--The Mohegans--The Nanticokes--The Conoys--The Shawnees--The Saponies--The Assiwikalees _The Confederated Tribes._ All the Algonkin nations who dwelt north of the Potomac, on the east shore of Chesapeake Bay, and in the basins of the Delaware and Hudson rivers, claimed near kinship and an identical origin, and were at times united into a loose, defensive confederacy. By the western and southern tribes they were collectively known as _Wapanachkik_--"those of the eastern region"--which in the form _Abnaki_ is now confined to the remnant of a tribe in Maine. The Delawares in the far West retain traditionally the ancient confederate name, and still speak of themselves as "Eastlanders"--_O-puh-narke_. (Morgan.) The members of the confederacy were the Mohegans (Mahicanni) of the Hudson, who occupied the valley of that river to the falls above the site of Albany, the various New Jersey tribes, the Delawares proper on the Delaware river and its branches, including the Minsi or Monseys, among the mountains, the Nanticokes, between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic, and the small tribe called Canai, Kanawhas or Ganawese, whose towns were on tributaries of the Potomac and Patuxent. That all these were united in some sort of an alliance, with the Delawares at its head, is not only proved by the traditions of this tribe itself, but by the distinct assertion of the Mohegans and others, and by events within historical times, as the reunion of the Nanticokes, New Jersey and Eastern Indians with the Delawares as with the parent stem.[17] _The Mohegans._ The Mohegans, _Mo-hé-kun-ne-uk_, dwelt on the tide-waters of the Hudson, and from this their name was derived. Dr. Trumbull, indeed, following Schoolcraft, thinks that they "took their tribal name from _maingan_, a wolf, and _Moheganick_ = Chip. _maniganikan_, 'country of wolves.'"[18] They, themselves, however, translate it, "seaside people," or more fully, "people of the great waters which are constantly ebbing or flowing."[19] The compound is _machaak_, great, _hickan_, tide ("ebbing tide," Zeis; "tide of flood," Campanius) and _ik_, animate plural termination. The Mohegans on the Hudson are said to have been divided into three phratries, the Bear, the Wolf and the Turtle, of whom the Bear had the primacy.[20] Mr. Morgan, however, who examined, in 1860, the representatives of the nation in Kansas,[21] discovered that they had precisely the same phratries as the Delawares, that is the Wolf, the Turtle, and the Turkey, each subdivided into three or four gentes. He justly observes that this "proves their immediate connection with the Delawares and Munsees by descent," and thus renders their myths and traditions of the more import in the present study.