USS Iroquois

“ Once a tribe of the Iroquois became very warlike and cruel. They liked to follow the warpath rather than the hunting trails.
These warriors thought only of the war dance. They forgot to give thanks for the sweet waters of the maple, and for the planting season. Neither did they remember to praise the Great Spirit, in song and dance, for the juicy strawberries, and the waving green corn, as once they had done.
To fight was the one desire of their lives, the one thought that filled their minds. They boasted that none were so fierce and bloodthirsty as they. ”

“ It is reported that the Iroquois sailed from Trinidad on the 2nd November, and that there are three ships of war of the enemy at St. Thomas', one sail vessel, and two steamers; and that one of these was expected here last night. She has not yet made her appearance. It will be difficult for her to prevent our sailing. At 2.30 P.M. the steam-sloop Iroquois of the enemy made her appearance, coming round the north end of the island. She had at first Danish colours flying, but soon changed them for her own. ”

“ The Iroquois much outnumbered their foes. There were some two hundred of them in all, tall, powerful men, the boldest warriors of America, whose steady march excited Champlain's admiration as he saw them filing from their barricade and advancing through the woods. As for himself and his two companions, they had remained concealed in the canoes, and not even when a landing was made did the Iroquois behold the strangely-clad allies of their hereditary enemies. ”

“ The Iroquois were the terror of every tribe east of the Mississippi. If Champlain could but conquer them, he would make the power of France felt to the Gulf of Mexico.
All night long the Hurons worked, building a tower of timber upon which the Frenchmen could stand, and pick off with their guns those inside the walls.
Two hundred warriors, with shouts and yells, amid a volley of arrows, drag the tower into position. The Iroquois swarm upon the walls, and the fight begins—the Frenchmen firing from the top of the tower, the Iroquois sending back arrows. ”

“ The Iroquois, who preferred to do their fighting on land and who were nearer shore, hastened to the beach and began at once to build a barricade of logs, filling the air of the night with yells of defiance as they worked away like beavers. The allies meanwhile remained on the lake, their canoes lashed together with poles, dancing with a vigor that imperilled their frail barks, and answering the taunts and menaces of their foes with equally vociferous abuse. ”

“ Near the modern town of Ticonderoga the Hurons and Algonkins of Georgian Bay and Ottawa met a party of Iroquois, probably of the Mohawk tribe. The Iroquois had built rapidly a stockade in which to retreat if things should go badly with them, but the battle at first began in the old heroic style with as much ceremony as a French duel. First the allies from the St. Lawrence asked the Iroquois what time it would suit them to begin fighting the next day; then the latter replied: "When the sun is well up, if you don't mind? We can see better then to kill you all." ”

“ So great was the confidence inspired in the breast of this chief, by the use of fire arms, that he pushed into the Iroquois country like a mad man, and performed some feats against a people armed with bows only, which are astonishing.
With only four chiefs to aid him, he left Trois Rivieres, on one occasion, in a single canoe, with fifteen loaded muskets, thus giving three pieces, to each man. Each piece was charged with two balls, joined by a small chain ten inches long. Soon after entering the Sorel river, he encountered five bark canoes of Iroquois, each having ten men. ”

“ Lawrence, the Iroquois were sweeping in a scourge more deadly than smallpox up the Ottawa to the very forests of Georgian Bay. The Hurons no longer dared to go down to Quebec in swarming canoes. Only a few picked warriors—perhaps two hundred and fifty—would venture so near the Iroquois fighting ground. ”

“ The Iroquois have long since disappeared from the face of the earth, but even to-day the Georgian Bay Indians are subject to periodical spasms of terror. Some wild-eyed and imaginative youth sees at sunset a canoe far down the horizon. Immediately the villages are abandoned in haste, and the entire community moves up to the head-waters of streams, there to lurk until convinced that all danger is past. It does no good to tell these benighted savages that they are safe from vengeance, at least in this world. The dreaded name of Iroquois is potent, even across the centuries. ”

“ The Iroquois were always the threatening obstacle. It was affirmed that they had become so debauched by strong drink that their squaws could not nourish their few children, and that they had availed themselves of an adoption of those taken from their enemies. As they obtained their firearms with comparative cheapness from the English on the Hudson and Mohawk, they used them with vigor against the inner tribes with their primitive weapons, and were soon to find them of service against the English on the frontiers of Virginia. ”

“ We will show this Iroquois how a ship can go when she is built on purpose to go. Have the fires drawn forward, Mr. Mathew."
The first officer gave the Captain's orders to the engineer, and soon volumes of black smoke curled from the steamer's chimneys.
This proceeding did not seem to please the corvette, for she made the Dolphin the signal to lie to, but James Playfair paid no attention to this warning, and did not change his ship's course.
"Now," said he, "we shall see what the Iroquois will do; here is a fine opportunity for her to try her guns. Go ahead full speed!" ”

“ The lives of all the men left on the cutter, and the safety of the ship herself, might at any moment become absolutely dependent upon him. If no danger threatened aboard the Iroquois, there might yet be other lives and other ships endangered, and upon how well his instruments were cared for, and how thoroughly the watch was kept, would depend the possibility of catching those far-flung cries for help. ”

“ It organized the chaotic past, and gave concrete forms to Indian nature itself. The people have dwindled and decayed; but, banded by its ties of clan and kin, the league, in feeble miniature, still subsists, and the degenerate Iroquois looks back with a mournful pride to the glory of the past.
Would the Iroquois, left undisturbed to work out their own destiny, ever have emerged from the savage state? Advanced as they were beyond most other American tribes, there is no indication whatever of a tendency to overpass the confines of a wild hunter and warrior life. ”

