A confederacy of five, later six, New York nations, bound by fifty hereditary sachemships under a law tradition credited to the Onondaga lawgiver Dekanawida, that broke the Huron, Erie and Neutral nations, held the balance of French and English power for a century, and split over the American Revolution.
Gradual absorptionMorgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
Languages of administration
Iroquoian languages
Writing system: No cited figure
Core region
Present-day upstate New York, between the Hudson and Niagara rivers
How it was governed
4 of 4 coded
Army raised byHow the fighting force was recruited, not how it fought.
tribal levyContingents raised through kin or tribal structures the ruler did not create
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
Revenue fromWhat the state lived on. The values are unranked: the field cannot express which mattered most.
tributeRevenue received from another polity
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
Succession byThe rule in force, not the outcome. A rule repeatedly violated is still the rule.
matrilineal
electionChosen by a body entitled to choose
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
Right to rule fromThe ground publicly asserted — on coins, in the khutba, in titles.
descentDescent from a house or lineage, publicly invoked
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
Each line is drawn from a source that addresses the question directly. A line reads No cited figure where no source consulted does — never because the answer seemed obvious.
Turning points
6 hinges
14501848
1609
First battle with Europeans, at Lake GeorgeBattle
A Mohawk war party met Samuel de Champlain, allied with the Iroquois' own Algonquian-speaking enemies, on the shore of the lake he named for himself - the first clash between the Iroquois and any European power, and the first time they heard the report of a firearm, "by the marvellous power of which they were then easily vanquished." The French alliance with the Huron and Adirondack against them shaped a century of Iroquois foreign policy in return.
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
1643
The Neutral Nation driven from NiagaraBattle
Armed increasingly with firearms obtained through Dutch trade at Fort Orange, the confederacy expelled the Neutral Nation from the Niagara peninsula and settled the river's mouth permanently - the opening campaign of a decade of wars that gave the Iroquois unmatched military supremacy over their neighboring nations.
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
1653
The Erie nearly exterminatedBattle
A war against the Erie, who held the south shore of Lake Erie east to the Genesee, brought the confederacy close to annihilating that nation outright and left the Iroquois in possession of the whole of western New York and the northern edge of Ohio.
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
1715
The Tuscarora admitted as the sixth nationReform
Expelled from North Carolina after a disastrous war with English colonists, the Tuscarora turned north on the strength of a claimed common origin and were admitted as a constituent nation, settled on Oneida land; the Five Nations became, in English usage, the Six Nations, though the five original nations kept the fifty sachemships for themselves and never seated a Tuscarora sachem among them.
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
1779
Sullivan's campaign in Seneca and Cayuga countryCatastrophe
An American army of four thousand under General Sullivan marched into Seneca territory as far as the Genesee, burning towns, orchards and grain stores before a detachment ravaged Cayuga settlements in turn - punishment for a war the confederacy itself had entered only after the Oneida's lone dissent failed to hold the League to neutrality, and a blow from which its political power never recovered.
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
1800
Handsome Lake's revelationReform
A Seneca sachem given up for dead during a long illness recovered claiming a commission from the Great Spirit to preach against the intemperance threatening the Iroquois with extinction, wrapping a temperance reformation inside the old religion rather than replacing it - a new doctrine that became, and remained, the prevailing faith among the nations that had not already converted to Christianity.
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
Chapters
6 in order · about 10 minutes
The snakes in Tododaho's hair
formationDrafted from Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
Before the League, the five nations of present-day New York were separate
and often hostile bands, drawn from a common stock but split by rivalry
into open warfare of unknown duration. Tradition traces the project of a
confederacy to the Onondaga, among whom an Onondaga lawgiver, Dekanawida -
"Da-ga-no-we'-da" in Morgan's rendering - first proposed a compact that
could let five warring nations "elevate themselves to a general
supremacy" together rather than destroy one another apart.
A sachem too dangerous to refuse
The obstacle, as the Iroquois told it, was Tododaho himself: an Onondaga
sachem of such terrible power that snakes grew from his hair and anyone
who met his angry look fell dead. Tododaho resisted the new order, since
accepting it meant giving up absolute power to sit as one equal among
many. A Mohawk sachem, Hiawatha - "Ha-yo-went'-ha," the man who combs -
is remembered as the one who calmed him, combing the snakes from his
hair and clearing the way for his consent. In tribute, the first of the
fifty sachemships created by the League was named for Tododaho himself
and marked with honors beyond the other forty-nine, though bound by the
same equal vote in council as every other seat.
