THE IROQUOIS STOCK

Surrounded on all sides by the Algonkins were the Iroquois, once called the Five or Six Nations. When first discovered they were on the St. Lawrence, near Montreal, and in the Lake Region of Central New York. Various other tribes, not in their confederacy, and generally at war with them, spoke dialects of the same language. Such were the Hurons or Wyandots, between the Georgian Bay and Lake Erie, the Neutral Nation on the Niagara river, the Eries on the southern shore of the lake of that name, the Nottoways in Virginia, and the Tuscaroras in North Carolina. The Cherokees, found by the whites in East Tennesee, but whose national legend, carefully preserved for generations, located them originally on the head waters of the Ohio, were a remote offshoot of this same stem.

THE SUSQUEHANNOCKS

The valley of the Susquehanna river was occupied by a tribe of Iroquois lineage and language, known as the Susquehannocks, Conestogas and Andastes. The last name is Iroquois, from andasta, a cabin pole. By some, "Susquehannock" has also been explained as an Iroquois word, but its form is certainly Algonkin. The terminal K is the place-sign, Hanna denotes a flowing stream, while the adjectival prefix has been identified by Heckewelder with schachage, straight, from the direct course of the river near its mouth, and by Mr. Guss with woski, new, which, he thinks, referred to fresh or spring water.

Of these the former will appear the preferable, if we allow for the softening of the gutturals, which was a phonetic trait of the Unami dialect of the Lenape.

The Susquehannocks were always at deadly feud with the Iroquois, and between wars, the smallpox and the whites, they wee finally exterminated. The particulars of their short and sad history have been presented with his characteristic thoroughness by Dr. John G. Shea, (1) and later by Prof. N.L. Guss. (2) They were usually called by the Delawares Mengwe, which was the term they applied to all the Iroquois-speaking tribes. (3) The English corrupted it to Minqua and Mingo, and as the eastern trail of the Susquehannocks lay up the Conestoga Creek, and down the Christina, both those streams were called "Mingo Creek" by the early settlers.

It is important for the ethnology of Pennsylvania, to understand that at the time of the first settlement the whole of the Susquehanna Valley, from the Chesapeake to the New York lakes, was owned and controlled by Iroquois-speaking tribes. A different and erroneous opinion was expressed by Heckewelder, and has been generally received. He speaks of the Lenape Minsi as occupying the head waters of the Susquehanna. This was not so in the historic period.

The claims of the Susquehannocks extended down the Chesapeake Bay on the east shore, as far as the Choptank River, and on the west shore as far as the Patuxent. In 1654 they ceded to the government of Maryland their southern territory to these boundaries. (4) The first English explorers met them on the Potomac, about the Falls, and the Pascatoways were deserting their villages and fleeing before them, when, in 1634, Calvert founded his colony at St. Mary's.

Their subjection to the Five Nations took place about 1680, and it was through the rights obtained by this conquest that, at the treaty of Lancaster, 1744, Canassatego, the Onondaga speaker for the Nation, claimed p ay from the government of Maryland for the lands on the Potomac, or, as that river was called in his tongue, the Cohongorontas.

______________FOOTNOTES__________

1. In a note to Mr. Gowan's edition of George Alsop's Province of Maryland, pp. 117-121 (New York, 1869); also, in 1858, in an article "On the Identity of the Andastas, Minquas, Susquehannocks, and Conestogas," in the Amer. Hist. Mag., Vol. II, p. 294.

2. Early Indian History on the Susquehanna, p.31. (Harrisburg, 1883.)

3. Mengwe is the Onondaga yenkwe, males, or men, viri, and was borrowed from that dialect by the Delawares, as a general term. Bishop Ettwein states that the Iroquois called the Delawares, Mohegans, and all the New England Indians Agozhagauta.

4. Bozman, History of Maryland, Vol. 1, p. 167