INTRODUCTION. 151 
Tartar origin, and found their way there by crossing Behring’s straits. Yet 
another theory derives the aborigines from the Northmen of Europe. This 
theory is based upon the resemblance of the American Indians to the Esqui- 
maux, and between the Esquimaux and the Laplanders. Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill 
maintained this hypothesis. Henry Wheaton, now minister of the United 
States at the court of Berlin, has pursued investigations which, together with 
those of the Swedish antiquaries, have produced a general conviction that the 
Northmen visited the shores of New-England several centuries before the dis- 
covery of America by Columbus; and it is argued that if the bold adventurers 
in the age of Eric the Red could traverse the North seas from Norway to 
Greenland, and thence to the American coast, spirits equally brave might have 
done the same ages before. Other speculators have attempted to trace the 
descent of the American Indians from the Canaanites driven from Palestine by 
Joshua. Grotius and Martyr believed that Yucatan was first peopled by Chris- 
tian Ethiopians; while some regard those races as descendants of the long lost 
ten and a half tribes of the children of Israel.* 
The first colonial historian of the Six Nations was Cadwallader Colden, and 
his work is valuable although it reaches only to a very short period subsequent 
to the peace of Ryswick. The work is certainly good authority as a record of 
facts, and manifests a benevolent spirit and an inquiring genius. It is especially 
interesting also because it shows that each of the Five Nations was a distinct re- 
public, while they were all bound in a confederacy with a grand central council 
at Onondaga. Colden, however, is supposed to have erred in adopting the French 
opinion, that the Five Nations had only recently occupied the country in which 
they were found at the time of the discovery of the continent. David Cusick, 
an educated Tuscarora Indian, about twenty years ago published a history of the 
Six Nations, derived from their traditions. This work, which as a merely literary 
work is without merit, nevertheless establishes the fact, if any reliance can be 
placed on Indian tradition, that the five nations resided in the country now con- 
* Apair, Boupinot, Miuier, M. M. Noau. 
