History, Manners & Customs of Indian Nations (Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States). John Heckewelder
Читать онлайн книгу.
my delineations of their character must be considered to apply; yet, to shew the contrast, I have also delineated some of their present features.
It may be proper to mention in this place, that I have made use of the proper national name of the people whom we call Delawares, which is: “Lenni Lenape.” Yet, as they, in the common way of speaking, merely pronounce the word “Lenape,” I have, in most instances, when speaking of them, used this word singly. I have also made use of the word “Mengwe,” or Mingoes, the name by which the Lenape commonly designate the people known to us by the name of the Iroquois, and Five or Six Nations. I shall give at the end a general list of all the names I have made use of in this communication, to which I refer the reader for instruction.
As the Indians, in all their public speeches and addresses, speak in the singular number, I have sometimes been led to follow their example, when reporting what they have said; I have also frequently, by attending particularly to the identical words spoken by them, copied their peculiar phrases, when I might have given their meaning in other words.
On the origin of the Indians, I have been silent, leaving this speculation to abler historians than myself. To their history, and notions with regard to their creation, I have given a place; and have also briefly related the traditions of the Lenape on the subject of their arrival at, and crossing the river Mississippi, their coming to the Atlantic coast, what occurred to them while in this country, and their retreat back again.
As the relation of the Delawares and Mohicans, concerning the policy adopted and pursued by the Six Nations towards them, may perhaps appear strange to many, and it may excite some astonishment, that a matter of such importance was not earlier set forth in the same light, I shall here, by way of introduction, and for the better understanding of the account which they give of this matter, examine into some facts, partly known to us already, and partly now told us in their relation; so that we may see how far these agree together, and know what we may rely upon.
It is conceded on all sides that the Lenape and Iroquois carried on long and bloody wars with each other; but while the one party assert, that they completely conquered the other, and reduced them by force to the condition of women, this assertion is as strongly and pointedly denied by the other side; I have therefore thought that the real truth of this fact was well deserving of investigation.
The story told by the Mingoes to the white people, of their having conquered the Lenape and made women of them, was much too implicitly believed; for the whites always acted towards the Delawares under the impression that it was true, refused even to hear their own account of the matter, and “shut their ears” against them, when they attempted to inform them of the real fact. This denial of common justice, is one of the principal complaints of the Lenape against the English, and makes a part of the tradition or history which they preserve for posterity.
This complaint indeed, bears hard upon us, and should, at least, operate as a solemn call to rectify the error, if such it is found to be; that we, in our history, may not record and transmit erroneous statements of those Aborigines, from whom we have received the country we now so happily inhabit. We are bound in honour to acquit ourselves of all charges of the kind which those people may have against us, who, in the beginning welcomed us to their shores, in hopes that “they and we would sit beside each other as brothers;” and it should not be said, that now, when they have surrendered their whole country to us, and retired to the wilds of a distant country, we turn our backs upon them with contempt.
We know that all Indians have the custom of transmitting to posterity, by a regular chain of tradition, the remarkable events which have taken place with them at any time, even often events of a trivial nature, of which I could mention a number. Ought we then, when such a source of information is at hand, to believe the story told by the Six Nations, of their having conquered the Lenape, (a powerful nation with a very large train of connexions and allies) and forcibly made them women? Ought we not, before we believe this, to look for a tradition of the circumstances of so important an event; for some account, at least, of the time, place, or places, where those battles were fought, which decided the fate of the Lenape, the Mohicans, and of a number of tribes connected with them? Are we to be left altogether ignorant of the numbers that were slain at the time, and the country in which this memorable event took place; whether on the St. Lawrence, on the Lakes, in the country of the conquerors, or of the conquered? All these I am inclined to call first considerations, while a second would be: How does this story accord with the situation the first Europeans found these people in on their arrival in this country? Were not those who are said to be a conquered people, thickly settled on the whole length of the sea coast, and far inland, in and from Virginia to and beyond the Province of Maine, and had they not yet, at that very time, a great National Council Fire burning on the banks of the Delaware? Does not the joint tradition of the Delawares, Mohicans and Nanticokes, inform us, that their great National Council House3 then extended from the head of the tide on the (now) Hudson river, to the head of the tide on the Potomack? All this we shall find faithfully copied or written down from their verbal tradition, and that this Council House “was pulled down by the white people!”4 and of course was yet standing when they came into the country; which alone is sufficient to prove that the Lenape, at that time, were not a conquered people; and if they had been conquered since, we might expect to find the fact, with its particulars, somewhere on record.
It is admitted, however, by the Lenape themselves, that they and their allies were made women by the Iroquois. But how did this happen? Not surely by conquest, or the fate of battle. Strange as it may appear, it was not produced by the effects of superior force, but by successful intrigue. Here, if my informants were correct, and I trust they were, rests the great mystery, for the particulars of which, I refer the reader to the history of the Lenape and Mohicans themselves, as related in part by Loskiel in his “History of the Mission of the United Brethren among the North American Indians,”5 and in this work. In the first, he will find three material points ascertained, viz. 1st, “that the Delawares were too strong for the Iroquois, and could not be conquered by them by force of arms, but were subdued by insidious means. 2d, that the making women of the Delawares was not an act of compulsion, but the result of their own free will and consent; and 3d, that the whites were already in the country at the time this ceremony took place, since they were to hold one end of the great Peace Belt in their hands.”6 In the following History, which I have taken from the relation of the most intelligent and creditable old Indians, both Delawares and Mohicans, not only the same facts will be found, but also a more minute account of this transaction; in which it will be shewn, that the Dutch not only were present at, but were parties to it, that it was in this manner that the Six Nations were relieved from the critical situation they were in, at that very time, with regard to their enemies, the Delawares, Mohicans, and their connexions, and that the white people present coaxed and persuaded them to cause the hatchet to be buried, declaring at the same time7 that they “would fall on those who should dig it up again;” which was, on the part of the Hollanders, a declaration of war against the Delawares and their allies, if they, or any of them, should attempt again to act hostilely against the Six Nations. All this, according to the tradition of the Lenape, was transacted at a place, since called “Nordman’s Kill,” a few miles from the spot where afterwards Albany was built, and but a short time after the Dutch had arrived at New York Island, probably between the years 1609 and 1620.
The Rev. Mr. Pyrlæus,8 who had learned the Mohawk language of Conrad Weiser, and was stationed on the river of that name, for some time between the years 1742 and 1748, has noted down in a large manuscript book, that his friend there, the Mohawk chief, had told him, that at a place about four miles from Albany, now called Nordman’s Kill,10 the first covenant had been made between the Six Nations and the white people; which is in confirmation of the correctness of the above tradition of the Mohicans.11
This was then, according to the best accounts we have, the time when this pretended “conquest” took place; and the Delawares, (as the Six Nations have since said) were by them made women. It was, however, a conquest of a singular nature, effected through duplicity and intrigue, at a council fire, not in battle. “And, (say the Delawares and Mohicans, in their tradition,) when the English took the country from the Dutchemaan, (Hollanders) they stepped into the same alliance