The only communication of the Hurons, with the infant colony of Canada, was by the river Ottawa, of a difficult navigation interrupted by numerous portages. The Five Nations directed their attacks to that quarter, cut off the several trading parties, which were in the habit of descending and ascending the river once a year, and intercepted the communication so effectually, that, about the year 1646, the Missionaries on Lake Huron were three years without receiving any supplies from Quebec. The Hurons who had lost several hundred warriors in those engagements became dispirited and careless. They indeed abandoned the smaller villages and fortified the larger. This only accelerated their ruin. In the year 1649, the Five Nations invaded the country with all their forces, attacked and carried one after the other the most considerable of those places of refuge, and massacred all the inhabitants.* The destruction was completed in the course of the ensuing year. A part of the Hurons fled down the Ottawa River and sought an asylum in Canada, where they were pursued by their implacable enemies even under the walls of Quebec. The greater part of the Ahrendas,† and several detached bands, surrendered and were incorporated into the Five Nations. The remnant of the Tionontates took refuge amongst the Chippeways of Lake Superior. Others were dispersed towards Michilimackinac, or in some more remote quarters. This event was immediately followed, as has already been stated, by the dispersion of the Algonkin Nations of the Ottawa River.

In 1671 the Tionontates, after an unsuccessful war with the Sioux, left Lake Superior for Michilimackinac, where they rallied around them the dispersed remnants of the other tribes of their nation, and probably of the Andastes and other kindred tribes, which had been likewise nearly exterminated by the Five Nations. Some years later they removed to Detroit, in the vicinity of their ancient seats. And, though reduced to two villages, they resumed their ascendency over the Algonkin tribes and acted a conspicuous part with great sagacity in the ensuing conflicts between the French and the Five Nations.

*The two Missionaries, Brebeuf and Lallemand, Jr., were made prisoners and burnt alive by the Iroquois. Eight or ten Jesuits were killed in Canada, at different times, whilst on their missionary duties. + Charlevoix says the villages of St. John and St. Michel. These were names imposed by the Missionaries, and, as appears by the Relations, both places were inhabited by that tribe.

Charlevoix, in 1721, writes, that they were still the soul of the councils of all the Western Indians. Still assuming the right of sovereignty over the country between the Lakes and the Ohio, as far west as the Miami, they encouraged the Shawnoes and the Delawares to remove to the Ohio, by granting to them the possession, though not the right to the soil, of the territory west of Alleghany River, bordering principally on Lake Erie, the Muskingum, and the Scioto. This last river is particularly mentioned by Mr. Johnston, the Indian Agent, as having received its name from them and belonging to them.

It has been seen, that Pennsylvania thought it necessary to obtain a deed of cession from the Wyandots for the northwestern part of the State. The treaty of Greenville was signed by all the nations which had taken part in the war. But it was from the Wyandots, that the United States obtained the cession of the territory, west of the Connecticut Reserve, lying between the northern boundary line of that ceded by that treaty and Lake Erie.* Those remaining in the United States, and till lately at Sandusky, on the Scioto, and near Detroit, are said not to amount to one thousand souls. A still less considerable part of the nation, which took part with the British during the last war, resides in Canada.

The vocabulary is principally extracted from that supplied by Mr. Johnston, with some additions from Smith Barton, and from a collection of sentences in the War Department. A specimen is also given of the ancient Huron from the vocabulary of Sagard, which would have been farther extended if full confidence could have been placed in his knowledge of the language.t

Father Brebeuf was sent in the year 1641, on a mission to the Attiouandas, who were seated south of the Wyandots on the northern shores of Lake Erie. But we know nothing of their language, except that it was a dialect of the Huron. That tribe was, on account of the strict neutrality it preserved during the wars between the Five Nations and the Hurons,

Treaty of 29th of September, 1817, Article V. The Miami of Lake Erie, and its branch, the St. Mary's, are there specified as their western boundary. The St. Mary's was to its mouth the line between them and the Miamis.

Since this paper was completed, I have been informed that there is a vocabulary and grammar of the Wyandot language in the library of Yale College. Mr. Johnston's Vocabulary is contained in 1 Trans. Am. Antiq. Society, p. 292.

generally known by the name of " the Neutral Nation." Their policy did not preserve them from destruction, which soon followed that of their kindred tribe. The only further notice we have of them is, that, in the year 1669, Father Fremin, whilst on an unsuccessful mission amongst the Five Nations, came to a village named Gandougarac, inhabited by a remnant of that nation and by some Hurons, who were living there under the control of the Senecas.

The Eries, Erigas, or Cat Nation, were seated on the southern shores of the lake which still bears their name. The French never had any mission amongst them. We only know that they were an Iroquois tribe, and that they were destroyed, in 1655, by the Five Nations. Charlevoix gives the date, and Evans mentions the fact.

