Of the condition of the region to the west of the Ottawa prior to the seventeenth century nothing is known from direct observation. Before Champlain had an opportunity of visiting it, the whole region westward to Lake Huron had been depopulated and reduced to a desert. The fact that the few natives found by Champlain occupying the once populous region of the Hochelaga Indians were Algonkins, has been the chief ground for the assumption that the expulsion of that old Wyandot stock was due to their hostility. But such an idea is irreconcilable with the fact that the latter, instead of retreating southward to their Huron-Iroquois kinsmen, took refuge among Algonkin tribes. According to the narrative of their own Wyandot historian, Peter Dooyentate, gathered, as he tells us, from traditions that lived in the memory of a few among the older members of his tribe, the island of Montreal was occupied in the sixteenth century by Wyandots or Hurons, and Senecas, sojourning peaceably in separate villages. The tradition is vague which traces the cause of their hostility to the wrath of a Seneca maiden, who had been wronged by the object of her affections, and gave her hand to a young Wyandot warrior on the condition of his slaying the Seneca chief, to whose influence she ascribed the desertion of her former lover. Whatever probability may attach to this romance of the Indian lovers, the tradition that the Hurons were driven from their ancient homes on the St. Lawrence by their Seneca kinsmen is consistent with ascertained facts, as well as with the later history of the Senecas, who are found playing the same part to the Eries under a somewhat similar incentive to revenge, and appear to have taken the lead in the destruction of the Attiwendaronks. The native tradition is of value in so far as it shows that the fatal enmity of the Iroquois to the Hurons was not originally due to the alliance of the latter with the French; but Senecas and Hurons had alike disappeared before Champlain visited the scene of Cartier’s earlier exploration. The Attiwendaronks, who dwelt to the south of the later home of the Hurons, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, may have formed another of the nations of the Wyandot stock expelled from the valley of the St. Lawrence. Situated as they were in their later home, midway between the Hurons and Iroquois, they strove in vain to maintain a friendly neutrality. Charlevoix assigns the year 1635 as the date of their destruction by the latter. Certain it is that between that date and the middle of the century their towns were utterly destroyed; and such of the survivors as lingered in the vicinity were incorporated into the nation of the Senecas, who lay nearest to them.

The Eries were another Huron-Iroquois nation who appear to have persistently held aloof from the league. They were seemingly a fiercer and more warlike people than the Attiwendaronks; they fought with poisoned arrows, and were esteemed or dreaded as warriors. Their numbers must have been considerable, since they were an object of apprehension to the nations of the league whose western frontiers marched with their own. They are affirmed by the native historian, Cusick, to have sprung from the Senecas; but, if so, their separation was probably of remote date, as they were both numerous and powerful. The country which they occupied was noted among the French coureurs des bois for its lynx furs; and they gave accordingly to its people the name of “La Nation du Chat.” Their ancient home is still indicated in the name of the great lake beside which they dwelt. But, for some unknown reason, they refused all alliance with the Senecas and the league of their Iroquois kin, and perished by their violence within seven years after the Huron country was laid waste. “To the Eries, and to the Neuter nation,” or Attiwendaronks, says Schoolcraft, “according to tradition, the Iroquois offered the alternative of admission into the league or extermination; and the strangeness of this proposition will disappear, when it is remembered that an Indian nation regards itself as at war with all others not in actual alliance.”[[135]] Peace, he adds, was the ultimate aim of the founders of the Iroquois oligarchy; and, for lovers of peace on such terms of supremacy, the casus belli would not be more difficult to find than it has proved to be among the most Christian of kings. In the case of the Eries, as of the elder Wyandots of Hochelaga, the final rupture is ascribed to a woman’s implacable wrath.

Father Le Moyne, while on a mission to the Onondagas in 1654, learned that the Iroquois confederacy were excited to fury against the Eries. A captive Onondaga chief is said to have been burnt at the stake after he had been offered, according to Indian custom, to one of the Erie women, to take the place of her brother who had been murdered while on a visit to the Senecas. It is a characteristic illustration of how the feuds of ages were perpetuated. The traditions of the Iroquois preserved little more than the fact that the Eries had perished by their fury. But a story told to Mr. Parkman by a Cayuga Indian, only too aptly illustrates the hideous ferocity of their assailants. It represented that the night after the great battle in which the Eries suffered their final defeat, the forest was lighted up with more than a thousand fires, at each of which an Erie was being tortured at the stake.[[136]] The number is probably exaggerated. But it is only thus, as it were in the lurid glare of its torturing fires, that we catch a glimpse of this old nation as it vanished from the scene. Of the survivors, the greater number were adopted, according to Indian fashion, into the Seneca nation.

