other hand Otsego is an Iroquois word, and it seems to be generally
agreed that the Otsego region was included, in the historic period, in
the possessions of the Iroquois, as the league of the Five Nations was
called by the French. The league included the Mohawks, Oneidas,
Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas; and took in also, in the eighteenth
century, as the sixth nation, the Tuscaroras.[8] While the village at
the foot of the lake would properly be called Mohawk, owing obedience to
the council of the original Mohawk towns, it might well have been
composed largely of Indians from other tribes. Fragments of shattered
tribes found refuge with the Iroquois in the latter days. Some were
adopted; some stayed on sufferance. The Minsis, a branch of the
Delawares, as well as the Delawares proper, were allowed to occupy the
southern part of the Iroquois territory. It will be recalled, in this
connection, that Cooper's favorite Indian heroes, Chingachgook and
Uncas, are of Delaware stock.

It is quite possible that, near the beginning of the eighteenth
century--basing the date, among other things, on the appearance of the
apple trees when the first white man came--there was a cosmopolitan
Indian community at the foot of Otsego Lake. Besides Mohawks, there
would have been included Oneidas, their nearest neighbors on the west;
and probably Delawares, or Mohicans. There might have been also some
one-time prisoners, adopted by the Iroquois, but belonging originally to
distant nations.[9]

All writers on the history of the Eastern Indians agree in assigning the
highest place to the Iroquois. Parkman asserts that they afford perhaps
an example of the highest elevation which man can reach without emerging
from the primitive condition of the hunter. Morgan declares that in the
width of their sway they had reared the most powerful empire that ever