Western Pennsylvania History 

About: Western Pennsylvania History is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Frontier. Over the lifetime, 380 publications have been published receiving 704 citations.

The League of The Iroquois

Abstract: The origins of the Iroquois are shrouded in the mists of prehistory. There is no certainty or even agreement of probability as to how the Indians of America came to inhabit the North American continent. Itis not even known where the Iroquois lived in North America before they began to establish domination over the area from the Hudson River to Lake Erie and from the St. Lawrence River to the Susquehanna Valley. To the primitive Iroquois the problem of their origin was solved by the \"Creation Myth,\" which told of a sky-world of gods who resembled the Iroquois. As the story goes, one of the young ladies was pregnant and kept her husband busy collecting the strange assortment of foods pregnant women are supposed to crave. In the middle of the sky-world grew a great elm tree especially sacred and not to be mutilated. Naturally, the woman wanted to eat of the roots of this tree. Her husband knew itwas wrong, but to quiet her he dug some roots of the sacred tree for her. In so doing, he inadvertently broke through the crust of the sky-world. The woman, being curious, looked through the hole. Whether she then slipped and fell or her husband pushed her is a moot question. At any rate, fall she did — to the water far below — stillclutching the roots of the sacred elm. The birds stretched their wings to support her on the way down, and a great sea turtle surfaced to give a dry resting place. Fish dove to the bottom of the ocean floor for soil in which she could plant the life-giving roots. The woman started walking in a circle around the planted roots, moving in the same direction the sun moves. AllIndian dances still move in this same direction. At the proper time the woman was delivered of a daughter, who in turn grew up and gave birth to twin sons, fathered in all probability by the West Wind. The birth of the twins killed their