The Hiawatha belt, the wampum belt said to record the founding of the League, as drawn for Popular Science Monthly in 1886.
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851) · Unknown artist · Public domain
Fifty seats, five nations
The compact settled at a council fire on the northern shore of Onondaga
lake, after a debate tradition says ran many days, created fifty
permanent sachemships distributed among the Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca,
Oneida and Cayuga. Each nation kept its own council for local affairs,
while the sachems together formed the supreme council of the League; the
Onondaga, who had named the fifty original titles, were called
name-bearers, and the Seneca, as hereditary doorkeepers of what the
Iroquois called their common Long House, guarded its western entrance.
No source can fix the year this happened - the Iroquois' own traditions
reach back to a remote and unrecorded past, and the clearest outside
clue, the circumstances of first Dutch contact on the Hudson, only
suggested to later observers that the League had already stood for
roughly a century by 1609.
Lewis Henry Morgan's map of the Haudenosaunee country as it stood in 1720, published with his League of the Iroquois in 1851.
Library of Congress · Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851) · Lewis Henry Morgan · Public domain
Muskets from Fort Orange
expansionDrafted from Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
The League's first encounter with Europeans was a defeat. In 1609, a
Mohawk war party of about two hundred met Samuel de Champlain on the
shore of the lake he named for himself, allied against them with the
Huron and Adirondack; it was the first time the Iroquois heard a
firearm, and Morgan records that its "marvellous power" carried the
field against them outright. The French alliance with the Iroquois'
traditional enemies hardened into what Morgan calls an uncompromising
and inveterate enmity that never cooled until Britain's conquest of
Canada a century and a half later.
Champlain's own picture of the 1609 fight, from his Voyages of 1613.
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851) · Samuel de Champlain · Public domain
A new era at Fort Orange
The balance turned in 1615, when the Dutch built a trading post at what
became Albany. Friendly relations with the Dutch, later inherited by the
English as a "covenant chain," opened a fur trade that brought the
Iroquois firearms of their own - and with firearms came what Morgan
describes as their rapid elevation to supremacy over every neighboring
Indian nation. The Iroquois had already, by his account, grown into "a
populous and powerful confederacy" holding ground no other Indian
people east of the Mississippi had matched; muskets gave that standing
teeth.
The Neutral Nation and the Erie broken in turn
The campaigns that followed were fast and, by Morgan's account, close
to annihilating. In 1643 the Iroquois drove the Neutral Nation from the
Niagara peninsula and settled its mouth themselves. Ten years later, in
1653, war against the Erie - who held the south shore of Lake Erie east
to the Genesee - came near to exterminating that nation outright,
leaving the confederacy in possession of the whole of western New York
and the northern edge of Ohio. By around 1670 the Huron and Adirondack
had been dispersed and subjugated as well, and Iroquois colonial
villages stood on the north shore of Lake Ontario to hold ground the
League had never occupied before European contact - conquest built,
each time, on the muskets that had first defeated them.
The scale against France
peakDrafted from Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
For as long as the French and English colonies in North America
remained close to evenly matched, Morgan credits the Iroquois with
deciding the contest between them. "The enmity and power of the
Ho-de'-no-sau-nee were sufficient to turn the scale against" France, he
writes, and France "must chiefly ascribe the final overthrow of her
magnificent schemes of colonization in the northern part of America" to
this one Indian confederacy - a judgment resting on a century of
Iroquois raids into French Canada and a standing refusal to let French
intimidation replace the "covenant chain" of friendship the League had
kept with the Dutch and, after 1664, the English.
The 'Four Indian Kings', three Mohawk and one Mohican, painted by John Verelst during their visit to Queen Anne's court in 1710.
Library and Archives Canada · Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851) · John Verelst · Public domain
A sixth nation at the fire
The confederacy's capacity to absorb outsiders on its own terms showed
again in 1715, when the Tuscarora, driven from North Carolina by a
catastrophic war with English colonists, turned north on the strength
of a claimed common origin in the Iroquoian language family. They were
settled on land ceded from the Oneida and admitted as a constituent
nation - what the English had called the Five Nations became, from that
point, the Six Nations in common usage - though the original five kept
their fifty sachemships to themselves and never seated a Tuscarora among
the sachems of the council.
A long peace
The decades after that admission, Morgan records, were the calmest the
confederacy had known: "from the close of the French war until the
commencement of the American Revolution, was a time of general peace."
