THE ARCHEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF NEW YORK I5O 



both their Huron and Iroquois kinsmen respected their ancient 

 authority and the prestige given them by the " Mother of Nations." 

 Thus, the Iroquois Confederacy or Long House came to embrace 

 only the IMohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. The 

 fact that some of their kinsmen would not join the confederacy was 

 displeasing to the Five Nations, who though dedicating their league 

 to the establishment of peace saw grave danger in their neighbors 

 who refused to subscribe to the articles of fr"endship. The new 

 confederacy was soon beset with enemies on all sides who saw in its 

 rising influence a general danger. But the confederacy developed 

 certain mental qualities within its leaders who were not to be over- 

 whelmed. They became astute statesmen as well as ferocious w'ar- 

 riors. They learned the advantage of concerted action, of com- 

 promise among themselves and of organizing mass onslaughts. Thus 

 nation after nation fell before them, — the Erie, the Neutral, the 

 Huron, the Wenro, and the Conestoga. The Cherokee were too far 

 aw^ay to reach effectively. Although the Five Nations lost thou- 

 sands of warriors their foes lost more and the surviving enemy 

 w^ere made captives, led into the Iroquois villages and adopted. This 

 swelled their ranks enormously and virtually united by blood 

 mixture all the Iroquois. 



The triumph did not come to them, however, until the middle of 

 the colonial period, and with this triumph came the golden age of the 

 Five Nations. This w^as from about 1650 to 1755. Before the 

 earlier date their foes had been Indians ; after that date they battled 

 with the white man, it is true, but they lost no power. By 1755. 

 however, the colonists had come in such numbers that the Five 

 Nations saw the end of their ascendancv as a dictatory power. 

 They had come, they had conquered and now they became engulfed 

 in a complex of cultural elements of which their ancestors had never 

 dreamed. 



When one considers how many captives were taken by the Iro- 

 quois tribes, and how extensive their trade and their raids were, it 

 seems little short of marvelous that so few non-Iroquoian articles 

 are found on the sites of their former habitation. Nearly every- 

 thing wx find is unmistakably Iroquois, as if among all the tribes 

 that they met and conquered nothing that they made was worth 

 taking or copying by the Iroquois. They even rejected certain 

 objects, as we have already seen, that ordinarily must have been 

 attractive to them. It is true that some non-Iroquoian articles may 

 have been found, but these are very few and may have been lost 



