Note 15 — Chapter I · INTRODUCTORY.—INDIAN TRIBES EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

For traditions of the Iroquois see Schoolcraft, Notes, Chap. IX. Cusick, History of the Five Nations, and Clark, Hist. Onondaga, I.

Cusick was an old Tuscarora Indian, who, being disabled by an accident from active occupations, essayed to become the historian of his people, and produced a small pamphlet, written in a language almost unintelligible, and filled with a medley of traditions in which a few grains of truth are inextricably mingled with a tangled mass of absurdities. He relates the monstrous legends of his people with an air of implicit faith, and traces the presiding sachems of the confederacy in regular descent from the first Atotarho downwards. His work, which was printed at the Tuscarora village, near Lewiston, in 1828, is illustrated by several rude engravings representing the Stone Giants, the Flying Heads, and other traditional monsters.