Assuming the existence of an Indian village on the present site of Cooperstown, before the coming of the white man, the question of the probable character of its inhabitants opens another field of study. Most of the relics found in this region belong to the Algonquin type. On the other hand Otsego is an Iroquois word, and it seems to be generally agreed that the Otsego region was included, in the historic period, in the possessions of the Iroquois, as the league of the Five Nations was called by the French. The league included the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas; and took in also, in the eighteenth century, as the sixth nation, the Tuscaroras.[8] While the village at the foot of the lake would properly be called Mohawk, owing obedience to the council of the original Mohawk towns, it might well have been composed largely of Indians from other tribes. Fragments of shattered tribes found refuge with the Iroquois in the latter days. Some were adopted; some stayed on sufferance. The Minsis, a branch of the Delawares, as well as the Delawares proper, were allowed to occupy the southern part of the Iroquois territory. It will be recalled, in this connection, that Cooper's favorite Indian heroes, Chingachgook and Uncas, are of Delaware stock. It is quite possible that, near the beginning of the eighteenth century--basing the date, among other things, on the appearance of the apple trees when the first white man came--there was a cosmopolitan Indian community at the foot of Otsego Lake. Besides Mohawks, there would have been included Oneidas, their nearest neighbors on the west; and probably Delawares, or Mohicans. There might have been also some one-time prisoners, adopted by the Iroquois, but belonging originally to distant nations.[9] All writers on the history of the Eastern Indians agree in assigning the highest place to the Iroquois. Parkman asserts that they afford perhaps an example of the highest elevation which man can reach without emerging from the primitive condition of the hunter. Morgan declares that in the width of their sway they had reared the most powerful empire that ever existed in America north of the Aztec monarchy. The home country of the Iroquois included nearly the whole of the present State of New York, but at the era of their highest military supremacy, about 1660, they made their influence felt from New England to the Mississippi, and from the St. Lawrence to the Tennessee. Within this league, the tribal territory of the Mohawks extended to the Hudson River and Lake Champlain on the east, northward to the St. Lawrence, and westward to a boundary not easily determined, but which included Otsego Lake. In the great league of the Iroquois the name of the Mohawk nation always stood first, and of all the Iroquois nations they were the most renowned in war. Joseph Brant, whom John Fiske calls the most remarkable Indian known to history, was a Mohawk chief.