Iroquois prosperous settlements in the 19th century, supporting themselves via farming and the sale of sleds, snowshoes, boats, and baskets. In 1884, about 100 Canadian Iroquois were hired by the British government to serve as river pilots and boatmen for the relief expedition for the besieged General Charles Gordon in Khartoum in the Sudan, taking the force commanded by Field Marshal Wolsely up the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum. On their way back to Canada, the Canadian Iroquois river pilots and boatmen stopped in London, where they were personally thanked by Queen Victoria for their services to Queen and Country. In
Iroquois an original form beginning with /h/, Bakker cites alternate spellings such as "hyroquois" sometimes found in documents from the period, and the fact that in the Southern dialect of Basque, the word "hil" is pronounced "il". He also argues that the /l/ was rendered as /r/ since the former is not attested in the phonemic inventory of any language in the region (including Maliseet, which developed an /l/ later). Thus the word according to Bakker is translatable as "the killer people". It is similar to other terms used by Eastern Algonquian tribes to refer to their enemy the Iroquois, which