Iroquois government was vested in a general council composed of fifty hereditary sachems, but the order of succession was always in the female and never in the male line. Each nation was divided into eight clans or tribes. The spirit of the animal or bird after which the clan was named, called its "To-tem," was the guardian spirit of the clan, and every member used its figure in his signature as his device. It was the rule that men and women of the same tribe could intermarry. In this manner relationships were interlocked forever by the closest of ties. The name of each sachemship was permanent. When a sachem died the people of the league selected the most competent from among those of his family, who by right inherited the title, and the one so chosen was raised in solemn council to the high honour, and dropping his own received the name of the sachemship. Two sachemships, however, after the death of the original sachems ever remained vacant, those of the Onondagas and "Ha-yo-went-ha" (Hi-a-wat-ha) immortalised by Longfellow, of the Mohawks. Daganoweda was the founder of the league, whose head was represented as covered with tangled serpents; Hi-a-wat-ha (meaning "he who combs") put the head in order and this aided the formation of the league. In honour of these great services this sachemship was afterward held vacant. The entire body of sachems formed the council league; their authority was civil, confined to affairs of peace, and was advisory rather than otherwise. Every member of the confederacy followed, to a great extent, the dictates of his own will, controlled very much by the customs of his people and "a sentiment that ran through their whole system of affairs which was as inflexible as iron." The character of the Iroquois confederacy has a bearing on the history of the Niagara country of prime importance; while their immediate seats were somewhat south of Niagara River itself, they were the red masters of the eastern Great Lake region when white men came to know it, conquering, as we have noted, the earlier red races, the Eries and Neutrals, who lived beside Lake Erie and the Niagara River. Of these very little is known; placed between the Iroquois on the South and the Hurons on the North both are accounted to have been fierce and brave peoples, for a long time able to withstand the savage inroads of the people of the Long House. The Eries occupied the territory just south of Lake Erie, while the Neuter or Neutral towns lay on the north side of the lake--stretching up perhaps near to Niagara Falls. They claimed the territory lying west of the Genesee River, and extending northward to the Huron land about Georgian Bay as their hunting-ground, and could, it was affirmed by Jesuits, number twelve thousand souls or four thousand fighting men in 1641, only a decade before annihilation by the southern foe.