Iroquois Messenger Systems From Indian Running: Native American History and Tradition by Peter Nabokov ©1981 Peter Nabokov

     In the east the Iroquois Confederacy was able to dominate upper New York State in part because of its organized runners. They ran on the 240 mile "Iroquois Trail" which bound together the Confederacy, requiring seventy hours to cover the country between the "eastern door" of the Mohawk, near present day Albany, to the "western door" of the Seneca, near Buffalo. The Quaker James Emlen records in his 1794 journal that one of Chief Cornplanter's runners, Sharp Shins, did the ninety rolling miles between Canadaigua and Niagara between sunrise and sunset. To sustain themselves the runners nibbled scorched cornmeal.
     Like the Inca of Peru, the Iroquois used their runners in relays to increase range and efficiency. During the Revolutionary War, one runner left Tonawanda at daybreak to get word to Avon, forty miles away, and returned by noon. Dispatched usually in pairs, they "took their way through the forest, one behind the other, in perfect silence," according to Lewis Henry Morgan. When night fell, they navigated by the stars, using the Pleiades in fall and winter, the loon constellations in spring and summer.
 

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