Some of the earthworks met with to the south of Lake Erie show proofs of greater constructive labour than anything found in Canada. Still more interesting are the primitive hieroglyphics of an inscription on Cunningham’s Island, ascribed to the Eries, and which Schoolcraft describes as by far the most elaborate work of its class hitherto found on the continent.[[137]] But the rock inscription, though highly interesting as an example of native symbolism and pictographic writing, throws no light on the history of its carvers; and of their language no memorial is recoverable, for they had ceased to exist before the great lake which perpetuates their name was known to the French.

More accurate information has been preserved in reference to the Hurons, among whom the Jesuit Fathers laboured with self-denying zeal, from time to time reporting the results in their Relations to the Provincial of the Order at Paris. One of the most characteristic religious ceremonies of the Hurons was the great “Feast of the Dead,” celebrated apparently at intervals of twelve years, when the remains of their dead were gathered from scaffolded biers, or remote graves, and deposited amid general mourning in the great cemetery of the tribe. Valuable robes and furs, pottery, copper kettles and others of their choicest possessions, including the pyrulæ, or large tropical shells brought from the Gulf of Mexico, with wampum, prized implements, and personal ornaments, were all thrown into the great trench, which was then solemnly covered over. By the exploration of those Huron ossuaries, the sites of the palisaded villages of the Hurons of the seventeenth century have been identified in recent years; and there are now preserved in the Laval University at Quebec upwards of eighty skulls recovered from cemeteries at St. Ignace, St. Joachin, Ste. Marie, St. Michael, and other villages, the scenes of self-denying labour, and in some cases of the cruel torturings, of the French missionaries by whom they were thus designated. Other examples of skulls from the same ossuaries, I may add, are now in the Museums of the University of Toronto, the London Anthropological Society, and the Jardin des Plantes at Paris. The skulls recovered from those ossuaries have a special value from the fact that the last survivors were driven out of the country by their Iroquois foes in 1649; and hence the crania recovered from them may be relied upon as fairly illustrating the physical characteristics of the race before they had been affected by intercourse with Europeans. The Huron skull is of a well-defined dolichocephalic type, with, in many cases, an unusual prominence of the occipital region; the parietal bones meet more or less at an angle at the sagittal suture; the forehead is flat and receding; the superciliary ridges in the male skulls are strongly developed; the malar bones are broad and flat, and the profile is orthognathic. Careful measurements of thirty-nine male skulls yield a mean longitudinal diameter of 7.39 to a parietal diameter of 5.50; and of eighteen female skulls, a longitudinal diameter of 7.07 to a parietal diameter of 5.22.[[138]]

Who were the people found by Cartier in 1535, seemingly long-settled and prosperous, occupying the fortified towns of Stadaconé and Hochelaga, and lower points on the St. Lawrence? The question is not without a special interest to Canadians. According to the native Wyandot historian, they were Wyandots or Hurons, and Senecas. That they were Huron-Iroquois, at any rate, and not Algonkins, is readily determined. We owe to Cartier two brief vocabularies of their language, which, though obscured probably in their original transcription, and corrupted by false transliterations in their transference to the press, leave no doubt that the people spoke a Huron-Iroquois dialect. To which of the divisions it belonged is not so obvious. The languages, in the various dialects, differ only slightly in most of the words which Cartier gives. Sometimes they agree with Huron, and sometimes with Iroquois equivalents. The name of Hochelaga, “at the beaver-dam,” is Huron, and the agreement as a whole preponderates in favour of a Huron rather than an Iroquois dialect. But there was probably less difference between the two then, than at the more recent dates of their comparison. In dealing with this important branch of philological evidence, I have been indebted to the kindness of my friend, Mr. Horatio Hale, for a comparative analysis of the vocabulary supplied by Cartier, embodying the results of long and careful study. He has familiarised himself with the Huron language by personal intercourse with members of a little band of civilised Wyandots, settled on their reserve at Anderdon, in Western Ontario. The language thus preserved by them, after long separation from other members of the widely scattered race, probably presents the nearest approximation to the original forms of the native tongue, as spoken on the Island of Montreal and the lower St. Lawrence. In comparing them allowance has to be made for varieties of dialect among the old occupants of the lower valley of the St. Lawrence, and also for the changes wrought on the Huron language in the lapse of three and a half centuries, not simply by time, but also as the result of intercourse and intermixture with other peoples. The habit of recruiting their numbers by the adoption of prisoners and broken tribes could not fail to exercise some influence on the common tongue. The k or hard g of Cartier is, in the Wyandot, frequently softened to a y; and on the other hand, the n is strengthened by a d sound, as in Cartier’s pregnant term Canada, the old Hochelaga word for a town, which has become in the Wyandot Yandata; and so in other instances.

