It is unfortunate for the memory of any race to have its history written by its enemies. This is the sad fate of the Indians. Their place in history has been determined by those who belong to an alien and antagonistic people with whom relentless warfare was waged almost from the period of their first contact. The result of these wars was the defeat of the red men, the spoliation of his territory, and the loss of his pristine freedom and with these went all those virtues and peculiarly interesting habits of mind that characterized him in his native wilds. In writing the history of those enemies and so justify in the eyes of posterity his own conduct, there is a grievous temptation to the conqueror, who may have many acts of oppression to palliate, to exaggerate the offenses of his enemy, even to construe into offenses acts which were meant to be friendly.

The history of the Indian is at best fragmentary and often written to subserve some ulterior purpose; and , paradoxically as it may seem, in addition to the incertitude of the white man's incomplete and often prejudiced record, the information we get from the Indian about himself is often less reliable than that give us by the white man. This grows out of certain inherent ethical concepts of the Indian, coupled with an inability to understand the white man's motive, whose insatiable desire for knowledge is quite beyond the ken of the less tutored or rather differently tutored red man.

The Indian was taught from his childhood that curiosity was a vice leading to gossip, which soon developed into the detestable habit of mischief-making. There was not a more contemptible character, from the view point of the red man, that that of the mischief-maker, and any tendency toward idle curiosity which developed among the youth of the forest folk, and which naturally led to mischief-making, was sternly rebuked, not by any corporal chastisement, but by the sharp shafts of ridicule and scorn which seldom failed to correct the incipient habit. Had the Indian's feeling toward corporal punishment been different, the ducking-stool might have been invoked to put down the habit of gossip or mischief-making; but corporal punishment was so utterly irreconcilable with his conception of personal liberty, as to be a inadmissible as a corrective. Among the Iroquois a visit to the offender by a delegation of the tribe each wearing a husk nose four or five inches long, suggesting that the wearer had to so elongate his natural nose in order to associate with one who had the habit of putting his nose into other folk's affairs, was generally a sufficient hint to correct the mischief-making propensities of the offender.

Such was the result of this trait of Indian character and his ideas of social ethics, that when a white man came among them asking questions as to the affairs of the red man, which from this angle could be in any conceivable manner concern the white man, he was placed in the category of the mischief-maker, and as such regarded as the legitimate butt for his ridicule. This found its exercise in some versatile Indian of imagination, who, with the air of a roman senator and a face immobile and inexpressive of any humor, would improvise legends, folk lore, history, tradition, or whatever seemed to appease the prurient desire of the white man; thus many a faked tale has come into the literature of the white man as veritable Indian lore.

WE might also add to the difficulties above specified the contradictory accounts of various writers, who so much differ even in those matters that palpably came within their own observation and which were the very subject matter of their investigation; these further impress one with the need of critical examination of all the records. A prominent example is the estimate of the Indians by the Recollects, who brand the red men as gross, stupid and rustic persons, incapable of thought or reflection, with less knowledge than the brutes, and utterly unworthy of any missionary effort for their redemption. Over against this opinion is the judgment of the Jesuits, who attribute to these same men good sense, tenacious memory, quick apprehension, solid judgment, and add that they take pleasure in hearing the word of God.

By some whose observations has been obviously superficial, the Indian has been described as taciturn and stoical. Such a characterization is perhaps excusable in one who has seen the Indian in the presence of strangers, standing like a stature, immobile for hors, with no word but a grunted exclamation of negation or assent. Betraying neither emotion nor interest in his environment. But let the observed follow the apparently stolid Indian into his home, where is unrestrained by the presence of strangers, and he would have found him the rustic humorist, rollicking, given to the exercise of practical joking, quick in repartee, ready to give and to take and with that philosophy that enables him to laugh at the joke upon himself, however rough, as heartily as when another is the victim. All of these suggestions would seem to emphasize the need of presenting, if possible, the Indian as he was, carefully eliminating those matters of incertitude, and attempting to present him as a provider--so we may see him in his family; in fine, to accentuate the human interest element in writing this account of the forest men whom our early writers properly called "silviages," or forest folk, but whose epithet has been corrupted into "savages," even as our conception of them has been corrupted. As Genesee county has an Iroquois Indian name, sonorous and beautiful in its suggestiveness, so let us do, at least, justice to these men and women from whom we have adopted the name, for these people have a closer connection with the history of our locality then has generally been known.

In considering the Indians of this county and vicinage, it is plainly necessary to go beyond the narrow confines of our county and take a comprehensive view of the Indians of Canada and the United States. It is quite obvious that the American Indians, or Amerinds, to use the new word coined by the ethnologists, with their inborn wanderlust and frequent enforced migrations resultant from the exigencies of their status and hostile environment, could not have any distinctive history in any locality, where they may have for a time lived, which would form anything like a completed narrative, or have any particular historic value if treated without reference to antecedent conditions.

The discoverers of North America found north of Mexico, a land whose extent baffled the imagination, whose inhabitants were so few that they greater portion of the country was entirely unoccupied--so few that every conception of territorial dominion, possession or occupancy, based in European standard, is fallacious and misleading when applied to the new world. Here and there regions were held by some tribe, or nation, under a title which the other tribes conceded, but it was all based on force, the good old rule of Rob Roy that they should take who have the power, and they should keep who can. Here and there were villages of a few families, located by some stream or lake, with an indefinite hinterland forming the hunting grounds of the people who wandered over them in summer and returned to winter in the village. The intertribal boundary lines were generally the watersheds that separated one drainage basin from another.

A great portion of these Indians still depend on the chase and the spontaneous gifts of nature in the way of fruits, nuts and edible roots for sustenance, and these naturally had less claim on the soil of any region where they roamed; some, however, had developed a crude agriculture and, as tillers of the land, had a more ethical basis for their claims of ownership. Not only had they become more stable in the habitations, but, by reason of a more dependable supply of food, they had become more numerous and, what then, as now, is more important, more able to defend their claims regardless of any ethical basis or abstract right. It was the variant standards of the whites and Indians as to land tenures that caused most of the wars, and it is to the credit of the whites that they generally recognized the claims of the Indians, however worthless from European standards, and extinguished the same by purchase, although it must be acknowledged that in the bargaining for such titles the Indians were often overreached by their better informed purchasers.