For six episodes, they were always present — standing at the edge of the English story, named but rarely centered. This episode brings them forward. The nations of the eastern seaboard in 1620 were not a backdrop. Wa-hun-se-na-cah ran a thirty-tribe paramount chiefdom across six thousand square miles of Virginia, held Jamestown in a posture of strategic patience for more than a decade, and watched the English die by the hundreds while he calculated whether they were worth more alive. Massasoit, ruling a Wampanoag Confederacy weakened by epidemic and threatened with absorption by the Narragansett, walked into Plymouth with sixty warriors in March of 1621 and negotiated a reciprocal alliance that held for fifty-four years. And the Iroquois — the Haudenosaunee — read the arrival of European trade faster than the Europeans did. From 1628 onward they used purchased Dutch firearms to eliminate their rivals one by one: the Mohican, the Huron, the Neutral, the Erie, the Susquehannock. By the end of the century they were the dominant political and military power in North America, playing Paris against London and The Hague from a longhouse in upstate New York. The nations were not swept aside. They were read, and they read back. This is their story.