their genesis of things. These three palisaded strongholds and their outlying hamlets made up the Mohawk (or Canienga) nation. It was likened, in the beautiful figurative language of the Iroquois, to a group of families gathered round a hearth or council fire, and filling up one end of the Long House or Great League of the Five Nations, founded by Hiawatha and his friends. The duty of the Caniengas of the Mohawk Valley was to guard the eastern entrance of the Long House, or the door which looked out on the Hudson. Their privilege was to furnish the great war-chief that should lead the people of the League to battle.

The proud Senecas, whose portion of the house extended from Seneca Lake to Niagara, were the western doorkeepers of this household of nations, waging fierce war on their neighbors near Lake Erie. The wily Onondagas, wise old politicians, in the middle of the Long House, at Onondaga Lake, led in council. Their leading chief, the elected president of this first American republic, lit the central council-fire and sat in state among the fifty oyanders (sachems) who formed the Iroquois senate. Ten of these were always Caniengas (or Mohawks), and fourteen were Onondagas. These two nations and the Senecas were called brothers; while the intermediate Oneidas and Cayugas were always spoken of as nephews, because they were younger and less important nations, with fewer oyanders.

Tekakwitha's father may have been one of the ten Mohawk oyanders, but there is more reason to believe that he belonged to a class of war-chiefs who took part only in councils of war. In 1656 these war-chiefs were very influential, for the Iroquois had set out on a wild career of conquest, the warlike Mohawks as usual taking the lead. The very same year that the little Mohawk-Algonquin was born in their land, they swept like a tornado over Isle Orleans, near Quebec. They carried off to their castles the last remnant of the Huron people, who, far from their own land, had gathered near the French guns for protection. These Hurons from the shores of Lake Huron belonged to the Iroquois stock, as distinguished from the Algonquin races. In very early times they had come down to the settlements on the St. Lawrence to trade with the French, and zealous Jesuit missionaries had accompanied them on their return to their own country. After great hardships these missionaries had succeeded in making them Christians, when, as the final result of an old feud, these Huron-Iroquois, as they are often called, were driven from their homes in the Northwest by the Iroquois of the League, and wiped completely out of existence as a nation. Six of the Jesuits who dwelt among them, and whose strange isolated lives have furnished the theme for Parkman's glowing pages, were massacred, while others were cruelly tortured by the ubiquitous Mohawks during the period of ten short years that elapsed between Jogues' last captivity and Tekakwitha's birth. Could the father of the Mohawk Lily have reddened his hands in their blood? It is more than likely; for though Ondessonk or Jogues was the only one of these martyrs who had reached the Mohawk Valley, they were all slain by Mohawk braves,—Jogues, Daniel, Brebeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, and Garreau; nor is this a complete list of the victims. To use once more the words of John Gilmary Shea, historian of these and their fellow pioneers,—

"Fain would we pause to follow each in his labors, his trials, and his toils; recount their dangers from the heathen Huron, the skulking Iroquois, the frozen river, hunger, cold, and accident; to show Garnier wrestling with the floating ice, through which he sank on an errand of mercy; Chabanel struggling on for years on a mission from which every fibre of his nature shrunk with loathing; Chaumonot compiling his grammar on the frozen earth; or the heroic Brebeuf, paralyzed by a fall, with his collar-bone broken, creeping on his hands and feet along the road and sleeping unsheltered on the snow when the very trees were splitting with cold," and later, "as a martyr, one of the most glorious in our annals for the variety and atrocity of his torments."

This last-mentioned blackgown, John de Brebeuf, called Echon by the Hurons, was a writer of valuable works on the Indian language and customs. He belonged to a noble family of Normandy; and on account of his great natural courage and soldierly bearing, his agony was prolonged by the savages with fiendish ingenuity, till finally, failing to wring a sigh of pain from his lips, they "clove open his chest, took out his noble heart, and devoured it," as a medicine to make them fearless-hearted.

The fortitude of a brave man under torture was a spectacle as keenly appreciated by the Iroquois as were the gladiator fights and martyrdoms of old by the Romans. The women in this case, however, instead of decreeing death by turning down their own thumbs, were granted the less fatal and less dainty privilege of sawing off the thumb of the victim, as in the case of Jogues at Ossernenon. The human torches of Nero, who had the early Christians wrapped in straw and placed in his garden on the Palatine Hill, then set on fire to illuminate his evening revels, are vividly recalled by the death of Brebeuf's companion, the delicate and gentle Gabriel Lalemant. He was wrapped in pieces of bark which were put in a blaze. His writhing frame and quivering flesh contrasted finely with the stoic endurance of Brebeuf, and the Iroquois kept him alive till morning, leaving his body at last a black and shapeless mass.

These gifted men living and dying in the wilderness were not without devoted followers, as can well be imagined; and many of their converts, the Christian Hurons, a now conquered race, dwelt with their old foes in the Long House. With the capture of those of the Hurons who had taken refuge at Isle Orleans the long struggle ended between two branches of a great Indian family or stock,—the Huron-Iroquois and the Iroquois of the League. Once victorious, it was the policy of the Five Nations of the League to quit all enmity, and to give the vanquished a home in their midst. Though the Hurons lost their national existence when thus adopted into the League, they did not lose their Christian faith. They clung to it in the midst of all the wild superstitions of their conquerors. They explained it to others as well as they could, and they welcomed with glad hearts any blackgown who was brave enough to tread in the footsteps of Jogues.

Such an one was Father Lemoyne, who came and went five times among the Onondagas and the Mohawks between the years 1653 and 1658, even while they were at war with his countrymen on the St. Lawrence. On a hurried visit to Fort Orange, the nearest colony of Europeans, he told the people there of the salt springs which are now a source of wealth at Syracuse; but the worthy burghers were incredulous and put it down in their records as "a Jesuit lie." These early settlers of our State, in spite of such occasional indications of prejudice, were a kind-hearted and a peace-loving people, always ready to do friendly offices for men who, unlike their rivals the Canadian traders, seemed to value the souls of the Indians more than their beaver-skins. They had already rescued two Jesuits, Jogues and Bressani, from captivity; and they afterwards sent Father Lemoyne a bottle of wine with which to say Mass at Onondaga. This last missionary the Indians now called Ondessonk, in memory of Jogues. He visited the Mohawks in 1656 to console the Huron exiles from Isle Orleans, and at the same time he reproached the Mohawk warriors for their cruelty.

This, of course, was little to the taste of Tekakwitha's pagan father, who took care, no doubt, that the blackgown should have no intercourse