The visitor at Niagara, as he looks at the Falls, will have a profounder appreciation of their magnitude by considering that it requires the water drainage of a quarter of a continent to sustain them, and that the remoter springs, which send to them their constant tribute, are more than twelve hundred miles distant.
CHAPTER IV.
Niagara a tribal name—Other names given to the tribe—The Niagaras a superior race—The true pronunciation of Indian words.
The name Niagara has been so thoroughly identified with the river and the Falls that the question whether it was also the name of an Indian nation or tribe has been quite neglected. It is proposed now to give the question some consideration, assuming, at once, its affirmative to be true. This, it is believed, we shall be justified in doing by every principle of analogy. We know that it was a general practice of the Indians who occupied this region of country, so abounding in lakes and rivers, to give the name of the nation or tribe to, or to name them after, the most prominent bodies and courses of water found in their territory. Such was the fact with the Senecas, Cayugas, Oneidas, Onondagas, and Hurons, the tribal name of each being perpetuated both in a lake and a river. The Mohawks, the warrior tribe of the Six Nations, having no noted lake within their boundaries, left a perpetual memorial of themselves in the name of a beautiful river. The unwarlike Eries, too, though finally exterminated by their more powerful and aggressive neighbors, the Iroquois, are still remembered in the lake which bears their name.
With the Niagaras the river and the cataract were the most notable and impressive features of their territory. Their principal village bore the same name; and when we recall the proverbial vanity of the race, we can hardly doubt that this must also have been their tribal name. That it should have been perpetuated in reference to the village, the river, and the falls, and that the use of it, in reference to the tribe, should have lapsed, can be readily understood when we recollect that they had two substitutes for the tribal name. One of these substitutes is explained at page 70 of the "Relations" of 1641, in a passage which we translate as follows: "Our Hurons call the Neuter Nation Attouanderonks, as though they would say a people of a little different language: for as to those nations that speak a language of which they understand nothing, they call them Attouankes, whatever nation they may be, or as though they spoke of strangers. They of the Neuter Nation in turn, and for the same reason, call our Hurons Attouanderonks."
Thus it would seem that this was a mere title of convenience used to indicate a certain fact, namely, a difference of language. The other substitute by which the nation was best known among their white brethren will be understood by an extract from a letter contained in the same "Relations," and written from St. Mary's Mission on the river Severn, by Father Lalement. In it he gives an account of a journey made by the Fathers Jean de Brebeuf and Joseph Marie Chaumont to the country of the Neuter Nation, as the Niagaras were called by the Hurons on the north and the Iroquois on the south of them, learning it, as they did, from the French. The letter says: "Our French, who first discovered this people, named them the Neuter Nation, and not without reason, for their country being the ordinary passage by land, between some of the Iroquois nations and the Hurons, who are sworn enemies, they remained at peace with both; so that in times past the Hurons and the Iroquois, meeting in the same wigwam or village of that nation, were both in safety while they remained. There are some things in which they differ from our Hurons. They are larger, stronger, and better formed. They also entertain a great affection for the dead. * * * The Sonontonheronons [Senecas], one of the Iroquois nations the nearest to and most dreaded by the Hurons, are not more than a day's journey distant from the easternmost village of the Neuter Nation, named Onguiaahra [Niagara], of the same name as the river."
It would seem, then, that this name, Neuter Nation, as applied to this tribe, was an appellation used merely to indicate a peculiarity of its location, or of the relation in which it stood to the hostile tribes living to the north and south of it. The Indians, it is needless to say, were not philologists, and seem not to have objected to the names applied to them, nor to have criticised the erroneous pronunciation of words of their own dialects.