The Andastes or Guandastogues were a more formidable nation; and the war of the Five Nations against them appears to have lasted more than twenty years. Although the French Missionaries never penetrated amongst them, those who resided amongst the Five Nations repeatedly allude to the alternate successes of the war. They saw and conversed with many of the prisoners, who were always put to death, and ascertained. that their language was an Iroquois dialect. As far as can be collected from their notices, the Andastes were seated on the Alleghany River, extending thence westwardly along the Ohio.

Father Lallemand, in the Relation of the year 1663, states that, in the month of April, eight hundred warriors of the Five Nations had proceeded from the western extremity of Lake Ontario to a fine river, nearly equal (semblable) to the St. Lawrence, the navigation of which is free of falls, and which they descended one hundred leagues to the Andastogue village. He must have meant the principal village, and it could not have been far from the site of Pittsburgh. The village was well fortified and the aggressors were repulsed. But, though assisted by the Shawnoes and the Miamis, the Andastes were finally destroyed in the year 1672.* It seems probable that they were a kindred tribe of the Wyandots, and that which left the name of Guyandot to one of the southern tributaries of the Ohio.

The confederacy known generally by the name of “Five Nations," called by the French "Iroquois," by the Lenape tribes Maquas or Menque (Mingos), in Virginia Massawomeks, in various places by the names more or less corrupted of their respective tribes, consisted, as the name imports, of five nations, seated south of the River St. Lawrence and of Lake Ontario, and extending from the Hudson to the upper branches of the river Alleghany and to Lake Erie. It has been doubted whether Hochelaga now Montreal, which Cartier found, in 1535, inhabited by Indians speaking a dialect of the Iroquois language, was occupied by the Hurons, or by the Five Nations. Independent of the much greater proximity of these, the question seems to be definitively settled by the declarations of the St. Lawrence Algonkins, who cultivated nothing, to Father Le Jeune. In the course of his excursions between Quebec and the site of Montreal, they pointed out to him several old fields, and informed him that they had formerly been planted in maize by the Iroquois.* It is therefore certain, that, within less than seventy years before the arrival of Champlain in Canada, the Five Nations either were driven from settlements they previously had on the St. Lawrence, or voluntarily abandoned them in order to concentrate their forces and to be less exposed to the attacks of their enemies.

Their five tribes were, from east to west, the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas. The time when the confederacy was formed is not known, but was presumed to be of a recent date, and the Oneidas and Cayugas are said to have been compelled to join it. Although the fact has been questioned, it is proved by the speeches of the several orators at the treaty of Easton of 1758, that those two tribes were the younger, and the three others the elder members of the confederacy. The residue of the Tuscaroras of North Carolina were, after their decisive defeat in 1712-13, admitted as a sixth nation. And at the treaty of Easton it was announced to the British, that the confederation now consisted of eight nations, the three elder as already stated, and the five younger viz. the Cayugas, the Oneidas, the

* Relations of New France, 1636. The word "Iroquois " is used in this essay as a generic term, embracing all the nations speaking dialects of the same language, and applicable to all those dialects. It is confined by the French to the Five Nations.

Tuscaroras, the Nanticokes and Conoys, making but one nation, and the Tuteloes.* But the Nanticokes and Conoys removed to the west not long after, and the Tuteloes do not afterwards appear as a distinct nation.

The Five Nations had already acquired a decided superiority over the other Indians, before the arrival of the Europeans. They were at that epoch at war with all the surrounding tribes, with perhaps the single exception of the Andastes on the west. That in which they were engaged towards the north, with the Hurons and Algonkins, was still attended with alternate success on each side. But southwardly they had already carried their arms as far as the mouth of the Susquehanna and the vicinity of Newcastle on the Delaware, and had become an object of terror to all the Indians, from the sources of the Potomac and even farther south, to the Merrimac and the Piscataway.

For this ascendency several causes may be assigned. Their geographical position was fortunate, and they had the wisdom, instead of extending and spreading themselves, to remain concentrated even at the time of their greatest successes in their primitive seats. They were there protected against any sudden or dangerous attack, on the south by wide ranges of mountains, on the north by Lake Ontario. What was of still greater importance, particularly in savage warfare, they were without doubt more brave and more ferocious than any of the other nations. They were also further advanced in agriculture, in the fabrication of their weapons, and in the few arts of the Indians, than those of the Algonkin-Lenape stock. On all occasions they discovered a greater degree of cultivated intelligence, in no instances more than in the formation and long continuance of their confederacy, and in attacking by turns the unconnected and disunited petty tribes by which they were surrounded.

The superiority of the Iroquois tribes generally over the Algonkins appears indeed incontestable, and to have been partly due to the great subdivision of these into small independent communities. They were far more numerous, and yet, everywhere, we find a prevailing Iroquois tribe, more powerful and populous than any of its neighbours of another stock; in North Carolina, the Tuscaroras; in Canada, the Hurons; above all, the Five Nations. The disproportion between the population

*Takaio's speech, at that treaty.