The historical significance given to the legend of Hiawatha by the coherent narrative so ingeniously deduced by Mr. Horatio Hales from _The Iroquois Book of Rites_, points to a long-past era of beneficent rule and social progress among the Huron-Iroquois. But the era is pre-Columbian, if not mythic. The pipe of peace had been long extinguished, and the buried tomahawk recovered, when the early French explorers were brought into contact with the Iroquois and Hurons. The history of their deeds, as recorded by the Jesuit Fathers from personal observation, is replete with the relentless ferocity of the savage. War was their pastime; and they were ever ready to welcome the call to arms. La Salle came in contact with them on the discovery of the Illinois; and Captain John Smith, the founder of Virginia, encountered their canoes on the Chesapeake Bay bearing a band of Iroquois warriors to the territories of the Powhattan confederacy. They were then, as ever, the same fierce marauders, intolerant of equality with any neighbouring tribe. The Susquehannocks experienced at their hands the same fate as the Alligéwi. The Lenapes, Shawnees, Nanticokes, Unamis, Delawares, Munsees, and Manhattans, were successively reduced to the condition of dependent tribes. Even the Canarse Indians of Long Island were not safe from their vengeance; and their power seems to have been dreaded throughout the whole region from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.
It thus appears probable that in remote centuries, before the discovery of America by European voyagers, the region extending westward from the Labrador coast to Lake Ontario, if not, indeed, to Lake Huron, had been in occupation by those who claimed to be autochthones, and who were known and feared far beyond their own frontiers. But though thus maintaining a haughty predominancy; so far as their arts afford any evidence, they were in their infancy. The country occupied by them, except in so far as it was overgrown with the forest, was well adapted for agriculture; and the Iroquois and Hurons alike compared favourably with the Algonkins in their agricultural industry. A confirmatory evidence of exceptional superiority among this remarkable race is that their women were held in unwonted respect. They had their own representatives in the council of the tribe; and exercised considerable influence in the choice of a chief. But on them devolved all domestic labour, including the cultivation of their fields. This work was entirely carried on by the women, while the share of the men in the joint provision of food was the product of the chase. The beautiful region was still so largely under forest that it must have afforded abundant resources for the hunter; but it furnished no facilities for the inauguration of a copper or bronze age, such as the shores of Lake Superior in vain offered to its Algonkin nomads. Of metallic ores they had no knowledge; and while they doubtless prized the copper brought occasionally from Lake Superior, copper implements are rare in the region which they occupied. Their old alliance with the Algonkins of the great copper region had long come to an end; and when brought under the notice of the French and English colonists, the Algonkins had joined with the Hurons as the implacable foes of the Iroquois confederacy.