view, and to interpret the significance of the league in that light. When the treaty which initiated it was entered into by the Caniengas and the Oneidas, they were both in that primitive stage of unsophisticated barbarism to which the term “Stone Period” has been applied. In the absence of all knowledge of metallurgy, their implements and weapons were alike simple and rude. Agriculture, under such conditions, must have been equally primitive; and as for their wars, when they were not defensive, they appear to have had no higher aim than revenge. Gallatin, no unappreciative witness, says of them: “The history of the Five Nations is calculated to give a favourable opinion of the intelligence of the Red Man. But they may be ranked among the worst of conquerors. They conquered only in order to destroy, and, it would seem, solely for the purpose of gratifying their thirst for blood. Towards the south and the west they made a perfect desert of the whole country within 500 miles of their seats. A much greater number of those Indians, who since the commencement of the seventeenth century have perished by the sword in Canada and the United States, have been destroyed by that single nation than in all their wars with the Europeans.”[142] To characterise the combination effected among such tribes as one presenting elements of wise civil institutions; or indeed to introduce such terms as league and federal system, in the sense in which they have been repeatedly employed, as though they referred to a confederation akin to those of the ancient Achæans or Ætolians, is to suggest associations altogether misleading. Though an interesting phase of American savage life, to which its long duration gives a marked significance, the Iroquois league was by no means unique; though it was the oldest, and may have been the model on which others were framed. The Creek confederacy embraced numerous tribes between the Mobile, Alabama, and Savannah rivers, and the Gulf of Mexico. At the head of it were the Muskhogees, a numerous and powerful, but wholly savage race of hunters. Like the Oneidas, Onandagas, and the still older Wyandots, they and the Choctaws claimed to be autochthones. The Muskhogees appealed to a tradition of their ancestors that they issued from a cave near the Alabama river; while the Choctaws pointed to the frontier region between them and the Chickasaws, where, as they affirmed, they suddenly emerged from a hole in the earth, a numerous and mighty people. The system of government amongst the members of this southern confederacy seems to have borne considerable resemblance to that of the Iroquois; if it was not borrowed from it. Every village was the centre of an independent tribe or nation, with its own chief; and the restraints imposed on the individual members, except when co-operating in some special enterprise or religious ceremonial, appear to have been slight.