“ There can be no doubt that we would have fallen into the hands of the Iroquois long ago but for his presence."
"Me and Red Jack—though I believe he likes his name of Lena-Wingo the best—have been on many a hunt together, and he beats anything I ever saw."
"There is no cause for his being otherwise, when he has spent so many years as a hunter and scout. The Iroquois would give a great deal to secure his scalp."
"You can just bet they would, and so would Colonel Butler, Captain Bagley or any of the Tories. You know that the fellow has done too much against the scamps to be forgiven. ”

“ If anything remained to heap the cup of Iroquois resentment to the brim, it was provided the following year, when Champlain again lent his assistance to the Algonquins and Hurons, and, encountering a war-party of Iroquois, a hundred strong, near the mouth of the Richelieu, killed or captured every one of them. The day was to come when the tables would be turned with a vengeance, when the war-cry of the Iroquois would be heard under the walls of Montreal and Quebec, and the death of each of the hundred warriors avenged a hundredfold. ”

“ Only hunters rash with the courage of untried youth would have left the shelter of the fort walls when all the world knew that the Iroquois had been lying in ambush round the little settlement of Three Rivers day and night for the preceding year. Not a week passed but some settler working on the outskirts of Three Rivers was set upon and left dead in his fields by marauding Iroquois. The tortures suffered by Jogues, the great Jesuit missionary who had been captured by the Iroquois a few years before, were still fresh in the memory of every man, woman, and child in New France. ”

“ Though it be true that the Iroquois are subtle, adroit and great cheats, I nevertheless cannot persuade myself that they possess so much intelligence, so much tact, and that they are such great politicians as to have had recourse to the ruses and intrigues imputed to them to destroy the French, the Hurons, the Algonquins, and their allies. ”

“ They linger five days, and then retire to their canoes, carrying Champlain on a litter all the way to Lake Ontario. The Iroquois steal upon them in their retreat, letting fly volleys of arrows, and yelling like hyenas over the defeat of the Hurons. They have discovered that the white men with their guns, after all, are not invincible. ”

“ The Attiwandaronks, or Neutrals, with whom, till this time, the Iroquois had maintained peaceful relations, shared the same fate; for they were the friends of the Hurons and the French. The Eries perished in a war provoked, as the French missionaries in their always trustworthy accounts inform us, by a perverse freak of cruelty on their own part.
Yet, in all these destructive wars, the Iroquois never for a moment forgot the principles which lay at the foundation of their League, and which taught them to "strengthen their house" by converting enemies into friends. ”

“ Of all American Indians the Iroquois were ever preëminent, invincible. The proud races of the furthest south had felt the weight of their tomahawks and the nations that camped about the shores of Lake St. John "kept their sentinels pushed well southward in dread of their fierce invasion." As conquerors of half a continent, the choicest hunting-grounds were theirs, and so the forests, divided by the Oyo, Ohio, which took its rise in the Iroquois home-land south of Lake Ontario, was the nation's choice. ”

“ CHAPTER IX. THE IROQUOIS POLICY. Few popular notions, it may be affirmed, are so far from the truth as that which makes the Iroquois a band of treacherous and ferocious ravagers, whose career was marked everywhere by cruelty and devastation. The clear and positive evidence of historical facts leads to a widely different conclusion. It is not going too far to assert that among all uncivilized races the Iroquois have shown themselves to be the most faithful of allies, the most placable of enemies, and the most clement of conquerors. ”

“ The Iroquois owed their triumphs as much to their sagacity and craft as to their extraordinary boldness and ferocity. It had always been their policy to attack their enemies in detail, and while destroying one to cajole the rest. There seemed little doubt that they would leave the tribes of the lakes in peace till they had finished the ruin of the Illinois; so that if these, the allies of the colony, were abandoned to their fate, there would be time for a profitable trade in the direction of Michillimackinac. ”

“ How did it come to pass that the Iroquois turned to be our enemies? Lifting up the hatchet and scalping knife against us, they left at Cherry Valley, and Wyoming, great blood spots, and along the frontier a line of fire and death. To answer this question, we must go back more than a century and a half. At that time the North American continent was divided between two quite different sorts of Indians, the Five Nations of the Iroquois, who were united in a confederacy, and the much more numerous Algonquins, who lived all around them. ”

“ The Iroquois were the salvation of New York. Their raids into Canada safeguarded the rival colony, and when the Five Nations were not on the warpath, the French hesitated to attack their English allies, for fear of provoking a fresh incursion of savages. It has been seen that the Iroquois tended more and more to a policy of neutrality, worn by constant fighting, tired of English inaction, and discerning that their true interest lay in siding with neither French nor English. ”

“ The Iroquois, in their best days, were the noblest and most interesting of all Indians who have lived on this continent north of Mexico. They were truly the men whom a name they bore described, a word signifying men who surpassed all others. They alone founded political institutions and gained political supremacy. With European civilization unknown to them, they had given birth to self-government in America. ”

“ It was known that the enemy’s steam-sloop, Iroquois, Captain James S. Palmer, had been at the island of Trinidad, on the second of the then current month of November, whence she had returned to St. Thomas—this neutral island being unscrupulously used by the enemy, as a regular naval station, at which there was always at anchor one or more of his ships of war, and where he had a coal-depot. ”

“ The Iroquois reverenced long-standing customs, social position, and the voice of age. War was their trade, but the highest dignities attached to the civil chieftain more than to the successful warrior. They dealt out shameless violence to all beyond their pale, but within the ranks of their own people they recognized much more than mere physical strength or skill in butchery. ”