The revolution which, at the critical period of the advent of the Trench in the valley of the St. Lawrence, in the interval of sixty-eight years between the visits of Cartier and Champlain, displaced the fortified and populous Indian capital of Hochelaga and left the surrounding regions a desolate wilderness, is a mysterious event. Had Champlain been curious to learn the facts of an occurrence then so recent there could have been little difficulty in recovering the history of the exodus of the Hochelagans. But it had no interest for the French adventurers of that day. The well-fortified Wyandot towns had given place to a few ephemeral birch-bark wigwams belonging to another race; and the readiest solution of the mystery has been to ascribe the expulsion of the Wyandots, or Hurons, from their ancient home in Eastern Canada, to the Algonkins. This, as already shown, is irreconcilable with the fact that Champlain found them in friendly alliance with the latter against their common foe, the Iroquois. If, however, the Wyandot tradition of the expulsion of the Hurons from the island of Montreal by the Senecas be accepted, it is in no degree inconsistent with the circumstances subsequently reported by Champlain; but rather serves to account for some of them, if it is assumed that the Senecas were, in their turn, driven out by the Algonkins, and then finally withdrew beyond the St. Lawrence.

But there is another kind of evidence bearing on the question of the affinities of the people first met with by Cartier in 1535, which also has its value here. The descriptions of the palisaded towns of the Hurons on the Georgian Bay very accurately reproduce that which Cartier gives of Hochelaga. Ephemeral as such fortifications necessarily were, the construction of a rampart formed of a triple row of trunks of trees, surmounted with galleries, from whence to hurl stones and other missiles on their assailants, was a formidable undertaking for builders provided with no better tools than stone hatchets, and with no other means of transport than their united labour supplied. But the design had the advantage of furnishing a self-supporting wall, and so of saving the greater labour of digging a trench, with such inadequate tools, in soil penetrated everywhere with the roots of forest trees. It was the Huron-Iroquois system of military engineering, in which they contrasted favourably with the Algonkins, among whom the absence of such evidence of settled habits as those secure defences supplied, was characteristic of these ruder nomads. But such urban fortifications no less strikingly contrast with the elaborate and enduring military earthworks to the south of the great lakes. The pottery and implements found on the site of Hochelaga are of the same character as many examples recovered from the Huron ossuaries. On the other hand the peculiar rites, of which those ossuaries are the enduring memorials, appear to have distinguished the western Hurons from the older settlers on the St. Lawrence. The great Feast of the Dead, with its recurrent solemnities, when after the lapse of years the remains of their dead were exhumed, or removed from their scaffold biers, was the most characteristic religious ceremonial of the Hurons; and was practised with still more revolting rites by the kindred Attiwendaronks. Festering dead bodies were kept in their dwellings, preparatory to scraping the flesh from their bones; and the decaying remains of recently buried corpses were exhumed for reinterment in the great trench, which was prepared with enormous labour, and furnished with the most lavish expenditure of prized furs, wampum, and other possessions.

In all ages and states of society unavailing sorrow has tempted the survivors to extravagant excesses in the effort to do honour to the loved dead; and sumptuary laws have been repeatedly enacted to restrain such demonstrations within reasonable bounds. The Book of Rites suffices to suggest that the ancient funeral rites of the Iroquois were of the same revolting and wasteful character, until their mythic reformer, Hiawatha, superseded them with a simpler symbolical funeral service. “I have spoken of the solemn event which has befallen you,” are the introductory words to the thirteenth paragraph of “The Condoling Council,” and it thus proceeds: “Every day you are losing your great men. They are being borne into the earth; also the warriors, and also your women, and also your grandchildren; so that in the midst of blood you are sitting.” It is therefore enacted, in the twenty-seventh paragraph, evidently in lieu of older practices: “This shall be done. We will suspend a pouch upon a pole, and will place in it some mourning wampum, some short strings, to be taken to the place where the loss was suffered. The bearer will enter, and will stand by the hearth, and will speak a few words to comfort those who will be mourning; and then they will be comforted, and will conform to the great law.”

A string of black wampum sent round the settlement is still, among the Indians of the Six Nations, the notice of the death of a chief, as a belt of black wampum was a declaration of war. It seems not improbable that the people of Stadaconé and Hochelaga had submitted to the wise social and religious reforms by which the ancient rites of their dead were superseded by the symbolism of the mourning wampum, and hence the absence of ossuaries throughout the island of Montreal and the whole region to the east. But when the fugitive Wyandots fled into the wilderness, and reared new homes around Lake Simcoe and in the western peninsula, they may have revived traditional usages of their fathers, and resumed rites which had been reluctantly abandoned. Among the civilised Indians of the Six Nations some memorials of their ancestral rites of the dead still survive. A visitor to the reserve at the time of the death of a late highly esteemed chief told me that on the event being known it was immediately responded to by all within hearing by the prolonged utterance, in a mournful tone, of the cry Kwé, and this, passing from station to station, spread the news of their loss throughout the reserve. Nearly the same sound, uttered in a quicker note, Quaig! is the salutation among the Hurons of Lorette.