THE IROQUOIS LEAGUE
History of the League.--Natural Growth of Indian Government.--How
Authority was exercised, how divided.--Popular Assemblies.--Public
Speaking.--Community Life.
Originally the Iroquois people was one, but as the parent stock grew
large, it broke up into separate groups.
Dissensions arose among these, and they made war upon one another.
Then, according to their legend, Hayawentha, or Hiawatha, whispered
into the ear of Daganoweda, an Onondaga sachem, that the cure for their
ills lay in union. This wise counsel was followed. The five tribes
known to Englishmen as the Mohawks, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the
Cayugas, and the Senecas--their Indian names are different and much
longer--buried the hatchet and formed a confederacy which grew to be,
after the Aztec League in Mexico, the most powerful Indian organization
in North America. It was then known as "The Five Nations."
{28}
About 1718, one of the original branches, the Tuscaroras, which had
wandered away as far as North Carolina, pushed by white men hungry for
their land, broke up their settlements, took up the line of march,
returned northward, and rejoined the other branches of the parent stem.
From this time forth the League is known in history as "The Six
Nations," the constant foe of the French and ally of the English. The
Indian name for it was "The Long House," so called because the wide
strip of territory occupied by it was in the shape of one of those
oblong structures in which the people dwelt.
When the five tribes laid aside their strife, the fragments of the
common clans in each re-united in heartiest brotherhood and formed an
eightfold bond of union. On the other hand, the Iroquois waged fierce
and relentless war upon the Hurons and Eries, because, though they
belonged to the same stock, they refused to join the League. This
denial of the sacred tie of blood was regarded by the Iroquois as rank
treason, and they punished it with relentless ferocity, harrying and
hounding the offending tribes to destruction.
Indian government, like Indian society, was just such as had grown up
naturally out of the {29} conditions. It was not at all like
government among civilized peoples. In the first place, there were no
written laws to be administered. The place of these was taken by
public opinion and tradition, that is, by the ideas handed down from
one generation to another and constantly discussed around the camp-fire
and the council-fire. Every decent Indian was singularly obedient to
this unwritten code. He wanted always to do what he was told his
fathers had been accustomed to do, and what was expected of him. Thus
there was a certain general standard of conduct.
Again, the men who ruled, though they were formally elected to office,
had not any authority such as is possessed by our judges and
magistrates, who can say to a man, "Do thus," and compel him to obey or
take the consequences. The influence of Indian rulers was more like
that of leading men in a civilized community: it was chiefly personal
and persuasive, and it was exerted in various indirect ways. If, for
example, it became a question how to deal with a man who had done
something violently opposed to Indian usage or to the interest of the
tribe, there was not anything like an open trial, but the chiefs held a
secret council and discussed the case. If they {30} decided favorably
to the man, that was an end of the matter. On the other hand, if they
agreed that he ought to die, there was not any formal sentence and
public execution. The chiefs simply charged some young warrior with
the task of putting the offender out of the way. The chosen
executioner watched his opportunity, fell upon his victim unawares,
perhaps as he passed through the dark porch of a lodge, and brained him
with his tomahawk. The victim's family or clan made no demand for
reparation, as they would have done if he had been murdered in a
private feud, because public opinion approved the deed, and the whole
power of the tribe would have been exerted to sustain the judgment of
the chiefs.
According to our ideas, which demand a fair and open trial for every
accused person, this was most abhorrent despotism. Yet it had one very
important safeguard: it was not like the arbitrary will of a single
tyrant doing things on the impulse of the moment. Indians are
eminently deliberative. They are much given to discussing things and
endlessly powwowing about them. They take no important step without
talking it over for days. Thus, in such a case as has been supposed,
there was general concurrence in the {31} judgment of the chiefs,
because they were understood to have canvassed the matter carefully,
and their decision was practically that of the tribe.
This singular sort of authority was vested in two kinds of men;
sachems, who were concerned with the administration of the tribal
affairs at all times, and war-chiefs, whose duty was limited to
leadership in the field. The sachems, therefore, constituted the real,
permanent government. Of these there were ten chosen in each of the
five tribes. Their council was the governing body of the tribe. In
these councils all were nominally equals. But, naturally, men of
strong personality exercised peculiar power. The fifty sachems of the
five tribes composed the Grand Council which was the governing body of
the League. In its deliberations each tribe had equal representation
through its ten sachems. But the Onondaga nation, being situated in
the middle of the five, and the grand council-fire being held in its
chief town, exercised a preponderating influence in these meetings.
