See UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1814.
IROQUOIS CONFEDERACY, The.
According to their traditions, the founder of the League or
confederacy which united the five nations of the Iroquois—the
Mohawks, the Onondagas, the Oneidas, the Cayugas, and the
Senecas, was Hiawatha, the hero of Iroquois legend.
See AMERICAN ABORIGINES: IROQUOIS CONFEDERACY.
He was an Onondaga chief, and is supposed to have lived about
the middle of the 15th century. "Hiawatha had long beheld with
grief the evils which afflicted not only his own nation, but
all the other tribes about them, through the continual wars in
which they were engaged, and the misgovernment and miseries at
home which these wars produced. With much meditation he had
elaborated in his mind the scheme of a vast confederation
which would ensure universal peace. In the mere plan of a
confederation there was nothing new. There are probably few,
if any, Indian tribes which have not, at one time or another,
been members of a league or confederacy. It may almost be said
to be their normal condition. But the plan which Hiawatha had
evolved differed from all others in two particulars. The
system which he devised was to be not a loose and transitory
league, but a permanent government. While each nation was to
retain its own council and its management of local affairs,
the general control was to be lodged in a federal senate,
composed of representatives elected by each nation, holding
office during good behavior, and acknowledged as ruling chiefs
throughout the whole confederacy. Still further, and more
remarkably, the confederation was not to be a limited one. It
was to be indefinitely expansible. The avowed design of its
proposer was to abolish war altogether. He wished the
federation to extend until all the tribes of men should be
included in it, and peace should everywhere reign. Such is the
positive testimony of the Iroquois themselves: and their
statement, as will be seen, is supported by historical
evidence. … His conceptions were beyond his time, and beyond
ours; but their effect, within a limited sphere, was very
great. For more than three centuries the bond which he devised
held together the Iroquois nations in perfect amity. It
proved, moreover, as he intended, elastic. The territory of
the Iroquois, constantly extending as their united strength
made itself felt, became the 'Great Asylum' of the Indian
tribes. … Among the interminable stories with which the
common people [of the Five Nations] beguile their winter
nights, the traditions of Atotarho and Hiawatha became
intermingled with the legends of their mythology. An
accidental similarity, in the Onondaga dialect, between the
name of Hiawatha and that of one of their ancient divinities,
led to a confusion between the two, which has misled some
investigators. This deity bears, in the sonorous Canienga
tongue, the name of Taronhiawagon, meaning 'the Holder of the
Heavens.' The Jesuit missionaries style him 'the great god of
the Iroquois.' Among the Onondagas of the present day, the
name is abridged to Taonhiawagi, or Tahiawagi. The confusion
between this name and that of Hiawatha (which, in another
form, is pronounced Tahionwatha) seems to have begun more than
a century ago. … Mr. J. V. H. Clark, in his interesting
History of Onondaga, makes the name to have been originally
Ta-own-ya-wat-ha, and describes the bearer as 'the deity who
presides over fisheries and hunting-grounds.' He came down
from heaven in a white canoe, and after sundry adventures,
which remind one of the labors of Hercules, assumed the name
of Hiawatha (signifying, we are told, 'a very wise man'), and
dwelt for a time as an ordinary mortal among men, occupied in
works of benevolence. Finally, after founding the confederacy
and bestowing many prudent counsels upon the people, he
returned to the skies by the same conveyance in which he had
descended. This legend, or, rather, congeries of intermingled
legends, was communicated by Clark to Schoolcraft, when the
latter was compiling his 'Notes on the Iroquois.' Mr.
Schoolcraft, pleased with the poetical cast of the story, and
the euphonious name, made confusion worse confounded by
transferring the hero to a distant region and identifying him
with Manabozho, a fantastic divinity of the Ojibways.
Schoolcraft's volume, which he chose to entitle 'The Hiawatha
Legends,' has not in it a single fact or fiction relating
either to Hiawatha himself or to the Iroquois deity
Taronhiawagon. Wild Ojibway stories concerning Manabozho and
his comrades form the staple of its contents. But it is to
this collection that we owe the charming poem of Longfellow;
and thus, by an extraordinary fortune, a grave Iroquois
lawgiver of the fifteenth century has become, in modern
literature, an Ojibway demigod, son of the West Wind, and
companion of the tricksy Paupukkeewis, the boastful Iagoo, and
the strong Kwasind. If a Chinese traveler, during the middle
ages, inquiring into the history and religion of the western
nations, had confounded King Alfred with King Arthur, and both
with Odin, he would not have made a more preposterous
confusion of names and characters than that which has hitherto
disguised the genuine personality of the great Onondaga
reformer."
_H. Hale, editor,
The Iroquois Book of Rites
(Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature,
number 2, pages 21-36)._
{1803}