The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization

455 Pages·1992·23.255 MB·English

by  Daniel K. Richter

The Ordeal of the Longhouse
Published for the
Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia,
by the University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill &t London
D A N I EL K. R I C H T ER
The Ordeal of
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The Peoples of the Iroquois
League in the Era of European
Colonization
The Omohundro Institute of Early American The paper in this book meets the guidelines for
History and Culture is sponsored jointly by the permanence and durability of the Committee on
College of William and Mary and the Colonial Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of
Williamsburg Foundation. the Council on Library Resources.
© 1992. The University of North Carolina Press Maps drawn by Kimberley Nichols
All rights reserved This volume received indirect support from an
unrestricted book publication grant awarded to
Manufactured in the United States of America
the Institute by the L. J. Skaggs and Mary C.
07 06 05 04 03 Skaggs Foundation of Oakland, California.
9 8 7 65
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication
Data
Richter, Daniel K.
The ordeal of the longhouse : the peoples of the
Iroquois League in the era of European
colonization / Daniel K. Richter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8078-2.060-1 (cloth: alk. paper). —
ISBN 0-8078-4394-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)
i. Iroquois Indians—History. 2. Iroquois
Indians—First contact with Europeans.
3. Iroquois Indians—Government relations.
I. Institute of Early American History and
Culture (Williamsburg, Va.) II. Title.
E99.I7R53 1992
974.7^04975—dc20
92-53621 CIP
To THOMAS AND MARY
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PREFACE
I did not set out to write a book about the Iroquois. A dozen years before
composing these words, as a graduate student at Columbia University I
submitted a dissertation prospectus for a multiethnic study of the eighteenth-
century Mohawk Valley frontier in New York. My initial questions centered
on the roles that ethnicity and a shared history of group interaction played in
determining allegiances during the American Revolution. I envisioned a
mosaic in which the vitally important native pieces could easily be assembled
from the vast shelf of Iroquois studies already in the library. But I never made
it to the Revolutionary era, nor did I ever dig very deeply into the Dutch,
Scottish, English, and Palatine German experiences in the region. Instead,
sitting alone at a campfire near Albany in 1981 (I was on a research trip and
could not afford a motel room), I concluded that the really interesting
questions lay in an earlier period and on the Indian side of the colonial
frontier.
The result—thanks to a thesis adviser who was either incredibly under-
standing or remarkably willing to see me hang myself with my own rope—
was a too long, narrowly diplomatic, and archaeologically uninformed dis-
sertation on Iroquois history in the seventeenth century. I was well aware of
that work's limitations even as I somehow successfully defended it and
persuaded the Institute of Early American History and Culture to give me
two years of uninterrupted postdoctoral time to turn it into a book. The two
years grew into eight that were increasingly interrupted by teaching and
other scholarly projects, as I learned repeatedly just how enormous a task I
had set for myself.
The literature on specialized aspects of the history, culture, and archaeol-
ogy of the peoples of the Longhouse was so vast and was growing so rapidly
that it often seemed the height of presumption—even folly—to survey a
subject to which scholars have devoted lifetimes of research and on which so
much was already in print. From another direction too, warnings rang that
the topic was beyond my ability. Native American activists were arguing that
it was long past time for Euro-American scholars to cease their document
grubbing and free Indian people to write their own history, on their own
terms, in their own conceptual vocabulary, so that they might retrieve their
past from the colonizers who stole it from them. Small wonder, then, that
{ vii }
when friends and colleagues asked about my project, I often turned the
conversation to some small aspect of Iroquois history, to a remark on the
questioner's own work, to baseball, or to anything else than the apparent
audacity of what I was trying to do.
The alarms continue to sound in my head, but I am more confident than I
once was of the need for an overview of how the peoples of the Iroquois
League, almost universally agreed to be the most significant native Ameri-
can power of the Northeast, fit into our picture of the continent during the
period of European colonization. My primary audience is neither the schol-
arly specialists on the Five Nations nor the Iroquois themselves, although I
trust each will find something worthwhile here. Instead, I hope to reach his-
torians, students, and interested readers who still too often exclude native
peoples from the narrative mainstream of North American development.
This is a story of European colonization viewed from the Indian side of the
frontier.
{ viii Preface }
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Through the long course of researching and writing—which I have come to
call "the Ordeal of The Ordeal of the Longhouse"—I have incurred many
intellectual and personal debts. The living meaning of that financial cliche
becomes apparent only as I begin to tally how little of this book I can actually
claim as my own.
Several institutions provided vital financial support. A predoctoral fellow-
ship from the American Antiquarian Society allowed me to turn six weeks of
funding into half a year at that Worcester, Massachusetts, treasure-house. A
two-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Institute of Early American His-
tory and Culture, which was partially funded by the National Endowment
for the Humanities, gave an opportunity for research, writing, and intellec-
tual networking very rarely enjoyed by someone so early in his scholarly
career as I then was. Subsequently, a National Endowment for the Human-
ities Columbian Quincentennial Fellowship from the Hermon Dunlap Smith
Center for the History of Cartography made possible two productive month-
long summer stints at the Newberry Library, with its unparalleled collection
of secondary and primary sources on native American topics and the intellec-
tual stimulation of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the
American Indian. And, repeatedly, my colleagues on the Dickinson College
Faculty Committee on Research and Development have been generous in
funding various expenses.
The staffs of many libraries and research centers have eased the burden of
research. I particularly want to thank the special collections librarians at the
American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the
Newberry Library, the New York State Archives, and the Van Pelt Library of
the University of Pennsylvania for their care and patience. The Interlibrary
Loan office of the Boyd Lee Spahr Library of Dickinson College cheerfully
fulfilled a number of unusual requests.
On several occasions I have been pleasantly surprised by the generosity of
researchers who have opened their files and their calendars to share their
unpublished findings with me. Richard Dunn and Marianne Wokeck, then of
the Papers of William Penn project at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania,
Charles Hayes, Lorraine Saunders, and Martha Sempowski of the Rochester
Museum and Science Center, Charles Gehring of the New Netherland Proj-
{ ix }