ROLL CALL OF IROQUOIS CHIEFS — FENTON 



Scattered places overgrown with brush 

 Where your heads rest in your graves, 

 Where you have it under your heads, 

 What indeed you established (the League). 



Patches of soft lawn cover the places 

 Where you met to legislate, 

 When still you employed all the words, 

 Ye founders of the Great Peace. 



5 



You did erect a great tree (elevate a chief). 

 You have reinforced the house (the League). 



Here the singer turns over the cane, calls upon the founders to listen, 

 and steps out of the longhouse and sets out on the road as he calls the 

 first title Tekariho'kenh. 



The version of Cayuga Chief (Tharles, although in Onondaga, cor- 

 responds closely. Recall that he and Spragg were neighbors and that 

 Charles also had made a set of mnemonic pictographs. His opening 

 verse is longer, and the second begs the pardon of the founders for 

 errors of sequence. The third adds a metaphor, "There the overspread- 

 ing trees ; all is covered with forest" to preface "abandoned fields . . . 

 overgrown with brush." 



The Gibson version, though shorter, opens differently. 



Hear us then ye proprietors. 

 You did complete it, 

 The Great Peace, 

 Hail Grandsires. 



Now it has grown old. 



There indeed it is overgrown with brush. 



Where your bones lie buried. 



Are also the words (laws) as laid down, (etc.) . . . 



Seth Newhouse in his manuscript of 1885 speaks of the Eulogy 

 as "Pacification" or the Confederating Hymn (Ron-wa-di-nonh-senh- 

 deh-thah), attributing it to Dekanawidah, author of the League 

 (Fenton, 1949, p. 145). He succeeded in dividing it into 30 verses 



