Note Back to Main Text — Chapter I · ANCIENT AMERICA.

After the Five Nations had been supplied with firearms by the Dutch their power increased with portentous rapidity.[48] At first they sought to persuade their neighbours of kindred blood and speech, the Eries and others, to join their confederacy; and failing in this they went to war and exterminated them.[49] Then they overthrew one Algonquin tribe after another until in 1690 their career was checked by the French. By that time they had reduced to a tributary condition most of the Algonquin tribes, even to the Mississippi river. Some writers have spoken of the empire of the Iroquois, and it has been surmised that, if they had not been interfered with by white men, they might have played a part analogous to that of the Romans in the Old World; but there is no real similarity between the two cases. The Romans acquired their mighty strength by incorporating vanquished peoples into their own body politic.[50] No American aborigines ever had a glimmering of the process of state-building after the Roman fashion. No incorporation resulted from the victories of the Iroquois. Where their burnings and massacres stopped short of extermination, they simply took tribute, which was as far as state-craft had got in the lower period of barbarism. General Walker has summed up their military career in a single sentence: "They were the scourge of God upon the aborigines of the continent."[51]