two peoples persisted in recitations of the tradition over time, it never supplanted the "ship and canoe" language characteristic of Haudenosaunee understandings of kaswentha. As illustrated in the recitations [...], the idea of a rope, and later a "chain" of iron, then silver represented a critical component of the tradition that bound the two peoples together in friendship as a necessary precursor to the kind of relationship embodied by two vessels travelling along a parallel route. The latter idea, in other words, related to the former concept – the two were neither incompatible nor mutually exclusive. Diana Muir Appelbaum has written that:there is no evidence that such a thing as an "original" two-row wampum belt ever existed. Nor is there any evidence of the existence of a 1613 treaty beyond a claim traceable to a document forged in the 1960s by a historian who collected and wrote about old manuscripts. Indeed, no documentary evidence (including wampum, which is very fragile) survive from the original treaty negotiations of 1613. But, as Parmenter points out:Evidence of Haudenosaunee and European recitations of the kaswentha tradition indicates clearly that the remarkable durability over time of ideas associated with a Two Row relationship does not depend on the legitimacy of a single document and that Haudenosaunee and contemporary Europeans "verbalized" these ideas long before the late nineteenth century. [...] Kaswentha relations were not static – they evolved over time as ties between the Iroquois and the Dutch (and the latter's English and American successors) deepened and sociopolitical circumstances grew more complex – but they did exist. Indeed, [...] it is incumbent upon all scholars considering the historicity of indigenous (not only Haudenosaunee) oral traditions (especially regarding something as fundamentally significant as kaswentha), to do more than simply identify a single document as a fake, or to set the bar for evidentiary proof of a concept's existence to practically impossible standards – such as requiring a surviving "physical" Two Row belt from the colonial era that can be explicitly associated with a documentary source. Oral tradition Onondaga leaders state that the oral tradition which accompanies the wampum belts is evidence that an agreement was made in 1613. Andy Mager of the Syracuse Peace Council was quoted in The Post-Standard as saying "We believe the Haudenosaunee oral history of the treaty...We believe the basic outlines of a treaty and that a treaty was negotiated between representatives of