The hymn, or _karenna_, deserves a special notice. In every
important council of the Iroquois a song or chant is considered a proper
and almost essential part of the proceedings. Such official songs are
mentioned in many reports of treaty councils held with them by the
French and English authorities. In this greatest of all councils the
song must, of course, have a distinguished place. It follows immediately
upon the address of greeting and condolence, and is, in fact, regarded
as the completion of it, and the introduction to the equally important
ceremony which is to follow, viz., the repetition of the ancient laws of
the confederacy. This particular hymn is of great antiquity. Some of the
chiefs expressed to me the opinion that it was composed by Dekana-widah
or Hiawatha. Its tenor, however, as well as that of the whole book,
shows that it belongs to a later period. The ceremonies of the council
were doubtless prescribed by the founders of the League; but the
speeches of the Book, and this hymn, all refer to the League as the work
of a past age. The speakers appeal to the wisdom of their forefathers
(literally, their grandsires), and lament the degeneracy of the later
times. They expressly declare that those who established the "great
peace" were in their graves, and had taken their work with them and
placed it as a pillow under them. This is the language of men who
remembered the founders, and to whom the burial of the last of them was
a comparatively recent event. If the league was formed, as seems
probable, about the year 1450, the speeches and hymn, in their present
form, may reasonably be referred to the early part of the next century.
There is reason to believe that the formation of the confederacy was
followed by wars with the Hurons and Algonkin tribes, in which, as
usual, many changes of fortune took place. If the Hurons, as has been
shown, were expelled from their abode on the northern shore of the
St. Lawrence, the Mohegans, on the other hand, inflicted some serious
blows upon the eastern nations of the confederacy. [Footnote: See the