The next day I went to pay a visit to the sachem of the Onondagas; I reached his village at ten o'clock in the morning. I was at once surrounded by young savages, who spoke to me in their language, mixed with English phrases and a few words of French; they were very noisy and wore an air of light-heartedness, like the first Turks whom I saw, later, at Koroni, when landing on the soil of Greece. These Indian tribes, enclosed in the clearings made by the whites, own horses and cattle; their huts are filled with utensils purchased at Quebec, Montreal, Niagara, and Detroit on the one side, and in the markets of the United States on the other. The explorers of the interior of North America found in a state of nature, among the different savage tribes, the several forms of government known to the peoples of civilization. The Iroquois belonged to a race which seemed destined to conquer the Indian races, if strangers had not come to exhaust his veins and stop the progress of his genius. That fearless man was not astonished at fire-arms when these were first used against him; he stood fast amid the hiss of the bullets and the roar of the cannon, as though he had heard them all his life; he seemed to pay no more heed to them than to the storm. So soon as he was able to procure a musket, he made better use of it than the European. He did not abandon for it the tomahawk, the scalping-knife, the bow and arrow; but to these he added the carbine, the pistol, the dagger, and the axe: he seemed never to have enough arms to satisfy his valour. Doubly equipped with the murderous instruments of Europe and America, his head decked with plumes, his ears slit, his face streaked with various colours, his arms tattooed and smeared with blood, this champion of the New World became as redoubtable in appearance as in battle, on the shores which he defended foot by foot against the invaders. The Onondaga chief was an old Iroquois in the fullest sense of the word; he kept up in his person the ancient traditions of the desert. The English narratives never fail to speak of the Indian sachem as "the old gentleman." Now, the old gentleman is perfectly naked; he wears a feather or a fish-bone in his pierced nostrils, and sometimes covers his head, which is smooth and round as a cheese, with a laced three-cornered hat, as an European sign of honour. Has not Velly[476] depicted history with the same veracity? The Frankish chieftain Khilpérick[477] rubbed his hair in sour butter, _infundens acido comam butyro_, stained his cheeks with woad, and wore a party-coloured jerkin or a greatcoat made of the skin of some beast; he is represented by Velly as a prince magnificent to the point of ostentation in his furniture and equipage, voluptuous to the point of debauchery, and scarcely believing in God, whose ministers formed the subject of his raillery. [Sidenote: With the Onondagas.]