Page:The Old New York Frontier.djvu/44

 quois rose rapidly in power and eventually made their influence felt all over the eastern part of the continent. They are known to have carried their arms westward to the Mississippi and southward to the Carolinas. They entered Mexico, and La Salle found them in Illinois. Captain John Smith, while exploring Chesapeake Bay, encountered there a small fleet of their canoes. Other Indians assured him that the Mohawks "made war upon all the world."

Everywhere these New York Indians were conquerors. They gained at last a recognized mastery over territory that now forms States and might make an empire, their influence reaching its height at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Morgan declares that in point of sway they had reared the most powerful empire that ever existed in America north of the Aztec monarchy. Miss Yawger quotes a remark, that their authority at one time extended over a larger domain than was embraced in the Empire of Rome, and Ellis H. Roberts has said they " ran in conquest farther than the Greek arms were ever carried, and to distances which Rome surpassed only in the days of its culminating glory." As for the ultimate purpose of the League being the abolition of war, this undoubtedly was its tendency, once conquest had been achieved. As with the Empire of Rome, so with the Empire of the Iroquois; within the borders of the empire there was peace. Morgan believes the Iroquois might have achieved still greater eminence. Parkman says they afford "perhaps an example of the highest elevation which man can reach without emerging from the primitive condition of the hunter." But deadly enemies arrived when the white man came with his ambitions and his fire-water.