14 HISTORY OF him back definitely but to a comparatively recent period, and tradition with her fabulous tongue goes not much farther. The most probable hypothesis is, that the Aborigines came over by Behring's Straits, and gradually spreading eastvrard and southward, until in the lapse of ages they had peopled the whole western hemisphere. Their aggregate numbers cannot definitely be known, as no census has been taken, and there are doubtless many tribes inhabiting the unexplored interior of the Great West, of whose numbers we can form no idea. In North America, at the outbreak of the Revolution, they are estimated to have exceeded three millions. Since that period they have been rapidly decreasing; many powerful tribes have become extinct, while but scanty remnants of others remain. In our own State, but a few hundred souls are left, who are provided for by the State government. They are principally descendants of the Six Nations, but constitute but a meagre representative of the courage, fortitude, and prowess, which has so characterized their ancestors. And the historian, whose duty it is to view with impartial and candid judgment the acts and actors of the past, cannot do less than to pay a passing tribute to the native Indian. At the time the Dutch landed at Albany, in 1620, New York was possessed by Five Confederate Nations, or tribes, and their dependents. Their names were the Mohawks, who occupied the country westward from Albany, and south of the Mohawk river to the German Flatts, a distance of ninety miles ; the Oneidas, still farther westward, through whose ter- ritory ran the division line of 1768, referred to in the previous chapter ; the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas, whose territory lay still farther to the west and south. Although distinct and powerful tribes, and who acted separately in mat- ters pertaining only to themselves, yet, in cases of emergency, a confederacy or congress of the chiefs and braves of each i{ resj)ective nation assembled around the common council fire, I
