46 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
at home and with other communities. And, on the other hand, a tribe or 
nation of selfish and quarrelsome people, whatever may be their state of 
culture, will have a selfish and quarrelsome government. 
It was my fortune to carry forward the investigations of my friend, 
Mr. Morgan, under circumstances somewhat more favourable than those 
which had enabled him to achieve such admirable results. The league 
which he so well describes was not studied by him in its complete frame 
and living action, but only in its fragments, and from the reports of 
former members, long after its disruption and the exile of the great 
body of its component tribes. As is well known, the majority of the 
Six Nations, under the influence of Sir William Johnson and his family, 
adhered to the British side in the American War of Independence, and 
at its close removed to Canada. There, on land that had once been 
under the rule of the confederacy, comprising the fertile plains which bor- 
der the Grand River, and which now form part of the county of Brant (so 
named from their leading war-chief), they restored, or rather continued, 
their political system, in all its primitive forms and vigour, which it still 
retains. Of this system I have given a brief account in a paper read 
before the American Association for the Advancement of Science at its 
annual meeting in 1881, and published in the proceedings of that year, 
and a much fuller description in a volume entitled “The Iroquois Book of 
Rites,’ published in 1883 in Dr. Brinton’s well-known Library of Amer- 
ican Aboriginal Literature. The particulars comprised in these descrip- 
tions were mainly gathered during many visits to the “Six Nations’ 
Reserve,” near Brantford, Ont., and in great part through the invaluable 
mediation and assistance of my late friend, Chief George H. M. Johnson, 
whose hospitable home (from which he took his Indian name of Onwanon- 
syshon, “ Lord of the Great House” )—an elegant and stately mansion 
known as * Chiefswood,” embowered in a fine park and overlooking the 
“wide and winding” Grand River—was my agreeable abode during these 
visits. 
‘I may be pardoned for a few personal references to this much 
esteemed friend and his family. Mr. Johnson was both an [Iroquois chief 
and an, Anglo-Canadian gentleman, and in both capacities was highly 
respected. He was the son of a leading chief, who had held for many 
years the office of Speaker of the Six Nations’ Council, and had been 
noted for his silver-tongued eloquence. This chief was himself of half- 
blood origin, as was also his wife. Chief George traced his pedigree on the 
one side to a high Anglo-American source, and on the other to one of the 
great chiefs, fifty in number, who were the chosen colleagues of the 
founder of the league. This founder was the famous Hiawatha—no 
mythological personage, but an Onondaga chief,—who lived about four cen- 
turies ago, and whose name, and the names of his companions in the first 
council, descended, like those of the first two Cæsars, or like the terri- 
