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The union of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk peoples is known as the Iroquois League. (Some historians of North American native culture, who suggest that the confederacy was probably formed by the early sixteenth century, view its formation as a defensive response to warfare with neighboring Huron and other Algonquian-speaking tribes.)
The League’s Five Nations are Iroquoian speakers, occupying a territory comprising present New York's Mohawk Valley and Finger Lakes region, bordered on the north by Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks and on the south by the Catskills and what today approximates the New York-Pennsylvania state line.
According to Iroquois legend, Deganawidah, a leader of divine status, had persuaded the Five Nations to give up intertribal warfare, marked by blood feud and cannibalism.
The Mohawk prophet Hiawatha, Deganawidah's earthly spokesman, had doggedly traveled among the five tribes in an attempt to unify them.
His persistence had succeeded, and the tribes had united in what has proven to be a nearly invulnerable political alliance.
The dates he lived are not fixed, but after the Mohawk joined the union, the Seneca nation debated joining the union and there is a tradition of a solar eclipse happening.
The most likely eclipse for this event was in 1142 AD, which actually fell over the land of the Seneca.
Carbon dating of sites of habitation of the Onondaga shows dates starting close to 1200AD ± 60 years.
Sporadic warfare and raiding against tribes outside the league afford opportunities for young Iroquois warriors to earn prestige and honor.
Initially, conquest and the gaining of economic and political advantages are of secondary importance.
The league is patterned after existing family, clan, and community organizations; its aim is not only to unite its members through symbolic kinship relationships but also to maintain the autonomy of individual tribal members.
An Onondaga site, centrally located, had been chosen as the meeting place for the league’s annual Grand Council, which consists of fifty life-appointed male sachems, or peace chiefs, who are nominated by the headwoman of certain sachem-producing lineages in each clan.
The Onondaga have fourteen sachems, the Cayuga ten, the Oneida and Mohawk nine each, and the Seneca eight.
The Onondaga are designated "keepers of the fire" and "wampum keepers," thus becoming the unofficial capital and the national archives of the league.
After lengthy ratification procedures, the council members had become responsible for keeping the internal peace, representing the body of tribes to outsiders, and coordinating tribal activities in unified warfare against nonmembers.
The league, a highly democratic political organization, arrives at major decisions through unanimity, compensating for otherwise unequal tribal representation.
An individual sachem can be deposed through impeachment proceedings initiated by his lineage's headwoman.
...until they find themselves at an Iroquois fort, probably one belonging to the Onondagas.
Pressured by the Hurons to attack prematurely, the assault fails.
Champlain is wounded twice in the leg by arrows, one in his knee.
The attack lasts three hours until they are forced to flee.
The indecisive Hurons have proven undependable as comrades-in-arms, and the French have provoked the eternal enmity of the powerful Mohawks, the easternmost of the Five Nations.
Some of the Iroquois tribes, notably the Oneida and Onondaga, have peaceful relations with the French but are under control of the Mohawk, who are the strongest tribe in the Confederation and harbor animosity towards the French presence.
The Iroquois Confederacy of five nations—the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca—continue to battle the Hurons, another Iroquoian tribe, for control of the fur trade.
Iroquois raids throughout the 1640s and 1650s devastate New France and drastically reduce the Hurons and their Algonquian allies.
The Iroquois launch a devastating attack into the heart of Huronia in 1649, destroying several key villages and killing hundreds, if not thousands, among whom are the Jesuit missionaries Jean Brebeuf, Charles Garnier, and Gabriel Lallemant, all of whom are considered martyrs of the Catholic Church.
Following these attacks, the remaining Hurons, reduced from fifteen thousand to five hundred members, disperse to seek refuge on the islands in the Great Lakes, leaving the Ottawa to later fill the vacuum in the fur trade with the French.
The Iroquois begin to attack the French in the early 1650s.
Some of the Iroquois Nations, notably the Oneida and Onondaga, have peaceful relations with the French but are under control of the Mohawk.
The latter are the strongest nation in the Confederacy and are hostile to the French presence.
After a failed peace treaty negotiated by Chief Canaqueese, Iroquois war parties move north into New France along Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River.
They attack and blockade Montreal.
A raid on an isolated farm or settlement typically consists of a war party moving swiftly and silently through the woods, swooping down suddenly, and wielding a tomahawk and a scalping knife to attack the inhabitants.
Prisoners, especially women and children, are in many cases brought back to the Iroquois homelands and are adopted into the nations.
European diseases had taken their toll on the Iroquois and neighbors in the years preceding the war, and their populations have drastically declined.
To replace lost warriors, the Iroquois work to integrate many of their captured enemy by adoption into their own tribes.
They work to keep their captured enemies happy.
They invite Jesuits into their territory to teach those who had converted to Christianity.
One priest records, "As far as I can divine, It is the design of the Iroquois to capture all the Huron...put the Chiefs to death...and with the rest to form one nation and country."
The Jesuits also reach out to the Iroquois, many of whom convert to or add Catholicism to indigenous belief.
They are to play an important part in the years to come.
Fine hundred Iroquois die suddenly from an epidemic of smallpox, a European infectious disease to which they have no immunity, in 1655.
The Iroquois had invited the French to establish a trading and missionary settlement at Onondaga (present-day New York state) in 1654.
The Mohawk in the following year attack and expel the French from this trading post, possibly because of the smallpox deaths.