CONTACTS BETWEEN IROQUOIS HERBALISM AND 

 COLONIAL MEDICINE ' 



By William N. Fenton 

 Bureau of American Ethnology 



[With 5 plates] 

 INTRODUCTION : THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE 



A traveler of the seventeenth century leaving the cedar-lined banks 

 of the St. Lawrence River to ascend the Great Lakes would have 

 encountered Indians living inland from both shores who continued to 

 speak related dialects of the Iroquoian language as he passed Niagara 

 and went on across southern Ontario toward the Detroit River. 

 South of Lake Ontario lay the country of a great confederacy 

 known to the French as the Iroquois and to the English as the 

 Five Nations : the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca 

 tribes who populated a dozen ragged villages across New York ; but 

 the cognate Neutral of Ontario and the Huron near Georgian Bay 

 were never part of the great League, which the Tuscarora of North 

 Carolina joined as the sixth nation in 1722.'' In common these 

 tribes shared generalized cultural as well as linguistic similarities 

 that set them in sharp contrast with Algonquian hunters living north 

 of them. But for the individual the local band was society and he 

 knew best his own village and the surrounding woods and fields where 

 he hunted and collected plant foods. Particularly was this true of 

 women who remained at home to till the fields, seldom traveling on 

 tribal business or on the warpath. Villagers discovered and sampled 

 the flora of their local habitats during a continual search for food. 

 Many plants were known or discovered to have medicinal properties, 

 while a few tragic events served to remind the cautious experimenter 

 that certain plants are poisonous so that he must be careful about 



* This article publishes the first part of a longer study, "Herbs and Herbalists among 

 the Iroquois Indians," which Is the further extension of a preliminary report entitled "An 

 Herbarium from the Allegany Senecas," published in The Historic Annals of Southwestern 

 New York, pp. 787-706, edited by Doty, Congdon, and Thornton. Lewis Historical PubL 

 Co., New York, 1940. 



* For the territories of the Iroquoian tribes see the maps and the writer's paper in Essays 

 in Historical Anthropology of North America, Smithsonian Misc. Coll., vol. 100, 1940. 



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