It was the last such peace the League would see. The Revolution that
followed put a system built for external supremacy to a test it had
never faced before - an alliance it could not present a single united
answer to.
The Oneida dissent
endDrafted from Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
The American Revolution asked the League a question its own law of
unanimity could not answer twice. Both Continental Congress and the
British sought Iroquois support, and when the council of sachems and
chiefs took up whether to declare for the English, the Oneida alone
opposed the measure as unwise - opposition that, under the League's own
requirement of unanimous consent, was enough by ancient law to defeat
the war measure as an act of the confederacy itself. But Morgan records
that "the course of events had, at this time, greatly impaired and
weakened the confederacy," and the ancient principle could not hold:
it was finally agreed that each nation could enter the war on its own
responsibility. Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca warriors took up
arms for the English; the Oneida did not.
Thayendanegea, Joseph Brant, the Mohawk leader who fought for the British, painted by George Romney in London in 1776.
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851) · George Romney · Public domain
Sullivan's fire
The border war that followed brought an American reprisal the
confederacy had never previously faced on its own ground. In 1779,
General Sullivan led four thousand men into Seneca territory as far as
the Genesee, burning towns, fruit orchards and stores of grain before a
detachment turned north to ravage Cayuga settlements as well. The
Mohawk, judging their own country no longer defensible, abandoned it
during the war and resettled in Canada, on the Grand River and near
Kingston, where their descendants live on reserved land still.
A map of the route of Sullivan's march in 1779.
Library of Congress · Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851) · Unknown cartographer · Public domain
An ally who signed without them
The peace of 1783 between Britain and the United States made no
provision for the Iroquois at all, leaving a League that had fought as
Britain's ally to negotiate its own survival with the victorious
republic. Morgan calls what followed, in effect, the end of the
confederacy's political existence: United States and New York State
jurisdiction was extended over Iroquois territory in the years after the
war, land was ceded in a long series of negotiations that Morgan judges
to have been conducted justly by New York's own standard even as they
narrowed Oneida holdings to a single small reservation, and the Six
Nations became, from that point forward, dependent nations within a
republic that had not existed when their council fire was first
kindled on the shore of Onondaga lake.
The narrowing reservations
afterlifeDrafted from Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
The peace of 1783 left each of the Six Nations to face the tide of
settlement pressing west across New York on its own. The Mohawk, who
had abandoned their country during the war, resettled permanently on
land the British Crown secured for them at Grand River in the Niagara
peninsula and near Kingston. The Oneida, despite having fought for the
American side, fared little better: their lands were ceded away in a
long series of negotiations until only a single small reservation
remained, and the nation itself split three ways, a few hundred
staying on at Oneida Castle, a larger band settling at Green Bay in
Wisconsin, and another crossing into Canada on the river Thames.
A nation scattered abroad
The Cayuga suffered worse than either. Hemmed in on every side within
twelve years of the first white settler's house going up in their own
county, they surrendered their whole domain by 1795 and abandoned even
their last reservation around 1800, scattering to Green Bay, to Grand
River, and in the largest number to Sandusky in Ohio, from which the
government later removed them again, into the Indian Territory west
of the Mississippi. Only the Onondaga, granting away their lands by
treaty but keeping the valley around their own ancient council fire,
came through the dispossession relatively whole. The Tuscarora settled
on land the Seneca themselves gave them near the Niagara river. By the
middle of the nineteenth century the Six Nations, once masters of the
country between the Hudson and Lake Erie, held only scattered
fragments of it: three small Seneca reservations at Tonawanda,
Cattaraugus and Allegany, a remnant of Oneida land, the Onondaga
valley, the Tuscarora tract, and the reserves in Canada, where the
descendants of every nation but the Oneida and Tuscarora had, between
them, recreated something like a miniature of the ancient League.
The Ogden Land Company
The Seneca's own three reservations drew a particular predator. A
land speculation company held the "preemptive right" to whatever
Seneca land might eventually be sold, and for fourteen years pursued
its purchase by fraud, bribery and intrigue that a contemporary
account judged worse than the treaties that had dispossessed the
Cherokee in Georgia. Two treaties, in 1838 and 1842, were forced on
the Seneca by these means; one of the four reservations, the
forty-nine-thousand-acre Buffalo tract bordering the growing city of
that name and worth, by one estimate, over a million dollars, passed
to the company for roughly a tenth of that sum. By the time of the
last census the remaining Seneca in western New York numbered a little
over twenty-seven hundred, living on annuity income the state paid
from the proceeds of a century of land sales, on three reservations
that together would not have covered one of the state's own smaller
counties.
