The Lenâpé and their Legends. Rafinesque Constantine Samuel
in North Carolina. The Cherokees, found by the whites in East Tennessee, but whose national legend, carefully preserved for generations, located them originally on the head waters of the Ohio, were a remote offshoot of this same stem.
The valley of the Susquehanna river was occupied by a tribe of Iroquois lineage and language, known as the Susquehannocks, Conestogas and Andastes. The last name is Iroquois, from andasta, a cabin pole. By some, "Susquehannock" has also been explained as an Iroquois word, but its form is certainly Algonkin. The terminal k is the place-sign, hanna denotes a flowing stream, while the adjectival prefix has been identified by Heckewelder with schachage, straight, from the direct course of the river near its mouth, and by Mr. Guss with woski, new, which, he thinks, referred to fresh or spring water.
Of these the former will appear the preferable, if we allow for the softening of the gutturals, which was a phonetic trait of the Unami dialect of the Lenape.
The Susquehannocks were always at deadly feud with the Iroquois, and between wars, the smallpox and the whites, they were finally exterminated. The particulars of their short and sad history have been presented with his characteristic thoroughness by Dr. John G. Shea,[5] and later by Prof. N. L. Guss.[6] They were usually called by the Delawares Mengwe, which was the term they applied to all the Iroquois-speaking tribes.[7] The English corrupted it to Minqua and Mingo, and as the eastern trail of the Susquehannocks lay up the Conestoga Creek, and down the Christina, both those streams were called "Mingo Creek" by the early settlers.
It is important for the ethnology of Pennsylvania, to understand that at the time of the first settlement the whole of the Susquehanna Valley, from the Chesapeake to the New York lakes, was owned and controlled by Iroquois-speaking tribes. A different and erroneous opinion was expressed by Heckewelder, and has been generally received. He speaks of the Lenape Minsi as occupying the head waters of the Susquehanna. This was not so in the historic period.
The claims of the Susquehannocks extended down the Chesapeake Bay on the east shore, as far as the Choptank River, and on the west shore as far as the Patuxent. In 1654 they ceded to the government of Maryland their southern territory to these boundaries.[8] The first English explorers met them on the Potomac, about the Falls, and the Pascatoways were deserting their villages and fleeing before them, when, in 1634, Calvert founded his colony at St. Mary's.
Their subjection to the Five Nations took place about 1680, and it was through the rights obtained by this conquest that, at the treaty of Lancaster, 1744, Canassatego, the Onondaga speaker for the Nation, claimed pay from the government of Maryland for the lands on the Potomac, or, as that river was called in his tongue, the Cohongorontas.
The Hurons, Wyandots, or Wendats, were another Iroquois people, who seem, at some remote epoch, to have come into contact with the Lenape. The latter called them Delamattenos[9] and claimed to have driven them out of a portion of their possessions. A Chipeway tradition also states that the Hurons were driven north from the lake shores by Algonkin tribes.[10] We know, from the early accounts of the Jesuits, that there was commercial intercourse between them and the tribes south of the lakes, the materials of trade being principally fish and corn.[11] The Jesuit Relations of 1648 contain quite a full account of a Huron convert who, in that year, visited the Lenape on the Delaware River, and had an interview with the Swedish Governor, whom he took to task for neglecting the morals of his men.
The Cherokees were called by the Delawares Kittuwa (Kuttoowauw, in the spelling of the native Aupaumut). This word I suppose to be derived from the prefix, kit, great, and the root tawa (Cree, yette, tawa), to open, whence tawatawik, an open, i. e., uninhabited place, a wilderness (Zeisberger).
The designation is geographical. According to the tradition of the Cherokees, they once lived (probably about the fourteenth century) in the Ohio Valley, and claimed to have been the constructors of the Grave Creek and other earthworks there.[12] Some support is given to this claim by the recent linguistic investigations of Mr. Horatio Hale,[13] and the archaeological researches of Prof. Cyrus Thomas.[14] They were driven southward by their warlike neighbors, locating their council fire first near Monticello, Va., and the main body reaching East Tennessee about the close of the fifteenth century. As late as 1730 some of them continued to live east of the Alleghanies, while, on the other hand, it is evident, from the proper names preserved by the chroniclers of De Soto's expedition (1542), that at that period others held the mountains of Northern Georgia. To the Delawares they remained kit-tawa-wi, inhabitants of the great wilderness of Southern Ohio and Kentucky.
Delaware traditions distinctly recalled the period when portions of the Cherokees were on the Ohio, and recounted long wars with them.[15] When the Lenape assumed the office of peacemaker, this feud ceased, and was not renewed until the general turmoil of the French-Indian wars, 1750-60. After this closed, in 1768, the Cherokees sought and effected a renewal of their peaceful relations with the Delawares, and in 1779 they even sent a deputation of "condolence" to their "grandfather," the Lenape, on the death of the head chief, White Eyes.[16]
CHAPTER II
The Wapanachki or Eastern Algonkin Confederacy
The Confederated Tribes – The Mohegans – The Nanticokes – The Conoys – The Shawnees – The Saponies – The Assiwikalees
All the Algonkin nations who dwelt north of the Potomac, on the east shore of Chesapeake Bay, and in the basins of the Delaware and Hudson rivers, claimed near kinship and an identical origin, and were at times united into a loose, defensive confederacy.
By the western and southern tribes they were collectively known as Wapanachkik– "those of the eastern region" – which in the form Abnaki is now confined to the remnant of a tribe in Maine. The Delawares in the far West retain traditionally the ancient confederate name, and still speak of themselves as "Eastlanders" —O-puh-narke. (Morgan.)
The members of the confederacy were the Mohegans (Mahicanni) of the Hudson, who occupied the valley of that river to the falls above the site of Albany, the various New Jersey tribes, the Delawares proper on the Delaware river and its branches, including the Minsi or Monseys, among the mountains, the Nanticokes, between Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic, and the small tribe called Canai, Kanawhas or Ganawese, whose towns were on tributaries of the Potomac and Patuxent.
That all these were united in some sort of an alliance, with the Delawares at its head, is not only proved by the traditions of this tribe itself, but by the distinct assertion of the Mohegans and others, and by events within historical times, as the reunion of the Nanticokes, New Jersey and Eastern Indians with the Delawares as with the parent stem.[17]
The Mohegans, Mo-hé-kun-ne-uk, dwelt on the tide-waters of the Hudson, and from this their name was derived. Dr. Trumbull, indeed, following Schoolcraft, thinks that they "took their tribal name from maingan, a wolf, and Moheganick = Chip. maniganikan, 'country of wolves.'"[18] They, themselves, however, translate it, "seaside people," or more fully, "people of the great waters which are constantly ebbing or flowing."[19] The compound is machaak, great, hickan, tide ("ebbing tide," Zeis; "tide of flood," Campanius) and ik, animate plural termination.
The Mohegans on the Hudson are said to have been divided into three phratries, the Bear, the Wolf and the Turtle, of
In a note to Mr. Gowan's edition of George Alsop's
Bozman,
Heckewelder,
Peter Jones,
"The Cherokees had an oration, in which was contained the history of their migrations, which was lengthy." This tradition related "that they came from the upper part of the Ohio, where they erected the mounds on Grave Creek, and that they removed hither [to East Tennessee] from the country where Monticello is situated." This memory of their migrations was preserved and handed down by official orators, who repeated it annually, in public, at the national festival of the green corn dance. J. Haywood,
Prof. Thomas has shown beyond reasonable doubt that the Cherokees were mound builders within the historic period.
Loskiel,
Heckewelder,
Heckewelder,
Trumbull,
Capt. Hendricks, in