60 DANIEL WILSON ON THE HUEON-IEOQUOLS OF 



coustitutes the western part of the State of New York, fomid the river valleys and lake 

 shores in occupation of the Iroquois confederacy, then consisting of Mohawks, Oneidas, 

 Onondagas, Cayngas and Senecas. These constituted the five nations of the famous 

 IroqiTois league. But the Hurons of Canada, with whom they were latterly at deadly 

 feud, appear to have been the oldest representatives of the common race, and were still in 

 occupation of their ancestral home when Cartier first explored the St. Lawrence. The 

 same race had spread far to the south ; and its rehires entatives, in detached groups, long- 

 continued to jjerpetuate its influence. These included the Conestogas or Audastes, the 

 Andastogues, the Carantouans, the Cherohakahs or Nottoways, the Tuscaroras, and others, 

 under various names. It is not always easy to recognize the same tribe under its widely 

 dissimilar designations. The Susquehannocks of the English and the Minquas of the 

 Dutch, appear to be the Andastes iinder other names, and Champlain's Carantouans 

 may have been the Eries. Under those and other names the Huron-Iroquois stock 

 extended to the country of the Tuscaroras in North Carolina. Still farther south 

 Grallatin surmised, from linguistic evidence, a connection between the Cherokees and 

 the Iroquois.' This fact Mr. Hale has placed beyond doubt ; and having detected in the 

 langvrage of the former a grammatical structure mainly Huron-Iroquois, while the vocab- 

 ulary is to a great extent foreign, he is inclined to think that we thus recover traces of 

 a people, far south in Alabama and G-eorgia, the descendants of refugees of the 

 conquered Alligéwi, adopted into one of the nations of their Iroqirois conc[uerors." 



From one after another of the outlying southern offshoots of the common stock, addi- 

 tions were made from time to time, to restore the numl)ers of the decimated Iroquois. 

 Westward of the confederacy was the country of the Eries, an offshoot of the Seneca 

 nation, occupying the southern shore of the great lake which perpetuates their name. 

 Immediately to the north of the Eries, within the Canadian frontier, the Attiwendaronks, 

 or Neuters, occupied the peninsula of Niagara, while the Tiontates or Peiuns, and other 

 tribes of the same stock, were settled in the fertile region between Lakes Erie and Huron. 

 In 1Ï14, the Tuscaroras, when driven by the English out of North Carolina, were wel- 

 comed by their Iroquois kinsmen, and received into the league which thenceforth bore 

 the name of the Six Nations. Towards the middle of the same centirry the waste of war 

 made them ready to welcome any additions to their numbers ; and tln^ Tuteloes and Nan- 

 ticokes, both apparently Algonkin, firrnished fresh accessions to the diminished numbers 

 of the confederacy, but without taking their place as distinct nations. 



But of all the nations of the stock thus widely spread westward and southward, the 

 Hurons are the native historical race of Canada, intimately identified with incidents of its 

 early settlement, and of friendly -iutercoui-se with La Nouvelle France. Their language is 

 now recognized as the oldest form of the common speech of the Huron-Iroquois, and it is not 

 creditable to Canadian philologists that its grammar still remains unrepresented in any 

 accurate printed form. The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec did, indeed, pub- 

 lish in its Transactions, in 1831, the translation of a Latin MS., compiled with much 

 industry by a missionary who had la1>oured among thi' Hurons of Lorette, and whose 

 anonymous work was found amongst the papers of the mission. But it is the production 



' Archseologia Americana, vol. ii., p. 173. 

 ^ Indian Migrations, p. 17. 



