148 ASSINNIBOINE AND SASKATCHEWAN EXPEDITION. 



Mohawk of the Turtle tribe recognized the Seneca of the Turtle tribe as a 

 relative, and between them existed the bond of kindred blood. In like 

 manner the Oneida of the Hawk tribe received the Onondaga or the Cayuga 

 of the same tribe as a relative, not in an ideal or conventional sense, but as 

 actually connected with him by the ties of consanguinity. Herein we dis- 

 cover an element of union between the five nations, of remarkable vitality 

 and power. A cross-relationship existed between the several tribes of each 

 nation and the tribes of corresponding name in each of the other nations, 

 which bound them together in the league with indissoluble bonds. If 

 either of the nations had wished to cast off the alliance, it would have 

 broken this eight-fold bond of consanguinity. Had the nations fallen into 

 collision with each other, it would have brought Hawk tribe against Hawk 

 tribe — in a word, brother against brother. The history of the Iroquois ex- 

 hibits the wisdom of these organic provisions; for, during the long period 

 through which the league subsisted, they never fell into anarchy, nor even 

 approximated to a dissolution from internal disorders. 



" At no time in the history of the Iroquois could a man marry a woman o 

 his own tribe, even in another nation. All the members of a tribe were 

 within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity ; and to this day, among the 

 descendants of the Iroquois, this law is religiously observed. Husband and 

 wife, therefore, were in every case of different tribes. The children were of 

 the tribe of the mother. Here, then, we discover, one of the central ideas of 

 their laws of descent : to place the father and mother in different tribes, and 

 to assign the children to the tribe of the mother. Several important results 

 followed, of which the most remarkable was, the perpetual disinheritance of 

 the male line. As all titles, as well as property, descended in the female 

 line, and were hereditary in the tribe, the son could never succeed to his 

 father's title of sachem, nor inherit even his tomahawk. 



(( A tribe of the Iroquois, it thus appears, was not, like the Grecian and 

 Roman tribes, a circle or group of families, for two tribes were necessarily 

 represented in every family ; neither, like the Jewish, was it constituted of 

 the lineal descendants of a common father ; on the contrary, it involved the 

 idea of descent from a common mother ; nor has it any resemblance to the 

 Scottish clan, or to the canton of the Switzer. It approaches, however, 

 nearer to the Jewish. Denying geographical boundaries, a tribe of the 

 Iroquois was composed of a part of a multitude of families, as wide spread 

 as the territories of the race, but yet united together by a common tribal 

 bond. The mother, her children, and the descendants of her daughters, in 

 the female line, would, in perpetuity, be linked with the fortunes of her own 

 tribe ; while the father, his brothers and sisters, and the descendants in the 

 female line of his sisters would be united to another tribe, and held by its 

 affinities. No circumstances could work a translation from one tribe to 

 another, or even suspend the nationality of the individual. If a Cayuga 

 woman of the Hawk tribe married a Seneca, her children were of the Hawk 

 tribe and Cayugas, and her descendants in the female line, to the latest 



