Page:The Old New York Frontier.djvu/45

 It is interesting to reflect that this federation of warlike people had for its capital a small village near Onondaga Lake where general congresses were held, and the policy of the League agreed upon. To Onondaga, highways from the south, east, and west conveniently led. These men lived on the highest land of the continent east of the Mississippi. They were at the head-waters of great rivers, and thus were able to reach nations less powerful than themselves, whom repeatedly they brought into subjection. Past the confluence of the Unadilla and Susquehanna rivers, messengers of peace or war, warriors going to battle and returning from victories in the south, made their way.

This strategic advantage in very notable manner was to serve the Indians in the eighteenth century when menaced by a conflict between Europeans—the English and the French—for possession of their country. No one understood the advantage better than the Indians themselves. At Onondaga they declared that "if the French should prevail so far as to attempt to drive us out of our country, we can with our old men, wives and children, come down the streams of the Mohawk River, the Delaware, both branches of the Susquehanna and the Potomac, to the English. If the English should expell us our country, we have a like conveyance to the French by the streams of St. Lawrence and Sorrell River, and if both should join, we can retire across the Lakes."

The Iroquois, though powerful as a confederacy, were never a numerous people. Just before the Revolution it is unlikely that they numbered more