HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

used, however, by many writers to describe all the aborigines east of the Mississippi and south of the j St. Lawrence, from the singular and very striking fact, that but one language was spoken throughout this entire region which was styled the "Algonquin" or "Algonkin." All the Indians Avithin these limits j understood each other. There were only comparatively slight local variations. They required no interpreters, except to communicate with white men. West and northwest of the Lenni-Lenape, extending

A SrSQUEHAJfNA OR DELAWARE CHIEF.

(From Smith's "History of Virginia.")

from the western sloi)es of the Cattskills and the Helderbergs south of the Mohawk, and north of it, from the banks of the upper Hudson and the waters of Champlain to the shores of Lake Erie, and thence through the region south of that lake to the Mississippi, was the dominion of the third, and, perhaps, the most famous of the three great nationalities or races of confederated Indians, the Five (and later Six), Nations or Iroquois, and their affiliated tribes.

These were the three great stocks of aborigines, who were in possession of North America from the

Potomac and Ohio on the south, to Canada on the north, and from the Atlantic Ocean on the east, to the Father of Waters on the west, at the time of Hudson's discovery of the great bay of New York and the magnificent river which bears his name.

Each of these three confederacies embraced numerous distinct tribes, sub-tribes, and smaller tribal divisions, or cantons, and chieftaincies, all having separate names, but united more or less closely by the bond of a common origin. Each tribe, or sub-tribe, possessed its own locality and specific region as its own property, which was never lost, except by voluntary migration or by conquest.