Note 18 — HISTORY OF THE RACE.

This is certainly a dignified and wise answer; designed as it was, to cover their disastrous defeat and flight from the St. Lawrence valley to the north. The precedence to which he alludes, on reaching the straits of Detroit, as having been theirs before, is to be understood, doubtless, of the era of their residence on the lower St. Lawrence, where they were at the head of the French and Indian confederacy against the Iroquois. Among the latter, they certainly had no precedency, so far as history reaches. Their council fire was kept by the Onondagas.