Besides the Grand Council and the tribal council, there were councils
of the minor chiefs, and councils of the younger warriors, and even
councils of the women, for a large part of an Indian's {32} time was
taken up with powwowing. Besides these formal deliberative bodies,
there were gatherings that were a sort of rude mass-meeting. If a
question of deep interest was before the League for discussion,
warriors flocked by hundreds from all sides to the great council-fire
in the Onondaga nation. The town swarmed with visitors. Every lodge
was crowded to its utmost capacity; temporary habitations rose, and
fresh camp-fires blazed on every side, and even the unbounded Indian
hospitality was strained to provide for the throng of guests. Thus,
hour after hour, and day after day, the issue was debated in the
presence of hundreds, some squatting, some lying at full length, all
absolutely silent except when expressing approval by grunts.
The discussion was conducted in a manner that would seem to us
exceedingly tedious. Each speaker, before advancing his views,
carefully rehearsed all the points made by his predecessors. This
method had the advantage of making even the dullest mind familiar with
the various aspects of the subject, and it resulted in a so thorough
sifting of it that when a conclusion was reached, it was felt to be the
general sense of the meeting.
From this account it will be evident that public {33} speaking played a
large part in Indian life. This fact will help us to account for the
remarkable degree of eloquence sometimes displayed. If we should think
of the Indian as an untutored savage, bursting at times into
impassioned oratory, under the influence of powerful emotions, we
should miss the truth very widely. The fact is, there was a class of
professional speakers, who had trained themselves by carefully
listening to the ablest debaters among their people, and had stored
their memories with a large number of stock phrases and of images taken
from nature. These metaphors, which give to Indian oratory its
peculiar character, were not, therefore, spontaneous productions of the
imagination, but formed a common stock used by all speakers as freely
as orators in civilized society are wont to quote great authors and
poets. Among a people who devoted so much time to public discussion, a
forcible speaker wielded great influence. One of the sources of the
power over the natives of La Salle, the great French explorer, lay in
the fact that he had thoroughly mastered their method of oratory and
could harangue an audience in their own tongue like one of their best
speakers.
The subject of the chiefship is a very {34} interesting one. As has
already been explained, a son did not inherit anything from his father.
Therefore nobody was entitled to be a chief because his father had been
one. Chiefs were elected wholly on the ground of personal qualities.
Individual merit was the only thing that counted. Moreover, the chiefs
were not the only men who could originate a movement. Any warrior
might put on his war-paint and feathers and sing his war-song. As many
as were willing might join him, and the party file away on the war-path
without a single chief. If such a voluntary leader showed prowess and
skill, he was sure to be some day elected a chief.
It is very interesting to reflect that just this free state of things
existed thousands of years ago among our own ancestors in Europe. At
that time there were no kings claiming a "divine right" to govern their
fellow men. The chiefs were those whose courage, strength, and skill
in war made them to be chosen "rulers of men," to use old Homer's
phrase. If their sons did not possess these qualities, they remained
among the common herd. But there came a time when, here and there,
some mighty warrior gained so much wealth in cattle and in slaves taken
in battle, that {35} he was able to bribe some of his people and to
frighten others into consenting that his son should be chief after him.
If the son was strong enough to hold the office through his own life
and to hand it to his son, the idea soon became fixed that the
chiefship belonged in that particular family.
This was the beginning of kingship. But our aborigines had not
developed any such absurd notion as that there are particular families
to which God has given the privilege of lording it over their fellow
men. They were still in the free stage of choosing their chiefs from
among the men who served them best. We may say with confidence that
there was not an emperor, or a king, or anything more than an elective
chief in the whole of North America.
Not only had nobody the title and office of a king among the Indians;
nobody had anything like kingly authority. Rulership was not vested in
any one man, but in the council of chiefs. This feature, of course,
was very democratic. And there was another that went much further in
the same direction: almost all property was held in common. For
instance, the land of a tribe was not divided among individual owners,
but {36} belonged to the whole tribe, and no part of it could be
bartered away without the entire tribe's consent. A piece might be
temporarily assigned to a family to cultivate, but the ownership of it
remained in the whole tribe. This circumstance tended more than
anything else to prevent the possibility of any man's raising himself
to kingly power. Such usurpations commonly rest upon large
accumulations of private property of some kind. But among a people not
one of whom owned a single rood of land, who had no flocks and herds,
nor any domestic animals whatever, except dogs, and among whom the son
inherited nothing from his father, there was no chance for anybody to
gain wealth that would raise him above his fellows.
Thus we see that an Indian tribe was in many respects an ideal
republic. With its free discussion of all matters of general interest;
with authority vested in a body of the fittest men; with the only
valuable possession, land, held by the whole tribe as one great family;
in the entire absence of personal wealth; and with the unlimited
opportunity for any man possessing the qualities that Indians admire to
raise himself to influence, there really was a condition of affairs
very like {37} that which philosophers have imagined as the best
conceivable state of human society for preserving individual freedom.
