INTRODUCTION. 151 



Tartar origin, and found their way there by crossing Behring's straits. Yet 

 another theory derives the aborigines from the Northmen of Europe. This 

 theory is based upon the resemblance of the American Indians to the Esqui- 

 maux, and between the Esquimaux and the Laplanders. Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill 

 maintained this hypothesis. Henry Wheaton, now minister of the United 

 States at the court of Berlin, has pursued investigations which, together with 

 those of the Swedish antiquaries, have produced a general conviction that the 

 Northmen visited the shores of New-England several centuries before the dis- 

 covery of America by Columbus ; and it is argued that if the bold adventurers 

 in the age of Eric the Red could traverse the North seas from Norway to 

 Greenland, and thence to the American coast, spirits equally brave might have 

 done the same ages before. Other speculators have attempted to trace the 

 descent of the American Indians from the Canaanites driven from Palestine by 

 Joshua. Grotius and Martyr believed that Yucatan was first peopled by Chris- 

 tian Ethiopians ; while some regard those races as descendants of the long lost 

 ten and a half tribes of the children of Israel.* 



The first colonial historian of the Six Nations was Cadwallader Colden, and 

 his work is valuable although it reaches only to a very short period subsequent 

 to the peace of Ryswick. The work is certainly good authority as a record of 

 facts, and manifests a benevolent spirit and an inquiring genius. It is especially 

 interesting also because it shows that each of the Five Nations was a distinct re- 

 public, while they were all bound in a confederacy with a grand central council 

 at Onondaga. Colden, however, is supposed to have erred in adopting^the French 

 opinion, that the Five Nations had only recently occupied the country in which 

 they were found at the time of the discovery of the continent. David Cusick, 

 an educated Tuscarora Indian, about twenty years ago published a history of the 

 Six Nations, derived from their traditions. This work, which as a merely literary 

 work is without merit, nevertheless establishes the fact, if any reliance can be 

 placed on Indian tradition, that the five nations resided in the country now con- 



* Adair, Boodwot, Miller, M. M. Noah. 



