These Iroquois were in the way, to be sure; but with them New York had every advantage over her sister provinces. Her policy toward these powerful Indians was conciliatory. She was allied with them against the French. The Six Nations ravaged the frontiers of all the other colonies, from Massachusetts to Carolina, and carried their con quests to the Mississippi, but they spared New York and even invited her to build forts on their border as outposts against the French. New York had the most in?uential Indian agent of his time in Sir William Johnson, who had married the sister of the Mohawk chief Brant, and by her had several sons who were war chiefs of the Iroquois. In 1745 the Iroquois even ceded to New York a strip of land sixty miles wide, along the southern shores of lakes Ontario and Erie, extending to the modern Cleveland. V'at the period of which I am speaking, it should have been comparatively easy for the Knickerbockers to secure passage for their emigrants into the western country had they chosen to ask it.