Even the very houses of the Indians were adapted to community-life.
They were built, not to shelter families, but considerable groups of
families. One very advanced tribe, the Mandans, on the upper Missouri,
built circular houses. But the most usual form, as among the Iroquois,
was a structure very long in proportion to its width. It was made of
stout posts set upright in the earth, supporting a roof-frame of light
poles slanting upward and fastened together at their crossing. Both
walls and roof were covered with wide strips of bark held in place by
slender poles secured by withes. Heavy stones also were laid on the
roof to keep the bark in place. At the top of the roof a space of
about a foot was left open for the entrance of light and the escape of
smoke, there being neither windows nor chimneys. At either end was a
door, covered commonly with a skin fastened at the top and loose at the
bottom. In the winter-season these entrances were screened by a porch.
In one of these long houses a number of families lived together in a
way that carried out in {38} all particulars the idea of one great
household. Throughout the length of the building, on both sides, were
partitions dividing off spaces a few feet square, all open toward the
middle like wide stalls in a stable. Each of these spaces was occupied
by one family and contained bunks in which they slept. In the aisles,
between every four of these spaces, was a fire which served the four
families. The number of fires in a lodge indicated, quite nearly, the
number of persons dwelling in it. To say, for instance, a lodge of
five fires, meant one that housed twenty families.
This great household lived together according to the community-idea.
The belongings of individuals, even of individual families, were very
few. The produce of their fields of corn, beans, pumpkins, and
sunflowers was held as common property; and the one regular meal of the
day was a common meal, cooked by the squaws and served to each person
from the kettle. The food remaining over was set aside, and each
person might help himself to it as he had need. If a stranger came in,
the squaws gave him to eat out of the common stock. In fact, Indian
hospitality grew out of this way of living in common. A single family
would frequently have been "eaten out of {39} house and home," if it
had needed to provide out of its own resources for all the guests that
might suddenly come upon it.
We are apt to think of the Indian as a silent, reserved, solitary
being. Nothing could be further from the truth. However they may
appear in the presence of white men, among themselves Indians are a
very jolly set. Their life in such a common dwelling as has been
described was intensely social in its character. Of course, privacy
was out of the question. Very little took place that was not known to
all the inmates. And we can well imagine that when all were at home,
an Indian lodge was anything else than a house of silence. Of a winter
evening, for instance, with the fires blazing brightly, there was a
vast deal of boisterous hilarity, in which the deep guttural tones of
the men and the shrill voices of the squaws were intermingled. Around
the fires there were endless gossiping, story-telling, and jesting.
Jokes, by no means delicate and decidedly personal, provoked uproarious
laughter, in which the victim commonly joined.
A village, composed of a cluster of such abodes standing without any
order and enclosed by a stockade, was, at times, the scene of almost
{40} endless merry-making. Now it was a big feast; now a game of
chance played by two large parties matched against each other, while
the lodge was crowded almost to suffocation by eager spectators; now a
dance, of the peculiar Indian kind; now some solemn ceremony to
propitiate the spirits who were supposed to rule the weather, the
crops, the hunting, and all the interests of barbarian life.
At all times there was endless visiting from lodge to lodge.
Hospitality was universal. Let a visitor come in, and it would have
been the height of rudeness not to set food before him. To refuse it
would have been equally an offence against good manners. Only an
Indian stomach was equal to the constant round of eating. White men
often found themselves seriously embarrassed between their desire not
to offend their hosts and their own repugnance to viands which could
not tempt a civilized man who was not famished.
It seems strange to think of the women as both the drudges and the
rulers of the lodge. Yet such they were. This fact arose from the
circumstance already mentioned, that descent was counted, not through
the fathers, but through the mothers. The home and the children were
{41} the wife's, not the husband's. There she lived, surrounded by her
female relatives, whereas he had come from another clan. If he proved
lazy or incompetent to do his full share of providing, let the women
unite against him, and out he must go, while the wife remained.
The community idea, which we have seen to be the key to Indian social
life, showed itself in universal helpfulness. Ferocious and pitiless
as these people were toward their enemies, the women even more
ingeniously cruel than the men, nothing could exceed the cheerful
spirit with which, in their own rough way, they bore one another's
burdens. It filled the French missionaries with admiration, and they
frequently tell us how, if a lodge was accidentally burned, the whole
village turned out to help rebuild it; or how, if children were left
orphans, they were quickly adopted and provided for. It is equally a
mistake to glorify the Indian as a hero and to deny him the rude
virtues which he really possessed.
{45}