Excerpt from Sullivan Centennial: Historical Addresses
The centuries are the natural divisions on Times great calendar; the milestones that mark the stages of human progress. We propose to-day, for a little time, to step backward a centennial milestone, to turn back the pages, and read the story of a century agone, and recount the deeds of heroic sacrifice, of soldierly courage and valor which transpired on this very spot one hundred years ago this very day, nay, this very hour.
To understand the story, allow me to refresh your recollection by referring to some facts of still earlier occurrence. A century and a half before the events we commemorate to-day, a peculiar raee of men occupied all this broad land. Their earlier history is lost in the maze of uncertain traditions and childish legends, their later has been preserved only by their foes and successful rivals for the domination and possession of the continent.
When the country was first known to the whites, the territory bounded on the north by the St. Lawrence, on the east by the Hudson and Delaware, on the south by the Potomac, and on the west by the great lakes, was inhabited by nations which from their language, general customs and traditions, seemed to be more closely related to each other, than to the nations which surrounded them. The confederated Five Nations, or as they are commonly called, the Iroquois, occupied the north-east portion of this territory, having the Eries and Hurons on the west, and to the south the Andastes, or tribes along the Susquehanna. These powerful neighbors had greatly weakened the strength of the Iroquois, and well nigh reduced them to a condition of vassalage, and more than once had even driven them from their ancestral seats.
For their mutual protection the Five Nations entered into a confederation, and in at rude way, anticipated the great Federal Republic which is to-day exercising such controlling power over the affairs of this continent, and such mighty influences over the nations of the earth. By means of the mutual aid they were thus able to give each other, and of the rifle, which traders of old to the Mohawks prior to 1620, the Iroquois soon began to assert their independence, then to make war upon their neighbors, and in a few years from being vassals, they became masters and either exterminated or brought into subjugation not only their former conquerors, but carried their conquests to the Mississippi on the West and the Gulf on the South.
When the English assumed control of New York, they formed an alliance with the Iroquois against the French, the common enemy of both, then in possession of Canada and claiming all the country drained by the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi.
The Iruquois, strengthened by this alliance, and becoming still more attached to the English by the wise policy and blandishments of such shrewd agents as the Johnsons, declared themselves to be the children of the King of England, and the English to be their brethren. At the beginning of the war of the Revolution, they mustered nearly 2,000 warriors, which with their valor, their peculiar methods of warfare, and the advantages of their situation, rendered them a power whose hostility was greatly to be feared.
The Indian had learned from the white man not only the use of the rifle, but some of the arts and appliances of civilization.
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