The Great Law of Peace: The Iroquois Confederacy and the Making of the Northeast
By Daniel R. Whitcomb
Length4h 12m
About this audiobook
The names come one at a time: a hunting party found in a clearing with its bows broken, a woman carried off, a man cut down among the cattails. In the Mohawk Valley some six centuries ago, each name is a debt. A grieving family can close the wound only with a captive, adopted into the dead man's place or killed to stand in for him, and every captive taken opens a new wound in a village on the far side of the hill.
A stranger from the north, remembered as the Peacemaker, set out to break the cycle, carrying a law from village to village. It was not meant to end all war among human beings. It was meant to break the one rule that kept the longhouses weeping, that every death must be answered with another. With Hiawatha, a man undone by his own grief, he brought the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca together beneath a tree of peace as the Haudenosaunee, the People of the Longhouse.
The Great Law held through the Beaver Wars and the Covenant Chain with the English, through the contest for the Forks of the Ohio and Pontiac's War, and it took in the Tuscarora as a sixth nation. The Revolution split it. When that war ended there were two council fires where there had been one, and the Six Nations were left divided between reservations in New York and new lands on the Grand River in Canada.
The mourning wars are long over. The council fire at Onondaga is still burning.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 12 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 18, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Tree at the Fork of the River
2Chapter 2: Hiawatha's Grief
3Chapter 3: The Great Law
4Chapter 4: The Longhouse and the Fields
5Chapter 5: Beaver Wars
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 6: The Covenant Chain
7Chapter 7: The Forks of the Ohio
8Chapter 8: Pontiac's War and the Line
9Chapter 9: Two Fires, One Longhouse
10Chapter 10: A Line at Sandusky
11Chapter 11: The Long Walk of the Six Nations
12Chapter 12: The Fire That Kept Burning
13About the Author
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