In a letter, dated at Tonachin, a Huron village, 18th July, 1627, Father Daillon told of his visit to the Neuters the year before. In it he wrote:
"I have always seen them constant in their resolution to go with at least four canoes to the trade, if I would guide them, the whole difficulty being that we did not know the way. Yroquet, an Indian known in those countries, who had come there with twenty of his men hunting for beaver, and who took fully five hundred, would never give us any mark to know the mouth of the river. He and several Hurons assured us well that it was only ten days journey [from the Huron Country] to the trading place; but we were afraid of taking one river for another and losing our way, or dying of hunger on the land."
The above quotation, which was given in Sagard, 1636, was omitted from Daillon's letter by Le Clercq in his "Premier Établissement de la Foi," 1691. In his translation of the latter work, John Gilmary Shea, in a note concerning this very passage, says:
"This was evidently the Niagara River and the route through Lake Ontario," and he adds: "The omission of the passage by Le Clercq was evidently caused by the allusion to trade."
That omission was doubtless at the instance of the French Government, whose permission was then a necessity before any book could be published. That Government knew the importance and the advantages of Niagara, both as a strategic point and as a Center of Trade. Only four years before Le Clercq's book appeared a French army, under De Denonville, had built a fort there; but the hostility of the Iroquois (incited by British agents) had forced its abandonment a year later. Anxious to again possess it, planning now to do so by diplomacy rather than by arms, the French Government would naturally have objected to any published allusion to the locality as a point of Trade,—which could in no way have aided its designs, but by further calling Britain's attention to Niagara's importance, would naturally cause her agents to be still further vigilant toward frustrating any move of France for the control thereof.
In the same letter Daillon says:
"But the Hurons having discovered that I talked of leading them [the Neutrals] to the trade, he [Yroquet] spread in all the villages when he passed, very bad reports about me * * * in a word, the Hurons told them so much evil of us [the French] to prevent their going to trade * * * adding a thousand other absurdities to make us hated by them, and prevent their trading with us; so that they might have the trade with these nations themselves exclusively, which is very profitable to them."
Yroquet, who was Champlain's friend, as before mentioned, being a close ally of the Hurons, evidently had no desire for a Frenchman to open trade directly with the Iroquois—the sworn foes of the Hurons—and thus to divert any of the trade which he carried on with the French in the Huron Country.
So the first white man known to have been on the Niagara River (in 1626) wrote about it as a "trading place." It clearly was regarded in that light, at that time, both by the Neutrals and by the Hurons; those being the only two tribes which Father Daillon had visited. And if it was so known to the tribes on the west and northwest, there was no reason why it should not have been so known—and it no doubt was so known—to the tribes to the south, to the east, and to the west.
On his map, in 1632, Champlain continues his location of the Cataract at the point where the river enters Lake Ontario; and marks it, "Falls at the extremity of Lake St. Louis [Ontario] very high, where many fish come down and are stunned."