Yet we hear at times of women taking part in the most important councils of their nations, of their even leading warriors to battle, of their exercise of all the functions of a ruler. Women have been made head chiefs; a very notable instance of a woman ruler was the "Queen of Pamunkey," who was the widow of Totapotamoi, a great Indian chief in the Virginias. She came to one of the councils of the Virginia Burgesses in the time of Berkeley, and was the recipient of much attention. She was described as a woman of majestic presence, who entered the council chamber "with a comportment graceful to admiration, grave court-like gestures, and a majestic air on her face"; and through the quaint old verbiage we can descry a woman of carriage and powers of intellect remarkable in her race. Her dress was picturesque; she wore a sort of crown of black and white wampum plaited together, and her fine figure was covered by a robe of buckskin, dressed with the hair outward and decorated with fringes--not impossibly scalplocks--from the shoulders to the hem. She had been summoned to the council to give a promise of help; but she had her own grievances to relate in the fact that her husband had been slain while fighting for the English, and yet she had never received any compensation or acknowledgment of his services. The incident holds for us its chief interest as a proof of the high standing of individual women among the tribes of the Atlantic slope. This female rule was not a passing custom; it was evidently of long establishment at the time of the coming of the colonists, and it continued into later colonial and even into Revolutionary times. Of the later instances of women chiefs, Queen Esther furnishes a noted example. This abominable woman, who played such a prominent part in the massacre of Wyoming in 1778, was a half-breed, probably the daughter of Catherine Montour, also a half-breed and a fiend incarnate. In the attack upon Wyoming Valley, led by Major John Butler, son of that Walter Butler whose name was so execrated by the colonists,--the Senecas took part, led by a noted chief named Gi-on-gwah-tuh and by Queen Esther, who was probably, though this is not certain, in supreme command of the Indians. However this may be, we know that she led the attack, fighting like a fiend, and that after the action sixteen prisoners were placed in a circle around a large stone, known to this day as Queen Esther's Rock. Striking up a chant, she passed around the circle, at each step dashing out the brains of a victim. Two of the prisoners, however, managed to make a dash for liberty and succeeded in effecting their escape, and it is to them that we owe our account of the massacre.