THE OLD NEW YORK FRONTIER
1764, the Mohawks claimed land as far south and west as the mouth of Schenevus Creek, and that it was only after establishing their claims that they made sales to Sir William Johnson. Beyond the Unadilla River and extending to the Chenango lay Oneida lands, but in this part of the province early in the eighteenth century a tract was granted to the Tuscaroras,[1] who had come up from their earlier home in the Carolinas, and thus made the six nations where before there had been five.
In the summer of 1608, one year before Hendrick Hudson explored another great river, Captain John Smith made a tour of Chesapeake Bay as far north as the mouth of the Susquehanna. Here he met the Indians whose name this river bears. Writing the word Sasquesahanocks, he called them "a mighty people and mortall enemies with the Wassawoneks." They were "great and well-proportioned men," and "seemed like giants to the English." He found them "of an honest and simple disposition, with much adoe restrained from adoring us as gods." George Alsop, who wrote sixty years later in a kind of extravagant language peculiar to him, described them as "cast into the mould of a most large and warlike deportment, the men being for the most part seven foot high in latitude, and in magnitude and bulk suitable to so high a pitch; their voyce large and hollow, as ascending out of a cave, their gait and behaviour straight, stately and majestic, treading on the earth with as much pride, contempt and disdain to so sordid a centre as can be imagined from a creature derived from the same mould and earth." The stream which they inhabited and seldom departed from, except for war, Al-
- ↑ The accepted translation of this word is shirt-wearers.
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