Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 10.djvu/893

* IB.OQUOIAN STOCK. 787 IROQUOIS. All the tribes of this stock were agricultural, being noted above their neighbors for their fields of corn, puuijiki'is, and tobacco, to which, at a later period, were added orehards of apple and peach trees. Those of the North oceui)ied com- munal 'long houses' of poles overlaid with bark, in wagon-top shape, and sometimes from 80 to 100 feet in length. Among the Cherokee and others of the South each family occupied a house of a single room, usually built of logs plastered over with clay. The 'town liouse' of the Southern tribes, reserved for ceremonial purposes, was a large round structure of logs, with a conical earth-covered roof. The elan system had reached a high development among all the Iroquoian tribes, and women occupied a position of much importance, while the inherent tenacity of char- acter and capacity for organization exhibited by the Indians of this stuck gave them a eon- trolling inlluence wherever they were established, and enabled them more than any other of the Eastern tribes to withstand the new civilization. The present population of the Iroquoian tribes is about 40,000, of whom about 10,000 are in Canada. The Cherokee constitute fully one-half of the whole body. IROQUOIS, Ir'6-kwoi'. A confederacy of five tribes of Iroquoian stock — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, CajTiga, and Seneca — to which the Tusearora were afterwards added. They called themselves by names signifying respectively 'we of the long house' and 'real people.' The term Iroquois is of French origin, being possibly com- pcunded from two ceremonial words of frequent occurrence in their councils, with the addition of the French suffix ois. Another theory makes it an Algonquian derivative. Their Algonquian neighbors knew them as Mengwe or Nadowa, about equivalent to 'alien' or 'enemy,' while by the English they were designated as the Five, or Six, Nations. The people found by Cartier in 1535 occupy- ing the shores of the Saint Lawrence River from the present Quebec to SItmtreal were of Iro- quoian stock, as proved l)y linguistic evidence, and appear to have been, in part at least, the ajicestors of the later Iroquois. These tribes were dispossessed shortly afterwards by the more powerful Algonquian tribes, some, like the Hu- rons. taking refuge farther to the west, while others, including the Iroquois, retired to the south. Shortly after this withdrawal — probably about the middle of the sixteenth century — the tribes known later as the Five Nations were persuaded by the counsel of their traditional legislator, Hiawatha, to fonn a league or con- federacy upon such a well-ordered plan that it has endured for more than three centuries, and exists to-day as their ruling government, in spite of all the changes brought about by the advent of the white man. The five tribes at this time occupied central and western New York, where they were found in 1600 by Cham- plain, who, by joining forces with their Algon- quian enemies, brought down upon the French the lasting vengeance of the Iroquois League, which was one of the main factors in the ulti- mate loss of Canada. Ry the formation of the league, in which each tribe represented a State government, with a central federal council of fifty chiefs sitting at Onondaga, the Iroquois were enabled to with- stand the inroads of the hostile Algonquian tribes, and even to assume the offensive. On the establishment of tlic French missions among the Ilurons (see Wyandot), about the year 1630, the Iroquois, who in the meantime had been sup- plied with firearms by Ihc Dutch on the Hudson, iiegan war upon their kinsmen in Canada with such ell'eet that in a few years those of the Ilu- rons wlio had not been slaughtered or carried into captivity were forced to abandon their coun- try ami fly hundreds of miles to the west. The same fate soon after befell the cognate Neutral Nation and the Erie, as well as the Ottawa and others of Algonquian race, resulting in almost complete ruin to the French missions in Canada. The destroyers then turned upon the Conestoga and others in the South, the Jlohican and other* cast of the Hudson, and the Miami and Illinois in the West, until by the year 1700 they claimed and were conceded a paramount inlluence and dictation from Hudson Bay to the Cherokee frontier of Carolina, and from the Connecticut almost or quite to the Mississippi, the only tribes able to hiake successful opposition being the Ojibwa in the Northwest and the Cherokee in the South. From the beginning of the coloni- al period they held the balance of power between France and England in the Nortli. and were courted alike by both, but remained steadfast to the English interest. The few exceptions were chiefly in the case of the Mohawk and Cayuga, who yielded to the influence of the French .Jesuit missionaries, by whom they were finally drawn off from the territory of the league and .settled in the mission villages of Caughnawaga and Saint Regis. About the year 1715 the cognate Tusearora. who had been driven out from North Carnlina in a war with the settlers, removed to New York, where they were assigned lands by the Iroquois and admitted as the sixth na- tion of the league. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1775 the league council declared for neutrality, while allowing each of the six component tribes to take sides as it thought fit. The great majority of the Iroquois sided against the Americans, only the Oneida and a part of the Tusearora refusing. The Mohawk and Cayuga followed their great chief. Brant, in a body to Canada. At the close of the struggle these, with other Iroquois who had supiiorted the English cause, were settled by the Canadian Government on a reservation on Grand River. Ontario, where most of them still remain, others being at Quints Bay, Thames River, and Gibson, in the same province. The Catholic Iroquois are at Caugh- nawaga. iSaint Regis, and Lake of Two Moun- tains, in (Jncbcc Province, but are no longer affiliated with the Icagiie. Those of Caughna- waga constitute tlic largest single Indian settle- ment north of ^Mexico. In addition to the Catholic Saint Regis Iroquois in Canada, about as many more are on the New York side of the line, the reservation having been cut in two when the boundary was finally established by survey. The Iroqiiois in the I'nited States are all on reser- vations in New York, excepting the Oneida, most of whom removed to Wisconsin about 1S20, and a mixe.l band of so-called 'S<>neea' in the Indian Territory. In general it may be said that they are fairly prosperous, those of Caughnawaga heading the list. The political importance of the Iroquois, al-