Red Jacket, the Seneca orator, wearing his silver peace medal, in a lithograph after Charles Bird King published in 1836.
Library of Congress · Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851) · Charles Bird King · Public domain
The council that still meets
afterlifeDrafted from Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851)
Political independence was gone, but the League's own forms were not.
At intervals of one or two years the scattered fragments of the Six
Nations still assembled in general council, summoned and conducted
exactly as in the days of their own sovereignty, to raise up sachems
with the ancient ceremonies whenever death or deposition left a title
vacant. Every nation but the Oneida and Tuscarora still held, in the
main, to the ancient faith and its festivals - and around 1800 that
faith itself was reshaped by a man born to trouble it least: a Seneca
sachem named Handsome Lake, who had spent the better part of his life
a drunkard, and who, given up for dead during a long illness, said
three spirits sent by the Great Spirit had appeared to him, restored
him to health with berries from their own hands, and commissioned him
to preach against the intemperance then threatening the Iroquois with
outright extinction.
Doctrines carried from village to village
Handsome Lake did not discard the old religion; he wrapped a new
temperance reformation inside it, holding over the disobedient the
threat of a hell he claimed to have toured under his spirit guides'
protection, and offering the virtuous a heaven barred to every white
man. He carried the doctrine from nation to nation for the rest of his
life, exempting only the already-Christianized Oneida, and won enough
converts that discord gave way, by report, to sobriety and industry
across whole communities. He died at Onondaga in 1815, on one of his
own pastoral visits, and was succeeded - the only person the Iroquois
ever formally raised up to the office - by his own grandson, Sosehawa,
who preached the same doctrine for upwards of thirty years afterward
and still lived at Tonawanda where he had been born.
A recitation at Tonawanda, October 1848
The doctrine survived less as scripture than as recitation. At the
Mourning and Religious councils the League still convened, a portion
of two or three days was set aside for Sosehawa to repeat, word for
word, the instructions Handsome Lake claimed to have received - and
one such recitation, delivered at a general Mourning council at
Tonawanda across the four days from the 4th through the 6th of
October, 1848, before Mohawk, Onondaga and Seneca delegates and the
"children" nations of Oneida, Cayuga and Tuscarora, was translated
from Sosehawa's own words by Ely S. Parker, the Seneca sachem who
worked with Lewis Henry Morgan to record the confederacy's own account
of itself. Stripped of its treaties
and its territory, the confederacy that had once held the balance
between France and England went on raising up its sachems by the old
forms and gathering, nation by scattered nation, to hear a dead man's
revelation recited by a living one.
Ely S. Parker, photographed in the studio of Mathew Brady.
Morgan, League of the Ho-de'-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851) · Mathew Brady studio · Public domain
Succession
What led here
No earlier polity is recorded as leading here.
Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois League)
1450–1848
What led away
Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Iroquois League)conquered bythe United States
The Revolution's peace treaty of 1783 made no provision for the confederacy, which had split over which side to support; a punitive campaign in 1779 had already destroyed the principal Seneca and Cayuga towns, and in the years after the war the jurisdiction of the United States and New York State was extended over Iroquois territory, ending the League's political independence and beginning a history of reservations and land cessions.
Derived from cited spans, not from a separate source. Where both spans are ranges and they meet only on the widest reading of each, the pair is listed as possible rather than resolved to one answer. Unlinked entries are here for scale and are not written up.
Extent
The historical-basemaps snapshots are world maps at fixed years, and none of the ones falling inside this polity's lifetime names it among the polities it draws.
Rating
Four axes, all computed from cited numbers and never from editorial judgement. Percentiles are against every polity written up here — 419 of them — plus 49 more included for scale. Absolute figures. A missing axis is excluded from the total rather than counted as zero.
Reach
No cited figure
Longevity
248–398 years
56th to 78th percentile — the sources disagree on the span, so the rank is a range too
Demographic weight
No cited figure
Influence
Three separate counts. This site never publishes a single influence number of its own; the sliders on the rankings view fuse them only in your view.
Descendant scripts
No cited figure
Religions carried
No cited figure
Successor claims
No cited figure
Weighted total
67th percentile
computed from 1 of 4 axes, renormalised across the axes that have figures. A polity with two documented axes is not penalised against one with four.
