Note 39 — History, Manners, and Customs OF THE INDIAN NATIONS. CHAPTER I. HISTORICAL TRADITIONS OF THE INDIANS.

The Reverend C. Pyrlæus, a pupil of Conrad Weiser, of whom he learned the Mohawk language, and who was afterwards stationed on the Mohawk River, as a Missionary, has, in a manuscript book, written between the years 1742 and 1748, page 235, the following note which he received from a principal chief of that nation, viz.: “The Five Nations formerly did eat human flesh; they at one time ate up a whole body of the French King’s soldiers; they say, Eto niocht ochquari; which is: Human flesh tastes like bear’s meat. They also say, that the hands are not good eating, they are yozgarat, bitter.”

Aged French Canadians have told me, many years since, while I was at Detroit, that they had frequently seen the Iroquois eat the flesh of those who had been slain in battle, and that this was the case in the war between the French and English, commonly called the war of 1756.

At a treaty held at the Proprietors house in Philadelphia, July 5th, 1742, with the Six Nations, none of the Senecas attended; the reason of their absence being asked, it was given for answer, “that there was a famine in their country, and that a father had been obliged to kill two of his children, to preserve the lives of the remainder of the family.” See Colden’s History of the Five Nations, part II., page 52. See also the minutes of that treaty, printed at Philadelphia, by B. Franklin, in 1743, p. 7, in the Collection of Indian Treaties in the library of the American Philosophical Society.