of the English in the wars against the French, they
shook all Canada with the fear of their arms, while to the west they
extended their sway to the Straits of Michilimackinac and the entrance
to Lake Superior. The height of their fame was at the close of the Old
French War in 1763. Their decline and downfall, as a power upon the
continent, followed with the briefest interval. Reduced by incessant
fighting to seventeen hundred warriors, they took the part of England
against the Colonies in 1775. The glorious and the terrible incidents of
the Indian campaigns of the Revolution are familiar as household words.
The peace of 1783 found the Iroquois broken, humbled, homeless,
helpless, before the power of the United States, whose pensioners they
then became and have since remained. The bulk of these tribes still
reside in New York, while fragments of them are found in the extreme
West, having removed under the treaty of 1838.

Such, in brief, is the history of the Iroquois. They were the scourge of
God upon the aborigines of the continent, and were themselves used up,
stock, lash, and snapper, in the tremendous flagellation which was
administered through them to almost every branch, in turn, of the great
Algonquin family. It will not do to say, that, but for the Iroquois, the
settlement of the country by the whites would not have taken place; yet
assuredly that settlement would have been longer delayed, and have been
finally accomplished with far greater expense of blood and treasure, had
not the Six Nations, not knowing what they did, gone before in savage
blindness and fury, destroying or driving out tribe after tribe which
with them might, for more than one generation at least, have stayed the
western course of European invasion.

[I] The impudent character of these invasions will be best shown by a
recital of the facts in two cases occurring within the year. In 1870-71
the Osages living in Kansas sold their lands under authority of the
government, and accepted a reservation, in lieu thereof, in the Indian
Territory. Scarcely had they turned their faces towards their new home
when a sort of race began between them and some hundreds of whites,
which may be described, in the language of boys, as having for its
object "to see which should get there first." In October, 1871, the
agent reported that five hundred whites were on the Osage lands, and
actually in possession of the Osage village, while the rightful owners
were enca