The five nations of the Haudenosaunee — the people of the longhouse, known to the French and the English and through them to almost all the scholarship as the Iroquois — occupied a band of country running east and west across what is now upstate New York.⁸ They described that country as a single longhouse, the bark-covered dwelling in which several related families lived along a central row of fires. The Mohawk, farthest east, were the keepers of the eastern door. The Seneca,