IROQUOIS — FENTON 415 



a good watch over his door (p. 267). Another time all the houses 

 in the environs of a neighboring town were decked out with wooden 

 masks and straw figures within 48 hours of the sorcerer's edict (p. 

 231). 



Surely, if these practices had been current among the Five Nations 

 of New York at this time, the Jesuits who visited them during the 

 next few decades would have mentioned the masked ceremonies 

 which they knew from Huronia. Instead, Dablon and Chaumonot, 

 who witnessed the Midwinter Festival at Onondaga during 1656, are 

 silent about masks but describe their host, covering himself with 

 corn husks from head to foot, who went accompanied by two women 

 with blackened faces and bodies covered with wolf skins. Each 

 woman carried a club or a great stake.^^ Beschefer, who accom- 

 panied De Nonville's expedition against the Seneca, wrote in the "Rela- 

 tions" of 1687 to Villermont : 



I was mistaken when I told you that the Iroquois wore no masks. They make 

 some very hideous ones with pieces of wood, which they carve according to 

 their fancy. When our people burned the villages of the Tsonnontouans 

 (Seneca), a young man made every effort in his power to get one that an 

 outaouae (Ottawa) had found in a cabin, but the latter would not part with it. 

 It was a foot and a half long, and wide in proportion; 2 pieces of a kettle, 

 very neatly fitted to it, and pierced with a small hole in the center, represented 

 the eyes.28 



Beauchamp holds that since the Seneca had one Huron town after 

 1648, the Huron may have introduced the False-face Society to the 

 Seneca, from whence it spread through the other nations of the 

 Confederacy. Lafitau, who bolstered his Mohawk observation with 

 the earlier "Jesuit Relations," says masks were made from the bark 

 of trees.'^ Jolm Bartram, the Philadelphia naturalist, recorded an 

 unmistakable description of a False-face beggar who kept him awake 

 at Onondaga in 1743. 



... we were entertained by a comical fellow, disguised in as odd a dress 

 as Indian folly could invent ; he had on a clumsy vizard of wood colour'd black, 

 with a nose 4 or 5 inches long, a grinning mouth set awry, furnish'd with long 

 teeth, round the eyes circles of bright brass, surrounded by a larger circle of 

 white paint, from his forehead hung long tresses of buffaloes hair, and from the 

 catch part of his head ropes made of the plaited husks of Indian corn; I can 

 not recollect the whole of his dress, but that it was equally uncouth: he 

 carried in one hand a long staff, in the other a calabash with small stones ia 

 it, for a rattle, and this he rubbed up and down his staff; he would sometimes 

 hold up his head and make a hideous noise like the braying of an ass; . . . 

 In my whim I saw a vizard of this kind hang by the side of one of their 

 cabins to another town.^o 



«0p. cit, vol. 42, p. 154. 



» Op. cit., vol. C3. p. 289. 



^Lafltau, P. F., Mceurs des sauvages Ameriquains, vol. 1, p. 368. Paris, 1724. 



"Bartram, John, Observations on the inhabitants, climate, soil, rivers, productions, 

 animals ... in Travels from Pennsilvania (sic) to Onondaga, Oswego and Lalie Ontario, 

 p. 43. London, 1751 (reprinted at Geneva, N. Y.. 1895). 



