Unlike most linguistic stocks, the Iroquoian tribes did not occupy a
continuous area, but when first known to Europeans were settled in three
distinct regions, separated from each other by tribes of other lineage.
The northern group was surrounded by tribes of Algonquian stock, while
the more southern groups bordered upon the Catawba and Maskoki.
A tradition of the Iroquois points to the St. Lawrence region as the
early home of the Iroquoian tribes, whence they gradually moved down to
the southwest along the shores of the Great Lakes.
When Cartier, in 1534, first explored the bays and inlets of the Gulf of
St. Lawrence he met a Huron-Iroquoian people on the shores of the Bay of
Gaspé, who also visited the northern coast of the gulf. In the following
year when he sailed up the St. Lawrence River he found the banks of the
river from Quebec to Montreal occupied by an Iroquoian people. From
statements of Champlain and other early explorers it seems probable that
the Wyandot once occupied the country along the northern shore of Lake
Ontario.
The Conestoga, and perhaps some allied tribes, occupied the country
about the Lower Susquehanna, in Pennsylvania and Maryland, and have
commonly been regarded as an isolated body, but it seems probable that
their territory was contiguous to that of the Five Nations on the north
before the Delaware began their westward movement.
As the Cherokee were the principal tribe on the borders of the southern
colonies and occupied the leading place in all the treaty negotiations,
they came to be considered as the owners of a large territory to which
they had no real claim. Their first sale, in 1721, embraced a tract in
South Carolina, between the Congaree and the South Fork of the
Edisto,[44] but about one-half of this tract, forming the present
Lexington County, belonging to the Congaree.[45] In 1755 they sold a
second tract above the first and extending across South Carolina from
the Savannah to the Catawba (or Wateree),[46] but all of this tract east
of Broad River belonged to other tribes. The lower part, between the
Congaree and the Wateree, had been sold 20 years before, and in the
upper part the Broad River was acknowledged as the western Catawba
boundary.[48] In 1770 they sold a tract, principally in Virginia and
West Virginia, bounded east by the Great Kanawha,[47] but the Iroquois
claimed by conquest all of this tract northwest of the main ridge of the
Alleghany and Cumberland Mountains, and extending at least to the
Kentucky River,[49] and two years previously they had made a treaty
with Sir William Johnson by which they were recognized as the owners of
all between Cumberland Mountains and the Ohio down to the Tennessee.[50]
The Cumberland River basin was the only part of this tract to which the
Cherokee had any real title, having driven out the former occupants, the
Shawnee, about 1721.[51] The Cherokee had no villages north of the
Tennessee (this probably includes the Holston as its upper part), and at
a conference at Albany the Cherokee delegates presented to the Iroquois
the skin of a deer, which they said belonged to the Iroquois, as the
animal had been killed north of the Tennessee.[52] In 1805, 1806, and
1817 they sold several tracts, mainly in middle Tennessee, north of the
Tennessee River and extending to the Cumberland River watershed, but
this territory was claimed and had been occupied by the Chickasaw, and
at one conference the Cherokee admitted their claim.[53] The adjacent
tract in northern Alabama and Georgia, on the headwaters of the Coosa,
was not permanently occupied by the Cherokee until they began to move
westward, about 1770.
[Footnote 44: Cession No. 1, on Royce’s Cherokee map, 1884.]
[Footnote 45: Howe in Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, 1854, vol. 4,
p. 163.]
[Footnote 46: Cession 2, on Royce’s Cherokee map, 1884.]
[Footnote 47: Howe in Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, 1854, vol. 4, pp.
155-159.]
[Footnote 48: Cession 4, on Royce’s Cherokee map, 1884.]
[Footnote 49: Sir William Johnson in Parkman’s Conspiracy of
Pontiac, app.]
[Footnote 50: Bancroft, Hist. U.S.]
[Footnote 51: Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee, 1853.]
[Footnote 52: Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee, 1853.]
[Footnote 53: Blount (1792) in Am. State Papers, 1832, vol. 4,
p. 336.]
The whole region of West Virginia, Kentucky, and the Cumberland River
region of Tennessee was claimed by the Iroquois and Cherokee, but the
Iroquois never occupied any of it and the Cherokee could not be said to
occupy any beyond the Cumberland Mountains. The Cumberland River was
originally held by the Shawnee, and the rest was occupied, so far as it
was occupied at all, by the Shawnee, Delaware, and occasionally by the
Wyandot and Mingo (Iroquoian), who made regular excursions southward
across the Ohio every year to hunt and to make salt at the licks. Most
of the temporary camps or villages in Kentucky and West Virginia were
built by the Shawnee and Delaware. The Shawnee and Delaware were the
principal barrier to the settlement of Kentucky and West Virginia for a
period of 20 years, while in all that time neither the Cherokee nor the
Iroquois offered any resistance or checked the opposition of the Ohio
tribes.
The Cherokee bounds in Virginia should be extended along the mountain
region as far at least as the James River, as they claim to have lived
at the Peaks of Otter,[54] and seem to be identical with the Rickohockan
or Rechahecrian of the early Virginia writers, who lived in the
mountains beyond the Monacan, and in 1656 ravaged the lowland country as
far as the site of Richmond and defeated the English and the Powhatan
Indians in a pitched battle at that place.[55]
[Footnote 54: Schoolcraft, Notes on Iroquois, 1847.]
[Footnote 55: Bancroft, Hist. U.S.]
The language of the Tuscarora, formerly of northeastern North Carolina,
connect them directly with the northern Iroquois. The Chowanoc and
Nottoway and other cognate tribes adjoining the Tuscarora may have been
offshoots from that tribe.