480 WHITTLESEY ON THE WEAPONS AND 



with cross timbers to hold them together. A town he attacked in Western New York, prob- 

 ably at the outlet of Canandaigua Lake, had pickets thirty feet high with galleries on the 

 inside near the top, from whence the Senecas shot their arrows. 



After the Indians had seen how the Spaniards and the French erected stockades, they, in 

 a few cases, undertook to protect themselves in the same way. With his stone axe and even 

 with the tomahawk and squaw axe, which the whites furnished him, he could do little towards 

 cutting down forest trees for pickets. The stockades which the Iroquois constructed, to re- 

 sist the French at Onondaga, were made by burning off logs to a proper length, which were 

 but slightly set in the ground. They were without trenches. It is not a part of the Indian 

 character to provide for the future by present labor. The Onondaga fort was probably 

 planned by some Englishman. 



It had a rectangular form with four bastions; but no mention is made of parapets or moats. 

 It was built of large logs set in the ground in double ranks, so as to break joints. On one 

 side the line was composed of pickets thirty to forty feet high, with narrow spaces between 

 them. The Indians in this case did not attempt to defend their forts against the French, 

 but burned them and fled. They had also stakes and brush so interwoven as to make a 

 good defence against Indian weapons. Champlain states that they had stone axes, and only 

 a few miserable ones of iron, to cut timber for their works. 



His Indian allies, the Hurons of the north shore of Lake Ontario, were not at all inclined 

 to attack even this temporary fort of the Iroquois, and he was obliged with less than a dozen 

 Frenchmen, who had arquebuses, to do what was done. The French expedition under De 

 Nonville by way of Ironduquoit Bay, against the Senecas of Genesee Valley, in 1687, 

 found them in villages, with wooden defences similar to those at Onondaga. In 1696 when 

 the Count Frontenac inarched to the Onondaga castles above Syracuse, the cabins of the 

 Onondagas and of the Oneidas were protected by a triple palisade which was very high, but 

 no mention is made of ditches. A people who once possessed it would never have lost the 

 art of earth-work defences, nor would the tradition of wars and battles, occurring in connec- 

 tion with their ancient forts, have been forgotten. 



Very likely the ancient people who fortified on the shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario, were 

 not the same who occupied the valley of the Ohio ; but it is highly improbable they were 

 what we call the Aborigines, whose strategy consists in rapidity and concealment. It is very 

 seldom they engage in a prolonged battle, even among themselves. 



Their habits of war and their precarious mode of supply do not enable them to congre- 

 gate in great numbers, or to remain a long time around a besieged place. The ancient forts 

 of the mound-builders are as impregnable to assaults of our own race as to those of red 

 men. 



EXPLANATION OF PLATE XVI. 



[It should be stated that it was the intention of the Author to illustrate only weapons used for war or the chase. 

 As the drawings of figs. 3 and 5 were sent upon the same sheets as the others, they were placed in the hands of the 

 engraver before the Author was aware of it — two explanatory notes concerning them have therefore been inserted 

 in the text]. The figures are all reduced one third. 



Pig. 1. — Arrow or Javelin head from Oak Orchard, Wisconsin ; la., side view ; lb., cross-section through a-b. ; lc, 

 cross-section through c-d. 



Fig. 2. — Arrow or Javelin head from Copper Falls Mine, Lake Superior ; 2a., cross-section through e-f. ; 2b., cross- 

 section through g-h. 



