BUFFALO SOCIETY OF NATURAL SCIENCES 367 



missionary effort and warfare, by the steady growth of English 

 influence, a recognition on the part of the English of the great 

 value of the Senecas as a friendly buffer nation, and by incessant 

 warring of the Senecas with other Indians and with the French. 

 As ' 'pride cometh before a fall' ' so was the highest note of Seneca 

 arrogance struck in the years just preceding the ruin wrought at 

 the hands of the French, which terminated this eventful period. 



The Testimony of Recorded History. 



THE SENECA COUNTRY. 



At this time the country of the Senecas was called by the 

 French "Sonnontouan" or "Tsonnontouan" and the people 

 "Sonnontouans", or "Senecas". The word "Sonnontouan" is 

 sometimes applied, wrongly I think, to different villages of the 

 Senecas. Mr. A. C. Parker, (*l) following Gen. John S. Clarke, 

 calls Totiatko "Sonnontouan". There can be little doubt, how- 

 ever, that Sonnontouan was the general name for the Seneca 

 country, not the name of a Seneca town. Galinee, in his map, 

 expressly shows four villages with the notation "4 villages of 

 the Sonnontouans". Yet on later maps, notably that of Lewis 

 Evans, of 1755 and Governor Pownal, of 1776, a Seneca town is 

 n amed Chenandoanes. 



Sonnontouan, or the country of the Senecas, at this period 

 was understood by the French and English to mean an indefinite 

 territory south of Lake Ontario, west of the Cayugas. Of its 

 delimitations they knew nothing. We know now in a general 

 way that the Seneca country lay south of Lake Ontario in the 

 Genesee valley, probably, for a part of the period at least, entirely 

 east of that river, and running eastward until it met the Cayuga 

 country, approximately at Seneca Lake. Westward at that time 

 there could have been no boundary, at least in New York. The 

 overthrow of the Neuters in 1651 by the combined arms of the 

 Five Nations left the country between the Genesee River and the 

 Detroit River for many years an unoccupied wilderness and in 

 this wilderness the Senecas certainly established a few villages, 

 probably bases for hunting parties. Southward, also, we know of 

 no boundary. At the very beginning of this period the Senecas 

 overthrew their Iroquoian kin, the Eries, whose seat was south 



fc i A. C. Parker, Iroquois Uses of Maize, p 35. 



